The Stern Report on climate change, produced for the British government in 2006, predicted that the overall costs of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least five per cent of global gross domestic product every year.

Being lean means going green

Business Standard

Conventional wisdom dictates that at the time of purchase, a consumer&rsquo;s choice may be guided by the brand name, quality of product, its price, a simple need of owning the latest or even an impulse, not necessarily in that order. Bottomline: the consumer is interested in the sum of all parts and not any specific part. But, that&rsquo;s convention and game changing strategies rarely prescribe to the norms.

Not just another manufacturer

Crocs, the US-based footwear brand which popularised clogs with its modern take, wants to be more relevant to the Indian audience. It is rolling out a new tagline, &lsquo;Walk in comfort, wear in style&rsquo;, to tell consumers that it is more than ultra-comfortable cogs. After all, it offers over 300 styles each season across 90 countries.

Crocs: Spreading comfort

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the semiconductor-design innovator and manufacturer of microprocessor chips, is ready to roll out a new category of notebook PCs, billed as Ultrathins, in the third quarter of 2012. AMD has its eyes on the emerging market for thin and light notebook PCs that are expected to be the fastest growing segment this year.

Advanced Micro Devices: Ultra light on the pocket

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The top 10 business bestsellers

Despite having the largest kindergarten to grade 12 (K-12) population globally, India has a low enrolment rate in schools, especially at the senior secondary level. The enrolment percentage has fallen from 113 per cent at primary to 81 per cent at middle school and then to 31 per cent at secondary and higher secondary levels. Low enrolment and high drop-out rates are caused by low availability of schools in rural areas, low awareness, and prevalence of child labour amongst lower income strata.

KIT: School education in India

    This celebrity is the first person to have hit the milestone 25 million followers on Twitter and therefore has started her own social networking website. Name the person and the social network. Name it.

The Strategist Quiz (#260)

    When Amul was building a modern dairy plant to process liquid milk UNICEF and other diary experts declared it impossible to process liquid milk into powder and other solid products. Undeterred, Dr Kurien&rsquo;s team went ahead and achieved one of the firsts in the world.

Answers to last week's The Strategist Quiz (#259)

    &nbsp;Life in a metro like Delhi can be difficult, if one doesn&rsquo;t have a personal vehicle. And that&rsquo;s the first thing he needs to sort out, Kaushik Gupta, senior manager with a multinational company, thought to himself when his boss told him that he has been transferred to the capital city from Kolkata. Shifting base with his family, Gupta was, however, pleasantly surprised to find a safe and punctual travel option in the radio cab operators in the city.

Organising unorganised markets

You have possibly seen and even tasted this triangular chocolate at some point when you walked into a high-end traditional store, supermarket or hypermarket. Toblerone, which uptil now was imported and sold by two local distributors Universal and Barakat, has finally been integrated with the merged Cadbury-Kraft entity in India - the third Kraft brand after Oreo and Tang to go down that road. Cadbury-Kraft will now officially market and distribute Toblerone in the country. But it will not locally manufacture Toblerone like it does Oreo and Tang since the unique selling proposition of the mountain-shaped chocolate has been its production at one factory in Berne, Switzerland.

Kraft's premium chocolate bet

Aditya Birla brand, Kara Skin Wipes is back with its television campaign, second year in a row. The theme, the face (Anushka Sharma), the message, it all stays constant. And yet for a keen observer there are subtle signs of the brand, launched five years back, growing up.

Kara hopes to hit pay dirt with 'dirty habits portfolio'

It had lost the top position to BMW in the luxury car segment three years ago. But 2012 has brought in even worse news: Mercedes, the Stuttgart-headquartered world's oldest car maker, has slipped to the third position after Audi, owned by Volkswagen. While the gap between the two till April this year was marginal, it widened substantially in May, strengthening Audi&rsquo;s position in the second slot.

Speed bumps for Mercedes

MADISON AVENUE wants to get its act together this summer and take it on the road.

Marketing, now on the road 

Who is a poor Indian? One who earns below Rs 35 a day? Or one whose salary is in four figures? While the debate rages, the Bombay Parsi Punchayet, the organisation that governs the affairs of the Zoroastrian community in Bombay, has said that any Parsi who earns less than Rs 90,000 a month (or Rs 10.8 lakh a year) is poor and therefore eligible for its help in finding a house.

A house for Rohinton

Something unusual happened this May. Maruti Suzuki&rsquo;s new Ertiga beat the Toyota Innova, making it the largest selling &lsquo;proper&rsquo; people-carrier in the country.

Mass movement

On June 26, before he resigned as the Union finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee accepted a resignation letter: Omita Paul, 63, Mukherjee&rsquo;s all-powerful advisor, had put in her papers. Mukherjee will, in all likelihood, become the next occupant of the president&rsquo;s house at Raisina Hill; Paul is expected to move with him. In the unspoken euphoria over Mukherjee&rsquo;s exit from North Block, the significance of Paul&rsquo;s resignation was lost. Mukherjee is expected to hold an important, and not just ceremonial, office over the next five years, which will include the 2014 general elections, and he will be guided by Paul&rsquo;s advice.

Mr President, you must...

About a decade ago, Hyundai made its mark in the entry D-segment with the Elantra, the only real competitor to the Skoda Octavia back then. Offered with a 1.8-litre petrol and a 2.0-litre diesel option, the Elantra had a lot going for itself &mdash; decent performance, good space, fairly reasonable dynamics and a good price tag. But Hyundai didn&rsquo;t somehow enjoy the brand pull that Toyota and Honda enjoyed, while the car was not appealing in the looks department either.

Finally, some elan

Sunil Chhetri becomes the first Indian to join a major European football club.

Portuguese delight

I am planning to buy my first car and I have two options in mind &mdash; the Volkswagen Polo (Highline) petrol and the Honda Jazz X. I would essentially use the car for city driving, but would go out once a year on long trips as well.

First love

Perhaps of all the brutalities heaped upon us as Indians, the most alarming is that we do not even recognise when acts of human rights violations occur anymore.

In praise of Pinki

Ninety kilometres south-west of Chennai, in the Kanchipuram district of Tamil Nadu, is the small temple town of Uthiramerur. It is dusty, noisy and congested here. On what was once farmland stand several educational institutions. On what is left, farmers grow sugarcane and rice. A handful of small steel and cement factories can also be seen here, There is nothing noteworthy at Uthiramerur except for three famous temples: the Sundara Varadaraja Perumal Temple dedicated to Vishnu, Subramanya Temple (Murugan) and Kailasanatha Temple (Siva). About half a kilometre away is another temple called Vaikunta Perumal Koil. There are no idols here. The sanctum sanctorum is a rectangular assembly hall (mandapa) of over 2,500 square feet. The roof stands on the four stone walls and is not supported by any pillar in between. On top of the assembly hall is the vimana, the traditional turret of temples in this region.

Temple of democracy

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