A giant lollypop or a sweet nothing!

Some days back on my way to work, I happened to notice the Lollypop hoardings skirting the Western Express Highway (WEH) on a very short stretch. It was FedEx advertising on them all through.

As I tried to recollect my last memory of these hoardings, I wondered "Had they had become a blind spot to a Mumbaikar like me who travels up and down the WEH twice every weekday?" What with  with our head immersed in our mobile phones, it was quite believable as we don't have time to look out the car window.

For those who have not seen them, Lollypop hoardings are concrete structures literally the shape of what else but a lollypop. They are used for advertising on the flat surface on either side of it's face (see pic below). They came up in the 80's ( I think) and have been their ever since. And mind you, in recessionary times and even beyond we had seen only variety of bird images instead of any advertisements for a very long time.
I thought that as the media trends changed, even these lollypops would have gradually receded into oblivion. But after having seen them yesterday still 'alive and in complete form' with FedEx campaign running on it, it made me immediately infer. If there is one media vehicle which has bravely survived the onslaught of dynamic hoardings and even the fairly young social media, are truly these Lollypop Hoardings - standing tall on the fringe of Western Express Highway near the Mumbai Domestic Airport area. They truly deserve to be the hero of the movie 'Die Hard- Part 6', if ever there is one made.

However, what really amplified my curiosity was, why were the advertisers still using this medium?
What was attracting them to use these hoardings?? Was it the uniqueness of these lollypop hoardings, their few numbers, low advertising rates, the location of these hoardings or the sheer old world charm that the advertisers saw in this format? Now, that's something I am really curious to know. If you happen to have some insights on this medium, do let me know.
A giant lollypop for your thoughts!

What's in a name?

Juliet:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

That's what Juliet said but I beg to differ with her.
Honestly, this was never intended to be a blog post but in the recent times there have been so many stories I had heard around this topic that it drove me to write this piece. I would not say it has been an inspiring lesson but let's just say I was inspired to write about it. And as a marketer, I can assure you that I am definitely not on the same page as Sir William Shakespeare on this one.

Let me start with the memory of a story I had heard a long time ago which came jogging back to me as I sat down to write on this subject.
Story 1
Legend has it that many years back Madura Garments (now part of Aditya Birla Group) was about to launch a store for its newly launched brand of shirt in India. It was in one of the big metro cities in southern India. The top head honcho of the company was going to unveil the showroom amid lot of fanfare. He arrived very much on time but to be welcomed by an unsightly fascia (front branding) of the shop. Apparently, no one had noticed it till then and he also chose  to grin and bear through the whole proceedings as if all was perfectly fine. He did his job of inaugurating by cutting the ribbon, posing for a few photographs, and then leaving quietly. As expected, all hell broke loose the next morning in his office. He asked his secretary to round up all those involved in the store launch and asked them to meet him in his office immediately. By then even the team involved in the store launch had realized their fatal oversight and lumbered inside his cabin like lambs to the slaughter house. And as they say, rest is history!
By now you must be wondering what was the unsightly fascia branding which really got his goat. Believe it or not some one in the marketing team had outsourced the store branding to a painter who apparently didn't know his ABC's so instead of the fascia that should have read Van Heusen it ended up as Van Hussain.

Story 2
A couple of months back my colleague and her family members had been on a holiday to some place in North India. It was a big group and hence all the travel arrangements were dutifully done through a travel agent. The family landed at the destined airport, collected their baggage and headed towards the exit gate. As is a normal case, they expected someone with a placard to welcome them and take them to their hotel. Unfortunately, it didn't exactly happen that way. They scanned every placard which was being thrust into their face. None of the ten family members could locate either their name or surname on any of the placards bobbing up and down over the sea of heads. My colleague's father-in-law checked, her husband checked, even the youngest member of the family scoured but could not find the person nor placard they were looking for. It had been almost close to 45 minutes and now they had all started getting impatient and irritated for not being able to find the bloke. The travel agent was assuring over the phone that he had sent a person but his words now started ringing hollow after a tiring hour long scouring and searching.
Finally, my colleague's husband saw someone standing in the crowd with an unusual name pasted on the placard. Given the name, it seemed almost funny and unreal to him. He put two and two together and saw a glimmer of hope shining right in front of him. He walked up to the bloke with the placard and asked him the name of travel agent he worked for and the hotel he was to take his guests to. When he confirmed the same travel agent name and the hotel name, it all fell in place. It was precisely this guy they had been searching all over the airport and it was as if they had finally unearthed him under the heap of people. All the tension, irritation and helplessness of few minutes back dissolved into hearty peals of laughter when the family members saw the unusual but familiar name printed on the placard. 
My friend's family name is Gupte but you won't believe, the placard actually had 'Chhatrapati Shivaji' written on it. Yes, you read that right. The name of the fearless warrior King Chhatrapati Shivaji who has famously been dead since April 3, 1680. I am very sure that the great Shivaji Maharaj himself would have laughed his guts out in his grave after hearing this one.
Someone naive at the travel agent's office who desperately needed lessons in History had definitely goofed up in communication. Interchanged the family name and the name of the airport they were arriving from. Whatever the confusion, the family's holiday had definitely started on a hysterical 'war footing'.

And many such short stories...
There have been countless stories around how names have been mispronounced by those uninitiated. Here are a couple of quick ones which I know of, to make you believe in the real power of name and why Juliet was absolutely wrong.
A weekend back, two of my friend's had gone to a nearby bar to down a couple of beers. They asked the attendant which brand they had stock of. The attendant promptly replied 'Karuna' and 'Honeycan'. For a minute both could not believe their ears and thought either they had heard him wrong or these were probably new brands in the market. They asked him again and when he repeated the same names, it suddenly struck them. What he meant was Corona and Heineken and oh, such a tragedy for the marketing managers of these two world famous brands. They would surely not have appreciated this unintended blunder. But my friends happily downed one two many over this incident.
And then there is my colleague in office whose name is Mary Fernandes which is as simple a name can be. But guess what, even that name gets distorted by the many vendors she deals with. All the invoices and bills she receives, either address her as Merry or Marry but never Mary. And now she is  living with the fact that they are never going to improve in spite of the many corrections and dressing downs. She dreads the day when they will start addressing her as 'Meri'.
So there you are.
What's in a name? is what Shakespeare famously wrote in Romeo and Juliet, but I say, if not for the name, we would surely have a complete loss of identity and be left highly confused as all the above stories pointedly prove.