Me: Today I had the most creative surprise of an email in my inbox – The New Apple iPad email.

SomeOne: What’s most surprising aspect of this email, The (HTML) Design?

Me: No.

Someone: Must be the Graphics?

Me: No.

Someone: Stop making a big deal out of this, must be a funny/shocking Headline to the copy?

Me: No!.. Certainly a smart headline though, if you can see through it.”The New iPad”.

Someone: And that is smart because….?

Me: Because.. Apple by far the most creative multi-billion dollar company in the world today broke another industry convention and how! They just dropped the version name or number for the new iPad and just called it “the new iPad”. That’s brave to say the least and sheer genius to articulate the intensity of vision that it reflects on part of the company’s marketing department. Want to know why?

Someone: Yes, though I think you’re putting too much emphasis on something too trivial.

Me: That’s exactly why I am calling it Visionary & Genius. To effect such a huge change by change something so small or trivial that it’ll go unnoticed by the consumer yet benefit the consumer so much so that it might be a great differentiator for Apple, across product categories.

Remember the times when people were complaining that Apple Products were not only expensive but they updated their products too often and those who bought them as a status symbol or to flaunt it basically, found themselves robbed as the new version would be out in 6 months or a year and their pride of ownership would diminish. Well, now everyone who owns an iPhone or iPad will be owning the same product, no more “is your’s iPad or iPad 2″ crap. That would mean so much to the current owners that they don’t have to upgrade just to own the latest thing, unless they need the features.

Technically or to those who don’t study the brand management aspects, this would make not much sense right away, but if you ask me, this is sheer Creative Genius either way you look at it. Logistically, whether you’ve a commercial name or not, doesn’t matter an infinitesimally small bit. Each product, leave alone product lot or type, have individually trackable codes these days. However, it does save a bit on the inventory management, as those points of sale who’ve the older version of a product need not visually change every bit of commercial communication right away, as iPad or the new iPad are basically the same things, except while selling the details can be mentioned to those interested and supplemented by a few dynamic visual aspects of the points of sale.

For Marketing communications, as against the confusing product names or numbers, it’s simply the “iPad” or “iPhone” and so on. That makes the same advertisements work for more than one products. On top of this, like the current situation with the iPhone 3Gs and iPhone 4, which are both selling in many stores, people don’t need to buy a distinctively inferior (in features) iPhone 3Gs, but can just buy an iPhone that has less features and costs a little less. This same strategy is being used by rival Nokia for it’s Lumia series, one phone of that series costs almost half as much as the other, but the pride of ownership is no less :) Who knows we might have the much rumored $100 iPhone one day!

Holi always does this to people, but to see the real colors come out of each member of our team was fantastic, may be we should plan for a actual Holi (Rangpachami) Day celebration next time. Hopefully we’ll be a sizable number by then to justify dragging people out of their private holi zones and play with colors, may be Holi Eve.

Sounds like a plan, all we need is a drum full of water, a sack full of colors and total lack of supervision! We should be setting or lowering standards in Corporate Holi traditions for sure :) Nevertheless, wish you all a happy dirty holi, remember to play it safe!

More than everything else it was officially acknowledged that we all love Pizza, how un-classy! Heck, we still love it. While Pizza kept our mouths busy, our minds were running around wild with the planning for Summer around the corner. What to do, where to go and although we could not all conclude upon one activity or location to pursue, we’ve agreed to work on it further and finalize a nice Summer-Break, with the entire staff going outdoors for some activity.. if you have ideas, don’t hesitate to enlighten us :)

Today we’ve grown bigger with another engineer joining our team, isn’t that a good feeling! When we started, few years ago, we weren’t so sure it was going to work out so well and we’re still keeping our fingers crossed.

Startups however, have their share of challenges too. With every new team member, we’ve to plan for a new setup completely. Right from expensive resources like a computer, desk space and a chair to more manpower intensive expenses, like Training. It would’ve been easier had we been a firm with enough funding and enough manpower to handle HR functions like, interviews, hiring decisions, integration of selected candidates, etc. Nevertheless we enjoy doing it all for now carefully and sincerely, knowing full well that every action counts.

Another day another challenge and we’re loving it.

Valentine’s Day wasn’t really our deadline, but we always wanted a “special entry” and what better day to launch our company’s Brand New Virtual existence? so came into existence www.crplz.com

We’re in a total celebration mood today, although the actual celebration will happen towards the weekend.. lot of pending work to finish, clients to satisfy, projects to complete, maintenance due, documentation, training… wow! are we finally turning into a company or what? We’ve not yet crossed the psychological landmark of 10 employees though, we’ll do that in 2012 for sure :)

With a promise to write more, something everyday, at least every working day, am ending this post quickly. Checkout the site. Most of it is done and whatever’s remaining is being completed on a War Footing (had to use a “war” phrase on the universal day of love and peace, couldn’t find an appropriate alternative, we’re that seriously working on it).

Looking forward to hearing from you in the comments, emails, feedback and more importantly via the numerous contracts that you’ll sign with us for “making you look good online!”

Right from the selection of the logo, the colors, the punch line, our client was a bit surprised to see us promoted such wild ideas like the Hinglish name for the web-identity for instance – Kya Bolta Market! We worked on this concept of what should an investment advisory firm providing real-time as well as speculative leads on Macro as well a Micro-Economic trends be named?… and thus was born Kya Bolta Market, literally meaning – What Says (the) Market?

It’s always interesting to play with such brand names, which are unconventional, but this was more than that, we hit a jackpot when we found that “kyaboltamarket.com” was available! This is because, the question or phrase is the most commonly asked question amongst the investor community, mostly with serious curiosity to know how the market’s performing, but even at times with some intended sarcasm in it. Either ways, promoting the brand and the website, or it’s services is fairly simple, as all we’ve to do is to inform people to add the ‘.com’ to the question they ask frequently to each other.

In most parts of India (the target geography of our client) people understand this term very well associates with only one Market – The Share Market. However, it can be extended to the commodities, derivatives and such other markets where our clients provide investment advisory services.

Founders of KBM believe that in order to achieve success in the Financial Markets one has to have an absolutely disciplined approach towards trading or investment. Kya Bolta Market will try to imbibe this very approach of trading in you and would look forward to fortify you with its Financial Market Analytics.

When Manisha approached us for creating her online identity and a website, she knew what she wanted and we know we’ve given her exactly that, well, she told us so! Mentionable here is that Manisha’s been close to an ideal client who came to us with specific requirements, a deadline and we worked around a mutually agreed upon budget. Manisha’s not just happy with our work, we’re happy to have another client referred by Manisha !!