Sixty-year-old Arun Awasthi is averse to using debit cards for online transactions and is even more averse to credit cards. However, he is also wary of using cash for every transaction. &ldquo;Exactly the kind of customers targeted by our firm,&rdquo; asserts Itz Cash Card Managing Director Naveen Surya. While cash cards are not a new concept and the user need not have a bank account, they are yet to gather steam in India.

Cash cards promise more to woo mobile users

Business Standard

The iconic touchscreen tablet PC Apple iPad 1 has shed its price by Rs 3,400 within five weeks of launch in India. The Cupertino-based Apple unveiled its latest version of iPad in the US earlier this month. Maintaining its value-price leader position in the domestic market, the iPad is now making competitors, including players in the e-reader market, uncomfortable. At present, Samsung and Olive Telecom have launched tablet PCs and a clutch of device makers, including Research in Motion, Acer and Motorola, will do so in the next couple of months.

Apple gears up to bite into the e-reader market with iPad

Kishore Chhabria is set to join the long list of Indian liquor giants in the brandy market. The Chhabria-promoted Rs 1,200 crore Allied Blenders &amp; Distillers (ABD) will launch two brandy brands in South India next month.

Chhabria set for debut in brandy

Just a week ago, the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), owners of Amul, launched what it called an &ldquo;all-natural probiotic vitamins fortified flavoured yogurt&rdquo; under the brand name &lsquo;Flaavyo&rsquo;.

Coffee, tea, or yogurt?

As it completes its first year in India this month, the premium Austrian brand is also looking to tap the lower-end of the market

KTM gets into top gear

Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra, who recently made a mark at the global music arena with her debut album, is set to join the league of international pop diva BeyoncÃ© Knowles â€” on a different stage. She is set to be, like Knowles, part of PepsiCoâ€™s exclusive club of global brand ambassadors.

Priyanka Chopra may become the international face of PepsiCo

French cosmetics major Lâ€™Oreal is going Indian with a vengeance. The firm, whose Indian unit has a turnover of Rs 1,000 crore, will spend the better part of this year launching some locally-developed products â€” part of its strategy to get the Indian consumer hooked to it.

L'Oreal, made in India

Giorgio De Roni, GoAirâ€™s new chief executive officer, is no stranger to aggressive growth. In his previous job with Air One, an Italian private airline, he increased its market share from 6 per cent to 30 per cent. And the fleet count went up from 10 to 64. In the process, Air One became a profitable airline.

GoAir takes the big leap, finally

About six months after taking over as the chairman and CEO of PepsiCo India, Manu Anand is putting together a new manufacturing and distribution business model to address the needs of the mass segment. Anand admits it is a â€œlearning processâ€ as he elaborates on the companyâ€™s strategy in both beverages as well as foods business.

Q&A: Manu Anand, Chairman & CEO, Pepsico India

Itâ€™s raining water purifiers. If Amway, the countryâ€™s largest direct selling company, is planning to launch its popular â€˜eSpringâ€™ brand of water purifiers in the near future, almost all the existing players such as Kent Mineral and Hindustan Unilever have come up with new variants of their brands in the last couple of months. Smaller companies such as Okaya Power Group recently diversified into water purifiers under the Nasaka brand name.

Who's the purest of them all?

These are some of the headlines that greet you on www.fakingnews.com, a website that publishes satirical articles on politics, business, entertainment and sports. A brainchild of IIM-Ahmedabad graduate Rahul Roushan who writes under the pseudonym Pagal Patrakaar, Fakingnews was born out of acute boredom.

A spoof story

At the launch of the companyâ€™s latest communicator device E7, D Shivakumar, managing director and vice-president for Nokia India, was inundated with questions from the media on Nokiaâ€™s steady decline in market share and gradual increase of Androidâ€™s â€” Googleâ€™s open source mobile operating systems â€” share in India. But Shivakumar displayed no signs of irritation while he patiently addressed journalistsâ€™ queries.

Reconnect

Samsung has a clear view of how it can reach the No.

Affordability is key

Marico and Jyothy Laboratories had to overhaul their distribution and channel practices before they could leverage the acquired brands

Trade restrictions

Experts say successful brand extensions require a sharply defined unifying thread and Tata Chemicals may have faltered on that

i-Shakti's brand dilemma

The campaignA campaign I am very proud of is Shriram Transport Finance Gets You Going, which was  released in 2007-08. The campaign aimed at building brand equity for STFC (Shriram Transport Finance Corporation) among the investor community. Its aim was to raise funds to give loans to first-time truckers and small truck operators for the purchase of used commercial vehicles.Why it is my best campaignThis campaign handles a truly important national issue  banking for the unbanked  in an evocative and sensitive manner. It shows the aam aadmi as optimistic, diligent and honest,  and demonstrates that he is not a risk. The other important thing is that the campaign is uniquely Indian in character and appeals to everybody across all regions, cultures and income groups.Brief to the agencyThe client asked us to build brand equity for Shriram Transport Finance primarily among the financial and investor community by making them awar

The campaign shows hard work always pays off

Which company derives its name from a combination of words which in a major Indian language mean clever thinking and loans?

The Strategist Quiz (#292)

JUGAAD INNOVATION : THINK FRUGAL, BE FLEXIBLE, GENERATE BREAKTHROUGH GROWTH by Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, Simone AhujaPublished by Random HousePrice Rs 499The West must look to places like India, Brazil, and China for a new approach to frugal and flexible innovation.THE $ 10 TRILLION PRIZE by Michael J. Silverstein, Abheek Singhi, Carol Liao, David MichaelPublished by Harvard BusinessPrice Rs 995Do you know enough about the new consumers of China & India to convert them into customers?INDIANOMIX: MAKING SENSE OF MODERN INDIA by Vivek Dehejia, Rupa SubramanyaPublished by Random HousePrice Rs 399Economists VivekDehejia and Rupa Subramanya unearth reasons why we are like this only.TAP DANCING TO WORK: WARREN BUFFETT ON PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING, 1966-2012 by Carol J. LoomisPublished by Penguin PortfolioPrice Rs 799A collection of Buffetts articles Fortune published between 1966 and 2

The top 10 business bestsellers

To Costa Coffee, a high customer experience includes a great coffee, served quickly, with a smile, Andy Harrison tells Rajarshi BhattacharjeeDuring the last couple of years, the Indian hospitality sector was a rather unexciting playground. What prompted you to expand the Premier Inn brand in India?If I stand back and think about Premier Inn in the weak economic backdrop, we have actually grown vary rapidly. We now have 640 hotels with more than 50,000 rooms across the UK and growing at 9 per cent per annum. We are adding one new hotel every 10 days in the UK. This has been possible because we have a very strong product.Coming to India, the economy may not be very exiting for the short term, but we invest with a long-term vision. We are a company that was founded in 1742, and our business operation and expansion decisions are always taken based on long-term perspectives. The Premier Inn brand, which has been successful in the UK, will w

Customer connection is the differentiator: Andy Harrison

Real opportunities lie not in product extension but in declaring successful products obsolete, says a new book Drucker on Marketing

Abandon to succeed

Have property prices in the metros plateaued? Do smaller cities offer better growth options? BS Weekend asks PropEquity to see historical data for answers

Real value

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