The southern coffee business major, Coffee Day, is looking at a new market for its hot beverages. Targeted at the housewives, the company is in the process of introducing small vending machines for the household segment.
Having fine-tuned its business model, Trends-In-Vogue Pvt Ltd, a group company of FMCG company CavinKare Pvt Ltd, is planning a quick expansion of its branded salons business. The end of this financial year will see the opening of five Limelite's, its premium salon and spa, and the establishment of 15 more Green Trends, its mid-priced family salon.
Close on the heels of shutting down its audio manufacturing unit, consumer electronics firm Sony India has suspended production at its colour television facility and said that it was evaluating whether to close down the CTV unit.
As part of its growth and development strategy, home appliances company Electrolux Kelvinator Ltd plans to open exclusive retail outlets which will also act as experience centres, as well as introduce and nurture new product categories in the Indian market.
TVS Electronics has launched the first ever set-top boxes, made in India. The DTH set top boxes are being manufactured at its newly commissioned automated high volume manufacturing line in Chennai. TVS-E has signed up an agreement with Siti Cable Network – part of the Zee Network as its first customer in India.
Carrying forward its association with the Athens 2004 Olympics, Samsung India Electronics Limited (SIEL) on Thursday launched its ‘Olympic Series’ mobile phones. All three models -- SGH D410, SGH E800 and SGH E810 -- are high-end slide phones packed with new features.
What has worked for Pizza Hut is the strategy to ‘think global and act local’, says Pankaj Batra, Director-Marketing, Indian Subcontinent, Yum! Restaurants International. Starting with six restaurants in its first year, Pizza Hut has expanded to 73 restaurants in 19 cities and plans to scale up to 100 restaurants by end-2004.
Sahara and Percept’s ‘Mr and Miss Bollywood’ has reached its final stage. Auditions of the final 74 contestants are over and the judging processes to zero in on the 30 winners will soon begin to complete the hunt by October. Organiser duo planning to make talent hunt an annual affair – the next is slotted to begin in December 2004.
The much-awaited broadband policy is about a week away from its formal announcement. The communications and information technology union minister Dayananidhi Maran said on Thursday that the government was in the process of introducing the broadband policy.
Central Trading Group’s Investment Director Sejal Shah has put in her papers after a span of two and half years. CTG Group deals with the entire Group M clientele for benchmarking and group negotiations as far as media buying is concerned.
The government has extended the deadline, by three months, for television channels to comply with foreign investment norms. In the process, government has bought time till October 31, to decide whether foreign institutional investors (FIIs) and overseas corporate bodies (OCBs) should be permitted to fund TV channels uplinking from India.
Global information and media outfit VNU and WPP-promoted AGB Group’s decision to jointly provide television ratings across the world, establish that the TAM model – a joint venture of Nielsen and WPP’s Kantar Media Group (present in India as IMRB), is a beneficial one.
Client organisations are about selling products and every other activity is subservient to that over-riding objective. Now that doesn’t sound very profound, but advertising is not really the most important task of the client CEO, as most of us in advertising would fondly like to believe!