Jas Business Blog

Insane.. just plain insane…!

Picture this, you are just strolling around in the supermarket and stumble upon a grey sweat shirt. Just a plain sweatshirt in a plain Grey color that you can find in any nook and corner of downtowns in winter. You leisurely pull the price tag and see this:

That is right, this plain sweat is worth 2.765Billion dollars!

In case you are still with me, and have not fainted, let me explain the horror. It is the Zimbabwean dollar being talked about, the nation that has seen the largest ever hyper inflation ever where the worth of a currency note is less the cost of making such a note. In February last year, the annual inflation rose to more than 100,000 percent and the local currency tumbled to a record low of 25 million Zimbabwe dollars to one US dollar.

Reason for hyperinflation
If you ask me, its mediocrity itself on part of government thinking. The Central Bank prints too much money to pay for government expenditures. When the government notices prices are rising, it responds by issuing even more money. And this goes on till the money revolving in economy is so much that one ends up paying 3 billion for a sweat shirt!

Problem is not just with prices, its also with the amount of notes you need to buy things. So bank needs to print the currency of higher denomination and that is how Zimbabwe has come out with currency notes of 1 million, 10 million, 500 million, 1 billion and so on. You would expect some monetary and fiscal reforms to correct this, but instead the policy that Zimbabwe government came out with was that in August 2008 the Central Bank of Zimbabwe introduced a new currency slashing all zeroes. But as the right demon was not encountered, two months later they were back at 10,000 notes and it won’t be long before the old notes may be re-used. It was reported that annual inflation reached 231 million percent in July last year.

So how does it look like now?
Bad.. real bad! See this, you can not carry a plastic card for transaction to most of the places, so you need cash, and hell lot of cash!! Just wads and wads of cash! See the images below:

The million dollar baby

The billion dollar baby - who says money does not bring happiness? See this! You would end up laughing!!

What? No body is looting this kid?

Do not mis jusge this guy, he is just going to supermarket to buy vegetables

Time to pay the bill, open the almirah!

The new currency notes - these have last 10 zeros removed and stones signfy the heaviness

But who will tell them that the inflation has not stopped. So here we are, this is what we get to buy from new notes

Back to square one - bank had to start issuing 50K notes again and before its too late, we will again have the one billion dollar note coming back to life

Why? Why ? Why the hell Mr. Mugambe ?!!!

Who knows the brand the best? The brand manager? The guy who is managing sales through distribution channels? or the one who is not at all part of company – the consumer?

There have been cases that a big brand was forced to take back a change just because the consumer was not happy with the new offering. And mind it, when a brand has made its mark, it sure does a lot of research before launching the change in market as a perfect brand is made by hearts, by emotions and they get disturbed easier than a brain ofcourse!

Tropicana New packaging

Recently PepsiCo found it in Tropicana the hard way, almost 24 years after Coke learned it through New Coke. The PepsiCo Americas Beverages division of PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. Redesigned packaging that was introduced in early January is being discontinued, and the previous version is being brought back.

Also returning will be the longtime Tropicana brand symbol, an orange from which a straw protrudes. The symbol, meant to evoke juice’s fresh taste, had been supplanted on the new packages by a glass of orange juice and an orange-colored twist cap atop large cartons that is shaped like a halved orange.

Some of those commenting described the new packaging as “ugly” or “stupid,” and resembling “a generic bargain brand” or a “store brand.” This is what undersconsideration had to say about the brand – “This new packaging feels, at best, like a discount store brand with what looks like, again, at best, rights-managed stock photography if not outright royalty free. And the typography is, once more, at best, a lame derivative of how the British have lately exploited geometric sans serifs like Futura and Avenir to great results—here’s just one example of many.”

Tropicana Old packaging

But what is starking here is the role of Web2.0 means in these marketing effects. While it took months for Coke to understand that its new Coke taste was a flop, PepsiCo came to know about it in matter of days, thanks to blogging, twitter tweets, facebook and hate mail forwards on these channels. This November, many consumers used Twitter to criticize an ad for Motrin pain reliever and received responses within 48 hours from the brand’s maker, a unit of Johnson & Johnson, which apologized for the ad and told them it had been withdrawn!

Lesson for marketers? The same old one – brands rest in minds of people and not with the one who make the product/service.

Addendum
If you think it was only Tropicana packaging that PepsiCo tampered with in this tough time of recession, here is a food for thought, they even changed the packaging for Pepsi itself! And its not just the style of bottles or new funky colors, but they were bold enough to play around with the logo, in , I repeat, this tough time of recession!! Here are the visuals of what these guys did to a pretty neat brand…

New Pepsi Bottles