The premium brand banks on them to boost market share. Till a few months back, Hindustan Unilever was banking on renowned Indian hair stylists to co-create Sunsilk, its premium shampoo brand. The fast-moving consumer goods major has now set its sights higher and has just requisitioned the services of seven global hair experts to give consumers salon-quality products.

Sunsilk's new gambit

Business Standard

Stung by the sharp fall in the premium brand&rsquo;s market share, Hindustan Unilever has dropped the girls to pitch for family intimacy.

Liril woos the family

It&rsquo;s proving third time lucky for Puma, the German sports and lifestyle brand, in India. Despite being one of the first international players to have entered the country in the early 90s, Puma came into its own only in 2006 when it took charge of its manufacturing and also stepped up efforts to come up with its exclusive stores.

Puma on a new track in India: Kidswear

Weddings are emotional events, and the days and months leading up to them typically times of very special family togetherness. The process of conceptualising, organising and implementing the ceremony, the fact that a son or daughter is going off to start a whole new family, the enthusiastic opinions of pretty much anyone with a mouth and tongue &mdash; all of it guarantees a precious kind of bonding and a good deal of blood on the flower arrangements.

Heaven&#39;s choicest blessings

Sanjeev Bhargava produced hit films and ran successful businesses.

First among the culturati

The Pushkar Camel Fair is one of the most colourful annual festivals in India. Starting this year, a one-day literary event is being added to its busy calendar. On October 31, the Pushkar Literature Festival will bring together such writers as Namita Gokhale, Prasoon Joshi, Pavan Varma and the Urdu poet Sheen Kaaf Nizam over seven sessions that will explore the meeting points between contemporary literature and folklore, oral traditions, myths and legends.

Reading Pushkar

In a well-researched book, Shoma Munshi argues that the bahu-soaps, far from being regressive, had strong women protagonists.

Trials and tribulations

The People&rsquo;s Republic of China marked its 60th birthday with a show of manpower. It was as spectacular and heartless as the opening ceremony of the last Olympics. These extravaganzas may be doing the nation a disservice abroad, by reinforcing stereotypes of the Chinese as obedient, mass-produced, and invisible as individuals; collectively, able to achieve feats of engineering and display; separately, merely well trained. What an appalling public relations burden to carry! At least India and Indians are defined in the foreign imagination by chaos, layers and infinite variety, which seems somehow more human and forgivable.

Hello, China

The Super K rematch in Valencia had the oddest result. Kasparov won the rapid+blitz match 9-3, which is exactly the margin predicted by their ratings. An exact &ldquo;fit&rdquo; of result-to-prediction is as rare as a coin coming up heads exactly 50 times in 100 tosses. In this instance, it seems even more unlikely, since GK&rsquo;s last rating dates back to Q1, 2005 and both ratings are from long time-controls.

CHESS #607

For all the marketing push and pizzazz he brings to his job, as head of Brown-Forman in India, promoting Jack Daniel&rsquo;s bourbon in a nation of Johnnie Walker scotch drinkers, Amrit Kiran Singh, like his house, is probably less wunderkid and more a relic of an age when leisure and grace were part of an inherited lifestyle.

Nostalgia house

They say there are more photographs than there are bricks in the world. Such vast exposure to images seems to have trained us to read images in formulaic ways. Thus, in a single glance, we crown what we see into &ldquo;types&rdquo;. Debanjan Roy plays on this shortcut to seeing, creating work that we are able to effortlessly classify as working in the space of binaries.

The modern day Mahatma

The NXR is available with two battery options &mdash; Lead acid and Li-ion. The lead acid model, called the City, is powered by a 17 bhp (13 kW), 5 kgm electric motor while the Li-ion NXR, called the Intercity, gets its motion from a more grunty 25 bhp (25 kW) motor that puts out 9 kgm of torque. A full charge takes eight hours for both battery types.

Electric shockers

Last week, I actually met someone who runs a Honda Civic Hybrid on a regular basis. He bought it by paying the discounted price (roughly Rs 15 lakh, still) when Honda decided to clear out the stock of 200-odd Hybrids that was not moving at the Rs 21 lakh list price. The man in question was looking for a suitable second car and stumbled upon the idea of owning something &ldquo;truly modern.

Civic duty

I intend to buy a petrol driven premium hatch and I have shortlisted the Maruti Suzuki Ritz VXi, Hyundai i20 Magna and the Fiat Grande Punto 1.2 Dynamic. Please advise which one of these I should go for considering among other things driving comfort, after-sales service and resale potential.

Short and sweet

When the market spoils you for choice, our advisory on tips and gifts goes a long way in helping you select what&rsquo;s most extraordinary.

A little give and take

Matrimony websites go the whole hog to attract more ad campaigns.

Ad revenues betray online match-makers

When it comes to buying something, most of us want to spend less and get more. The same is true for mobile phones also. But sometimes, spending a little more on a mobile handset can guarantee you a device that has all the pre-requisites of a good phone, serves as your preferred gateway to the Web and is stylish too. HTC has always been steady in the mobile vendors&rsquo; race, and with handsets Hero and Magic, the company has once again proved its prowess in developing mobile phones that are more than just frills and touchscreens.

Magical and Heroic

French Director Francois Truffaut called him a one-man industry in the late-seventies, when eight of his films &ndash; released almost simultaneously &ndash; had an unprecedented success at the box office.

The Rs 700-cr brand

What&rsquo;s making news on the Web these days? The answer would be big daddies of the entertainment industry taking baby steps by creating online content.

Entertainment biggies climb on the online bandwagon

What if Fahad Azad could not fly fighter jets for the Indian Air Force? He&rsquo;s smart enough to make and use robots that have the potential to match the speed and precision of those flying machines in their own space.

Taking a robot-ride

Moov, the flagship brand of Paras Pharmaceuticals, is going off the beaten track. Known as the &ldquo;housewife&rsquo;s companion&rdquo; for over 23 years now, Moov is now reaching out to the husband as well.

'Mooving' with time

- Find Specials News, Features, Analysis and more at Business Standard. Full coverage of Goafest 2014

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