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Showing posts from October, 2012

Why magazines are even more relevant today

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If there's a commodity that perishes as swiftly as it is created, it is news.  The longer it takes to create, the higher its longevity and by corollary, news produced by the second, dies by the second.  We want our gratifications without any waiting period, we want to gulp down our food, build instant abs, get rich immediately and also know everything now.  We are also anxious to know more and more, and information has become a status-according social currency.   Fortunately, acquisition of knowledge does not have a finish line and so it behaves quite differently from instant abs or instant noodles.  In this hurried age, magazines play an important role by balancing societal myopia with perspective; need-for-speed with understanding, and anxiety with patience. The magazines analyze and opine like the elders of society - and hence also play the role of elders in the information society. In an age when every new opinion becomes news, magazines bring perspective through consider

Google is passe, so is flipkart.

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Humans are animals of habit. If we sit in a particular seat in any forum, we will automatically gravitate towards it the next time, if we walk on one side of the road, it will almost always be the same side every time. We lessen the use of our brain by using more of 'muscle' or mechanical memory - the known and comfortable route we know to be safe. Marketers bet on that. Whenever marketers bet big on a campaign, they know that there will be a 'trial' spike in sales after which the cliched 'new normal' will settle at a higher base because of the  neo-converts. Once you've become a convert, another change is not easy. So not only do you make a convert of one through a campaign, but the brand also ensures that this customer  has been blocked from future conversions. We have evolved to believe that if we've tested a method/product/service out any new experimentation is an unnecessary waste of effort. However, in the new age, nothing could be further th