anurekha asked:
Agile companies align their people and processes, both globally and locally, in a way that allows them to collaborate and respond quickly and continuously to consumers’ changing and diverse needs. Today’s multiple performance-related pressures require organizations to drive agility. With commodity price volatility up, retailers looking to manufacturers for innovation to drive category growth, and consumers becoming more demanding, organizational silos and confusion are not acceptable options.
Companies that enhance their traditional organizational structures by aligning people and process with consumer needs, selectively standardizing both non-consumer centric and customer-centric activities, and leveraging internal collaboration are able to respond quickly and effectively in this environment.
A lot of brand management research, generating fruitful concepts such as brand equity
(Aaker, 1991), brand leadership (Aaker & Joachimsthaler, 2000), brand identity (Kapferer, 2004), brand image (Gardner & Levi, 1955), and corporate reputation (Gray & Balmer, 1998), has thus been conducted to understand and explain how successful brands are to be built, managed and developed by corporations and their brand managers in a way that would give firms a competitive edge over their adversaries. Brand strategies, tactics, and other brand building activities for building not just a strong brand but a right type of brand then needs to be developed and put into action if it is to add value to the firm. All the brand management strategies, techniques and concepts though rests on a certain logic of brands, a set of axiomatic assumptions and principles that lies behind how firms ought to and seeks to build, manage and handle their brands, which all together comprise what Holt (2002) refers to as a branding paradigm.
Youth as a socially constructed category, generally referring to what is considered young and new and therefore strongly connected to the future, being culturally determined in the discursive interplay with visual, musical, and verbal symbols and signs Fornäs (1995), is often considered as a product of the development of the Western modern society (Kjeldgaard & Askegaard, 2006).
Fitting in with peers, conforming to certain social norms simultaneously as one expresses individuality, is of importance for young adults where clothing symbols such as brands may be used to symbolize the relation between the actual person and the social group he or she wants to affiliate with and be accepted, where refraining from certain symbols used and recognized by the majority actually may become a way to show individuality (Piacentini & Mailer, 2004). Younger people thus also make consumer choices based on the elimination of what is not acceptable (Auty & Elliot, 1998), which paradoxically mean young individuals then may conform to a certain subgroup, by being a non-conformant of the mainstream.
 The way consumers are interacting with media is also changing as the number of digital delivery platforms grows and their use increases. The “new†consumers created by these platforms tend to look for engaging, targeted, and timely interactions rather than broad-based information. Leading manufacturers are identifying internal technology champions, aligning advertising to consumer lifestyles, and identifying new mechanisms to leverage these platforms in order to better anticipate customer sentiment (both good and bad), build brand equity, and grow their business.
The adage “change is the only constant†is especially true in business today. Globalization, rapid advances in media and technology, changes in consumer spending habits, shifts in distribution channels, and other factors force today’s business landscape into a state of constant evolution.
There have been significant changes in recent years and no longer does successful advertising focus only on product benefits, but works through values and value change according to Smila (2002). By the late 1990s multinational companies were seen to be customising their advertising to the Indian market. Product endorsement by celebrities, and associations with national passions like cricket were other strategies used. The Korean company L.G. sponsored the Indian cricket team in the Cricket World Cup in 2003 for example and Adidas, who had previously made their Indian ads in London, started making them in India in 1999, with the advertising agency RKSwamy/BBDO and using an Indian cricket star Sachin Tendulkar (Chawla, 1999). L’Oreal increased its sales dramatically by using the Miss India who became Miss World, Diana Haydan, along with its usual models (Fannin, 1999).
 Sprite was launched in 1999 with advertising that spoofed advertising hype and current trends in advertising, targeting youth ‘in the process of establishing their identity’ (Chawla, 1999). Kinley bottled water in 2001 was advertised depicting village life and military families aimed at building emotional connections with consumers (Kripalani, 2003). Most creatives view emotional advertising as the key to developing brand loyalty. Creatives want customers to feel a bond with the brand.
           So how does one go about creating new India connects? The first step of course, is to accept that new India exists as a separate entity, which has little in common with the old India way of thinking. The image of young adult is Fashionable, Vibrant, Peppy and intelligent. This is the frame of appeal the advertisers are using in their advertising strategy.
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