Firstpost Brands Friday wrap

Now that the Firstpost Brands section is getting populated and we have a semblance of a team, it’s time to give the section more energy. Here’s the next dose of energy, a weekly column, published every Friday, on nuggets of news and info. from the previous week that I stumble upon.

Terrific way to start a Friday, when you see something like this.

Words of wisdom from the mouth of Calvin. “I’m writing a self-help book,” he says. “There’s a huge market for this stuff. First, you convince people there’s something wrong with them. That’s easy because advertising has already conditioned people to feel insecure about their weight, looks, social status, sex appeal, and so on…”

And then serendipity strikes, when I read that Debenhams has decided that they would stop photoshopping their lingerie model shots.

The illustration is courtesy Debenhams, so thank you, Debenhams. Perhaps the guys at Debenhams saw the Calvin strip before I did. If enough advertisers start following Debenhams position, there goes Calvin’s book.

More from Lifestyle

Is it safe to travel to Indonesia as violent protests spread? Why does South Korea still ban tattoos, and is that about to change?

And talking of positions, what is Cadbury Bournville positioned as? This is (I think) the first Bournville commercial we saw in India.

You had to ’earn’ Bournville - or you couldn’t get it for all the money in the world. O&M built on this positioning, underlining the tagline that Bournville had to be earned - it was that exclusive a chocolate.

So Sambit Mohanty got more than a little confused when he received his Hindustan Times copy this morning.

You get the Bournville - the same Bournville which you had to earn - free?

This is obviously a tactical exercise to push Dairy Milk Silk; give something free to get sampling of a new product in the market. But someone should have joined the dots and killed the idea of the Bournville freebie and think of another product from the stable - Toblerone, perhaps, as gratification?

And finally, a new form of gratification for retired cricketers. Rohit Bhaskar writes in The Hindustan Times that he was asked to pay for the honour of interviewing Saqlain Mushtaq. How much? Three hundred pounds. When Bhaskar dithered, the agency negotiating on behalf of Saqlain offered a Bournville-kind deal to him: Pay 500 pounds and get a Saqlain + Inzamam ul Haq combination.

And, with that, it’s a wrap. Catch you next Friday.