Regional players have hit Hindustan Unilever (HUL) where it hurts the most.

From India to Bharat

Business Standard

For four decades, Fiat was the only well-known car brand in India other than Ambassador. What&rsquo;s more, while Ambassador was for the officialdom and families, Fiat was the car of the yuppie, forward-looking folks.

Fiat's third coming

Not very long ago, when joint families were still the norm, elders would insist we have a spoonful of curd with sugar before we step out of the house. The auspicious ritual of combining sugar with a little bit of sour was meant to prepare you for experiences, both sweet and bitter, through the day. Or when your grandmother&rsquo;s home made sweets and confectionary was the centre piece of every family celebration. As families become nuclear and grandchildren&rsquo;s easy access to grandmother&rsquo;s goodies become rare, the winds of cultural change bring opportunities for brands to seize! Cadbury, chose to compete with life, instead of playing within the confines its category and was positioned in place of traditional sweets, with the tagline of &ldquo;kuch meetha ho jaye&rdquo;. For nuclear families, it meant that while Dadima&rsquo;s pedas would be missed; the celebration would no longer be incomplete.

Mining life for brand opportunities

In January-May this year, the sector increased its spending on print by 9% to stay on top with 19% of the pie.

Education is biggest advertiser in print

Since its inception in 1984 as a national level school of excellence in management science by the Government of India, IIM-Lucknow (IIM-L) has today grown into one of the topmost global management schools. Devi Singh, who is serving a second term as IIM-L&rsquo;s director, shares a few glorious moments and some obstacles faced by IIM-L during its 25-year journey. In an interview with Chitra Unnithan, he explains his stance on quality management education.

'We plan to train policy makers and maybe MPs'

Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business (ISB), seeing a growth of almost 25 per cent in its admissions for the one-year management programme this year, is now focussing on increasing the number of information sessions with prospective students.

Live info-sessions for ISB probables

Two day summit titled &ldquo;The Rising Tide&rdquo; presented by Chemicals materials &amp; Food practice of Frost &amp; Sullivan, at the Intercontinental The Lalit, Mumbai. at 9.20 a.m.

Sreedharan to be the chief guest at IIT-B convocation

Arvind Rao recalls the time in early-2002 when OnMobile, the company that he had founded with friend Mouli Raman two years before, almost shut shop. The two had met when Rao worked for a private equity fund and was negotiating for a venture with Raman at Infosys Technologies. They clicked and decided to float a business together. But now things looked bad.

Global Roaming

Downsizing. Right-sizing. Up-sizing. Human capital planning swings between these three points, without ever finding a balance at any point of time. It is amongst the most challenging and demanding business problems of our times. In his book, Talent on Demand, Peter Cappelli, professor of management, Wharton School, argues for using the principles of supply chain management, suggesting that the fundamentals of just-in-time manufacturing can be applied to talent management.

The just-in-time talent solution

When you step in to any of the eight Le Meridien hotels in India, indeed any in the world, you should be able to smell almost as soon as you step into the lobby &mdash; emerging through a portal, an art work usually, at the hotel entrance &mdash; a peculiar scent of old books and parchment in a library.

Starwoods Hotel: Tweaked to please

Sometime in October, General Motors India will roll out the Chevrolet Cruze. It will be positioned between the upper end of the executive segment and the entry level of the premium segment. The range (petrol or diesel, automatic or manual transmission) will be priced between Rs 13.50 lakh and Rs 18.50 lakh.

General Motors India: Cruzing along

Godrej Consumer Products is in talks with Sara Lee to acquire its 51 per cent equity stake in Godrej Sara Lee. The joint-venture company owns brands like Good Knight, Jet and Hit and manufactures, markets and distributes Sara Lee&rsquo;s international brands like Ambipur, Kiwi and Brylcream in the country.

Godrej Sara Lee: Parting ways

The Rs 172,000-crore private education market in India is estimated to be growing at 11 per cent a year &mdash; this segment represents 51 per cent of this market. Thus, the market for school uniforms is huge and growing at a fast pace. At present, uniforms are almost 40 per cent of the Rs 32,000-crore kidswear market, with growth of 15 per cent over last year.

KIT: School uniform retail in India

THE DISNEY WAR
Author: James Stewart
Publisher: Simon &amp; Schuster
Price: Rs 1,287
ISBN: 9780684809939.
THE WAL-MART WAY
Author: Don Soderquist
Publisher: Nelson Business
Price: Rs 1,287
ISBN: 9780785261193.
INDIA&rsquo;S GLOBAL POWERHOUSES
Author: Nirmalya Kumar
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Price: Rs 695
ISBN: 9781422140789.
HOW TOYOTA BECAME #1
Author: David Magee
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs 499
ISBN: 9781591842293.
THE ASCENT OF MONEY
Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs 395
ISBN: 9781846141928.
HOUSE OF CARDS: HOW WALL STREET&rsquo;S GAMBLERS BROKE CAPITALISM
Author: William D Cohan
Publisher: Allen Lane
Price: Rs 699
ISBN: 9781846141959.
THE RETURN OF DEPRESSION ECONOMICS
Author: Paul Krugman
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs 399
ISBN: 9781846142390.
BUYOLOGY
Author: Martin Lindstrom
Publisher: Random House
Price: Rs 372
ISBN: 9781847940131.
HOW THE MIGHTY FALL
Author: Jim Collins
Publisher: Random House
Price: Rs

The top 10 business bestsellers

&nbsp;

    Commander, Compass, Liberty and Wrangler are sub-brands of which vehicle brand?
    &nbsp;
    Which company founded in the 1830s is associated with its trademarked Blue Box and Blue Book?&nbsp;
    &nbsp;
    Which retailing company ran the following ad line in the 1980s: &ldquo;The biggest name in little computers&rdquo;?&nbsp;
    &nbsp;
    What was the first clamshell cell phone called?&nbsp;
    &nbsp;
    Who was the first Indian to receive royalty from the sale of

The Strategist Quiz (# 108)

&nbsp;

    What is common to Infosys Technologies and Technopak Advisors?
    Both the companies had tie-ups with Kurt Salmon Associates and later separated&nbsp;
    &nbsp;
    Whose mascots are Chouw and Mouw?
    Videocon Industries&nbsp;
    &nbsp;
    Which newspaper was the first to publish a correct story about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912?
    The New York Times&nbsp;
    &nbsp;
    Which is the only company that is allowed to use the Red Cross logo and why?
   

Answers to last week&#39s quiz (#107)

The Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, an initiative of the Indian Instutute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA)'s has churned out yet another start-up in the form of a health centre. An employee at CIIE, Charmie Haria has set up her own enterprise &mdash; Aikya Ayurveda Cure. Apparently, the centre aims at breaking the myth that ayurveda cures slowly. &quot;Most of us believe that ayurveda medicines take long to work on the body. At Aikya, we want to break this myth by using the 'panchkarma' treatment, which cures ailments from the root cause between 10 days and two months. We are trying to fill a gap between traditional ayurveda vaidyas and hi-end Ayurveda spas by providing state of the art panchkarma and other treatments at affordable rates,&quot; says Charmie Haria , founder, Aikya Ayurveda Cure.

CIIE supports health centre enterprise

IIM-Bangalore will hold the second edition of its entrepreneurship summit Eximius &lsquo;09 on the 15th this month. The two-day event, which aims at providing the budding entrepreneurs a platform to showcase their ideas, will have venture capital workshops, speaker series and panel discussion centering around entrepreneurship.

IIM-B holds summit for entrepreneurs

Blunders in CVs are common, and poor language skills are only a part of the problem.

Shyamal Majumdar: &#39;Indicting&#39; themselves

Hit by a slump in foreigners seeking admission in Australia amidst attacks on them, a leading university is offering a slew of incentives to students including iPods, laptops and even airfare for recruiting fellow pupils from overseas.

Oz varsity offers incentives for recruiting foreign students

Press Trust of India

Love Aaj Kal was the latest Hindi film release this weekend. It is another love story from the Bollywood stable. However, its promotion is interesting. Instead of using one standard visual across billboards, the film has used eight stills. This is surely a reflection of progress in vinyl printing technology &mdash; you no longer need quantities to get a cost benefit.

Page 699 - News