The battle for prime-time eyeballs has just got bigger. Sony Television, which has been struggling to retain its slot among the top five Hindi entertainment channels, is putting all its marketing and programming muscle behind six new TV shows, five of which are being telecast between 8 pm and 11 pm, when advertising and sponsorship rates are the highest.

Sony does a STAR Plus

Business Standard

This election saw the re-emergence of single party dominance in our democracy. The tide had turned from a few years ago when our states were churning &lsquo;Kingmakers&rsquo;.

Mandate 2009: Lasting lessons for national brands

Be it politics or any other issue, the trump card seems to be &ldquo;local&rdquo;, always. Take regional packet tea brands, which have held on to their turf despite the onslaught from big brothers like Tata Tea and Hindustan Unilever.

Regional tea on a roll

Axe angels are working overtime these days. Ever since Hindustan Unilever launched the &lsquo;Call Me&rsquo; campaign that shows a girl giving her phone number to a boy doused in Axe, the angels (as the girls in the commercials are called) have received 3.5 million calls. And the phones just don&rsquo;t stop ringing these days.

The Axe effect: Competition acquires an edge

Adidas, which launched its premium lifestyle product &ndash; Originals &mdash; in India two years ago, is still in the process of educating customers about the different story that the collections, represented by the Trefoil logo, has to tell vis-&agrave;-vis its regular 'performance&rsquo; brands.

'Adidas doesn't want to run before learning to walk'

There is a need for well qualified resource persons at the different management institutions across the country for achieving global benchmarks in management education, said Debiprasad Mishra, minister for higher education, tourism and culture of the Orissa government.

Experts stress on need for quality faculty at B-schools

Perceived till recently as low-budget and low-margin, the domestic market now means big business to Indian IT majors.

IT Services: Go Local

Voltas takes the social cause route to promote its air-conditioners.

Voltas: A cool cause

How the target for marketers and advertisers has changed.

The new improved Indian man

More people today watch Discovery than any other English channel.

Hooked by curiosity

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The top 10 business bestsellers

India is the second- largest producer of tobacco in the world after China. However, it holds a meagre 0.7 per cent share of the $30-billion global trade in tobacco.

KIT: The Indian tobacco industry

EXL Service, the Nasdaq-listed provider of outsourcing and transformation services, has refreshed its logo in blue and orange and come out with a new tagline, &ldquo;Go Next. Now.

EXL Service: Refreshing change

Bharti Enterprises, which has interests in telecom, insurance, retail and farm produce, has now got in to packaged food and beverages. FieldFresh Foods, its equal joint venture with Singapore-listed Del Monte Pacific, has launched fruit drinks, packaged fruit, ketchup, sauces and pasta under the Del Monte brand.

FieldFresh Foods: On the long road

    Down-aging, egronomics, cashing out, the vigilante consumer are four of the 10 trends identified for the 1990s by a famous marketing expert. Identify the marketing futurist and the book in which this was published.

The Strategist Quiz (#101)

    This Unilever detergent was developed for Brazilian customers who wanted a low-cost and effective product. Its name, coincidentally, means &ldquo;excellent&rdquo; or &ldquo;the best&rdquo; in Urdu.

Answers to last week's quiz (#100)

For the the first time in almost a decade, the premier Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) is yet to ensure a job for all the students from its third batch of the Post Graduate Programme in Management for Executives (PGPX). This is despite the institute having extended the placement season by two months, till the last week of May.

Despite extension, IIM-A yet to place all executive programme students

City-based Sai International School has entered into a strategic tie-up with Delhi-based IIT Study Circle, one of the premier organisations in the country for IIT-JEE coaching, to train the IIT-JEE aspirants of Orissa.

Sai International teams up with IIT Study Circle

In 1984, Apple was launched with a commercial that was run only once on Super Bowl. It had Big Brother indoctrinating people in an auditorium when a woman athlete comes running in and hits the screen with a hammer. The commercial ends with the line &lsquo;1984 will not be 1984 ever again&rsquo; (a reference to George Orwell&rsquo;s famous book of the same name).

Madhukar Sabnavis: The magic of Zoozoos

While other carmakers ready their new hatchbacks for launch, Maruti and Hyundai battle it out with theirs .

Hatch me if you can!

Pepsico has made India its launch pad for biscuits, but competition will be tough.

Page 707 - News