Madras sans Hoardings – Eyes wide shut

Before April 2008, I could see blue.  I could see yellow.  Pink.  Red.  Orange.  Purple.  I could see various other colours whose names menfolk reading this cannot comprehend. (Men cannot understand words like teal ) All of this on the colourful hoardings that adorned Madras’s skyline.

But there was one colour that I rarely saw.  Green. the natural, leaf green.  The greenery of the city has climbed to a higher strata through the removal of hoardings all across the city.  It was quite pleasant to see the leafy greenery which have been in hiding behind those multi-hued boards screaming out to the public.  But what does this open up?  As I whizzed past T.Nagar, I saw rusted roof tops, ugly buildings, broken and dilapidated skyscrapers(?) et al.  The removal of all these hoardings have opened our eyes to more than just the greenery.  Or has it?

As a community, we need to understand and be aware of the constituents that Stagnate, Contribute or Derail the city and its environment.  The hoarding ban has caused various repurcussions and realizations.  Advertising has taken a huge hit, event management companies have lost a way to announce to larger audiences and people now actually are more surprised seeing the free space and greenery rather than being awestruck looking at a Vodafone ad.

But my focus is more on the questions that have been thrown up.  What is the corporation doing about how dirty the buildings are and how dilapidated the surroundings are, now that they are more visible?  Why are the long posts that hold the hoardings still sticking out into the sky?  What sort of mass advertising is taking the place for hoardings (Internet?!)?  What are the electrical wires spoiling picturesque photographs?  How will the roads make-do for the loss of lighting from the hoardings?  Is there adequate city lighting through street lamps?

Also, this showed me that Madras will be Madras because of its people’s pure love for it.

http://thankyouchiefminister.com/index.html

So now that the doors are open to more questions, shall we start looking for some answers?  I will update when I do figure something out

A little beyond a lime juice…

When I walked into one of my neighbourhood eatouts after a gruelling work out one day, I ended up thinking about how people do very little to keep up a brand image built over years of hard work.

I am a regular there.  So much so that my friends and I even contemplated buying them new chairs and I would invest if they went public.  Now that you have a background, let me get on with it.

I walked in for a lime juice, just a lime juice.  Apparently, that is not allowed.  They serve burgers and sandwiches that I HAVE to eat to make myself eligible for the only lime juice that I want.  One may argue that it is the fault of the new guy who did not treat regulars well.  Or the fault of the guy who made the rules.  Sadly, it is the fault of the one guy who runs the show.  He did not hire to the right people and he did not educate them about the brand they were representing.

I left without eating/drinking anything.  They lost me.  And many others who cannot walk into a friendly place to grab some quick juice.  Then why even place that juice in the menu? What ever happened to customer delight?  Doesn’t brand retention ring a bell?

Brands + Amplification = Influence — ” David Armano”

I still do not know if I should mention the name of the place because I still like the food there.

Brand new day

WordPress just seems a lot more functional and cooler than most other blog sites.  So I moved my blog here.

Just to give you a quick update, you are entering my world and my take on stuff that intrigue me.  Branding+Management, Social Capital+Grassroots, Music, Humour, Entrepreneurship and some random thoughts as well.  Also, I am going to be more frequent here once I am done with my GMAT on July 21st.  So this is not procrastination

To get things started, here’s one for the road. A random quote

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

- Q