Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

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Just opened my desk drawer and there were hundreds of coins, tens of Diet Coke Pull-Tabs and lots of pencils. I have been collecting these for some time now. And these things are as dear as anything else could be. In fact you can hold these tabs for ransom and I would do anything to get them back.

I am sure people DO collect things - from something as mundane as a stamp to something as interesting as a food bill (or is it the other way round?). Over a period of years, I have collected stamps, coins, matchboxes, postcards, autographs, certificates, marbles, empty boxes, bills, envelopes, tins, sand, songs, books, movies etc. Is it only me who is so engrossed in collecting things or are there more?

Curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to know what other people collect. I asked junta on twitter. Within the next two minutes I was told that people collect DVDs, Books, miniature elephants etc.

Logical extension would be a place to aggregate all these things and realized that Flickr and its group is just the right place. Just created this Flickr Group. Please see/share/comment things that people around the world collect. Use the tag “iCollect” in case you decide to upload your pictures.

Don’t you think, its a good way to share what absurd/weird/non-conventional thing do YOU collect?

Time for another Friday Update. Its not even funny how soon a Friday came. I was in Delhi for two days visiting markets for a client. The trip was more exhausting than exciting. No new highlights so to speak of. However the Delhi trip gave quite a few ideas on interesting things that can be done in the Indian market. I will list few of them here.

To start with, a business idea.

• Background: While in market, I saw that Coke has a water brand called BonAqua apart from Kinley (that they recently relaunched). Wondering why would Coke have two brands in packaged drinking water category. I also saw that Frito Lays has launched a brand called Desi Beats - in direct competition to ITC’s Bingo.
• Idea: How about a market intelligence company? Not a market research company but a market intelligence company. The difference being that market researchers would try and collect data when demanded by the clients and on the other hand, market intelligence company would gather intelligence and help companies and brands take proactive decisions.
• Business Case: As a brand it is very difficult for me to keep track of things that are happening in the market. I would readily pay for a company that monitors the market on my behalf and gives me weekly or monthly dossiers on what is happening in the market. Further, this is better than market research because I am not paying for data that is mostly fudged and has lots of biases built it. In fact more and more clients I meet as part of my work for Creativeland Asia dont want to believe in traditional market research methodologies.
• How would I do this? If I had volunteers or part-timers whose only job is to go and click pictures at retail shelves across the country, I can have reams of data. And with advent of personal technology, its cheap and convenient to click pictures and send it to a centralized location. I can then have another team analyze this data for information and patterns. For example if suddenly all pics from Delhi show that Red Bull is now visible at even the juice stores, that would mean that Red Bull is trying to revamp their distribution and has ambitious plans.
• Probable roadblocks: Quite a few. Including things like <retailers not allowing you to click pictures>, <motivation and remuneration of volunteers>, <team of analysts>, <no competitive advantage> etc. Need to think lot more on this.
• Future of this idea. I think I will post this on VentureWoods and see if I get some feedback. And once I put things in shape, will try to take it further.

Apart from this, other notable things are

• A tee shirt shop that is very close to my n00b.in tees idea. Have to check these people out.
• Learned more about LeagueOne. Rather than opening new stores, they are just aggregating traditional retail stores and selling non-FMCG products/services like insurance, mobile recharges, OOH screens, movie tickets etc. there. Very interesting concept with lots of potential. More on this later. Probably a new blog post all together.