NIRALA - A wonderful Brand

When we were studying consumer behavior, a class fellow of mine did this interesting exercise in the class. During his presentation, he distributed the NIRALA SWEETS to everyone in the class to get their feedback. Those who were familiar with Nirala's taste were able to identify that the Mithaye (SWEETS) in it is not from the NIRALA brand, it is only packaging which was from NIRALA. Although I am not a great fan of sweets, but this incident was pretty surprising for me that students were able to identify that this sweet hasnt that unique taste which Nirala offers. All I said that time was WOW!

Nirala Sweets started their operations over half a century ago with a small shop in lahore. There was no concept of branding a mithayee(SWEETS) that time in Pakistan. Mr. Taj Din who was the founder of Nirala sweets started as a typical Mithayee shop with the entreprenurial spirit to grow it to a national level. They offered this unique taste of DESI GHEE which became their unique selling proposition.  His son Farooq Ahmad ( Chairman : Nirala Sweets) took his father's business further and adopted the growth strategy to further open Nirala's outlets to more locations in Lahore. As the product was superb, they were successful in getting good sales from other locations as well. But the proper branding started when Faisal Farooq and Ahmar Farooq ( sons of Mr. Farooq Ahmad) took over the business and came up with a concept of branding Nirala Sweets. As both individuals are MBA and they had this vision in mind to make it a proper brand and implements each element of branding in it. These people not only worked on the logo, and other promotional stuff but also on the facia, ambiance and the products they were offering. They implemented the same pricing, same brands and same ambiance so that the consumer have the same taste and feel while he is having mithayee from an outlet in Lahore or in Islamabad or whatever. 

Website is an important part of the marketing strategy and most of us when we want to know about something, we simply google it. So Nirala definitley wanted to have a strong online presence with a little ecommerce flair in it. User has also the option of ordering the Sohan Halwa ( one of their famous product) online. I have a little observation in the website. If you have ever visited any of the outlet, you will see a strong color which is Yellow, which I have found not present in their website.  I suggest they should also incorporate this color as the most dominant color.

 Now Nirala is not only in Pakistan but also in UK and Canada and they are still growing. They want to be present in every single market in Pakistan and these people have the vision to be a strong brand like KFC and Mcdonalds. 

Beliscity - Pakistani's Amazon

Whether we are business students or techy people, we have heard alot about www.beliscity.com. This website has come up with a very unique idea of selling the products online with a different mode of payment. Beliscity knew the physcology of Pakistan consumers that they are risk averse and they still have the fear of purchasing a product online. To encourage the Pakistan consumers to buy the products from home, they did two things which were like hitting the bull's eye. They offered the products cheaper than the market and secondly, they offered it without using your credit cards. There are four different methods to buy a beliscity product, through email, phone, sms or go to their store in clifton karachi which is actually a warehouse. But they are going to open their retail outlet soon. 

What they are offering is pretty interesting. Why i am saying that they are offering interesting products because its actually everything which our pakistani consumer really want to buy. Yes amazon is a good brand name so is barnes and noble but they cannot be successful because of the reason that people here in pakistan donot have the aptitude to read books and especially those books which are licensed. Around 80% of our books are low priced edition or pirated, so students dont bother to buy a licensed book. So what beliscity did was they offer products related to electronics and stuff. Today they have a wide range of products from a flash drive to laptops, jewelry, perfumes and even routers. 

The delievery system is also good. I never tried beliscity but my friends had good experience as far as the delievery system is concerned. Beliscity is planning to expand as they have also opened their outlet in lahore and most probably they are planning to come to islamabad soon. I suggest they should introduce product reviews section on their website so people can post comments about the products. This tactic can increase their sales and also work as a viral marketing tool for them.

Brandsynario - The goods and bads

If you belong to advertising, marketing or related field, you must have heard about the website www.brandsynario.com. I must say a great website with loads of information about the Pakistani advertising and media industry. The website is a product of Synergy Advertising which is one of the leading advertising agencies in Pakistan. The website is divided into five major categories and every section has its own importance.

The first section is Advertising, whether the campaign is local or foriegn, whether its a print or TVC ad, brandsynario has uploaded everything for the marketers and advertisers. I remember I used to visit this site when I was studying the course of Advertising and promotion in my MBA. The content is great but there is one problem that the resolution of those ads is very less. One of the reason why they are doing is to save the web hosting space as much as they can and offer larger quantity

The second section is Marketing, which offers you different videos and stuff related to brand management, supply chain and marketing. Although brandsynario doesnt have much to offer in it but still the concept is really good

The third section wich actually helped me alotin in advertising project and still its a good source for students as well as different companies is the list of all types of media companies like TV, newspaper, Radio with their profiles. Also there is a list of advertising agencies which come under the company profiles tab.

The most important section is the Research section in which ratings of different Tv channels and newspapers are given. Also Synergy Advertising conducts some survey which are not very frequent but the they are very good in terms of their content.

Recommendations :

Brandsynario currently believes in quantity as in there are lots of ads but they are ads just for the sake of ads. Definitley its the only website that is promoting the advertising trends all over the world but the quality of the content should be improved as well as there should be something new on daily basis. 

Branding Savour Foods

If you live in Islamabad or Rawalpindi, you must have heard about Savour Foods. This article does not give you an introduction about what is Savour Foods? How tasty is their Pulao ? And how much the owner of Savour is earning. I am sure 30% of the crowd coming into Savour think and discuss on the same lines and surprisingly they have assumed some handsome figure in their mind. So I am not here to discuss the importance of Savour Foods. Yes it has become a part of Islamabad Culture. They position themselves as Cost effective Pulao Kabab which everyone can afford to eat.  Wait a minute! I have unintentionally used a marketing term here called POSITIONING. But can any marketing guy tell me What  is their marketing strategy? Also what exactly is their expansion and growth strategy? I am sure we have suggestions but we don’t have proper solutions.

Savour Foods, Nirala Sweets and Gourmet Bakers have become the favorite case studies for all the business schools in Pakistan and why not? Our professors know that these products are brilliantly good and they are just lacking one or two components. As far as the Savor Foods is concerned, the product is simply addictive. I still go once in a week to have Savour whether with friends or some other. But the reason for any consumer to go to Savour is their tasty pulao with a low price. Although this strategy is pretty good in Pakistan but if I say you to compare McDonalds, KFC, Subway, and Pizza Hut with Savour foods? Yeah I know the target market is totally different but Savour Foods has not defined any target market they are just catering the masses. The only thing they lack is a proper brand. Do any of us remember the logo of Savour? Certainly NOT but we do remember the logo of KFC or McDonalds right?

The product is superb and has the potential to be successful all over Pakistan but I don’t know why the guy is expanding too slowly. McDonalds is a great example of giving franchises to people. The same can be done with Savour and I am sure there are people who want to invest in this business. That is how they can expand themselves. I am always wondering Why Pakistan don’t have a proper brand when some of our products have great power to rule the world?  Well there are many reasons and one of the reasons is Pakistani entrepreneurs are very risk averse.  We are making Jeans for Levis, we are making shirts for Gap and Marks & Spencer. We are making football for Nike that means we have the capacity to make exceptional products but what we can do is to brand our product

Browser Browser !

Well, Well Well....I am a big fan of reading about the competition and the competitors tactics. I have been following the stories since I was new to computers. I used to be a great fan of Netscape Navigator and read alot of stories about the the war between Internet Explorer and Netscape. Then came a browser Noeplanet which was faster than Netscape but failed due to many reasons which frankly speaking I dont remember because I was a kid that time. For a long long time, Internet Explorer has dominated the market until Firefox came into being and Wow what a browser with simply awesome features. The concept of tabs was introduced by Opera but beautifully followed by Fireox. Firefox is fast, reliable and I simply loved the feature of storing the session if the user has opened two or more tabs. Apple also introduced Safari which they claimed to be the fatest browser but with the launch of chrome they are now a little behind. Last month Google Inc, which recently launched its own Chrome browser, joined the Mozilla foundation, producer of the Firefox Web browser, and Norway's Opera, in protesting Microsoft's dominance in the browser market.n January, European regulators brought formal charges againstMicrosoft for abusing its dominant market position by bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser with its Windows operating system, which is used in 95 percent of the world's personal computers. So now Microsoft Corp is developing a feature in its new operating system that allows users to turn off Internet Explorer and other key Microsoft programs. So lets see what is the next strategy of each player in the browser market. I am also sharing a comparison of the Top Browsers in the market.

Rank	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5	#6	#7	#8	#9
Excellent    Very Good    Good    Fair    Poor	Firefox	Google Chrome	Internet Explorer	Opera	Safari	Maxthon	Flock	Avant Browser	Deepnet Explorer	PhaseOut
Overall Rating
Ratings
Features Set
Ease of Use
Security
Speed & Compatibility
Help/Support
Speed
Initial Startup Time	14	8.1	8.5	7.1	10.6	7	20.2	25.7	11.6	21.3
Average Startup Time	3.8	3.1	2.2	4.4	3.7	6.4	8	11	7.8	10.7
Navigation Time	6.4	7	7.4	7.3	7.8	8	8.3	6.4	6.3	8.8