Friday, 28th August ’20
Good morning, welcome to TMT Friday. As we end this week, we request you to embrace digital detox this weekend. Relax, do nature walks, and try out some new physical activities. With so many complexities in the world, all you need a dose of relaxation and some time with yourself. In the news, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos becomes the first man to cross the $200 billion net worth. With the Aatm Nirbhar Bharat push, India allows 74% FDI for defense manufacturing.
Here are a few words of business from Jeff Bezos,
If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.
MIND MONK
Tolerate Your Success
Who does not want to be successful? After all, it is the time we have been waiting for and working for. And when it comes, we prance around and burst into happiness. Well, we are certainly worth it. But sometimes, it is this extreme addiction to always meet with success that makes us intolerant of our failure and other success. It makes us hungry to meet our success soon in any way possible, just to prove to others that we have not failed. The reason is no matter how much happiness it brings, success brings along itself a toxic addiction. So we need to tolerate our success at times. But how to do it?
Success is temporary. Success is a journey, not a destination. When you become successful, don’t rest on your laurels. As soon as you take your eye off the ball, you risk losing your edge.
Stop feeding your ego. Don’t isolate yourself from reality by building relationships with people who stroke your ego. Surrounding yourself with “yes people” is just like talking to yourself.
Share your success. You may be successful, but there’s a good chance others helped you along the way. Find creative ways to share the credit and pull people up the ladder of success along with you.
Remember your roots. Remember where you came from and what you’ve learned along the way. Help others by mentoring them.
Compete against yourself. When you compete against others, it’s easy to emphasize winning over self-improvement. However, when you compete against yourself, you both win.
MARKETS
Markets: The Indices ended in green for the fifth day in a row supported by gains in heavyweights such as HDFC, Axis Bank, Mahindra & Mahindra, SBI, ICICI Bank, and IndusInd Bank. Due to the mute global market cues, the markets ended flat with a positive bias. It will be seen how the Jackson Hole meeting turns out for the Indian markets as the US interest rates to stay low for a long time. Bourses in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Seoul settled with losses, while Shanghai closed in positive territory. Stock exchanges in Europe were trading on a negative note in early deals.
TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION
- Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, has said that the company is “moving quickly” to resolve issues in the US and India in a letter he sent on Thursday morning soon after Kevin Mayer announced his resignation as the CEO of TikTok. ByteDance has approached firms like Reliance Jio for a specific sale of TikTok in India.
- State Bank of India is planning to set up an entity to rival National Payments Corporation of India and enter the country’s highly competitive, yet fast-growing, digital payments ecosystem as a primary stakeholder. SBI will need to provide at least Rs 500 crore as paid-up capital if the entity does get the green light.
- Samsung Electronics will reportedly begin trialing a work-from-home program for some employees next month as South Korea as the country deals with its largest increase in COVID-19 cases since March. COVID-19 cases in South Korea have begun climbing again over the past few weeks.
WHAT ELSE IS COOKING
Infosys inks five-year deal with Genesys: Infosys on Thursday said it has signed a five-year deal with the cloud customer experience and contact center solutions provider, Genesys. The five-year partnership with Genesys enables both companies to develop and deploy innovation and best-in-class solutions in the customer experience market. As a part of the partnership, Infosys will bring to market Genesys’ contact center solutions. In addition, Infosys will leverage and support R&D, operations, and customer service for Genesys PureConnect.
US-China tensions rise after Beijing launches missiles into the South China Sea: U.S.-China tensions over the South China Sea escalated on Wednesday, with Beijing firing four medium-range ballistic missiles into the waters, amid broader military exercises by the People’s Liberation Army, around the same time as the Trump administration took action against Chinese companies that helped set up outposts in the disputed region. Last month the US explicitly rejected China’s expansive maritime claims in the region for the first time, and sent aircraft carriers to the waters to conduct military exercises.
TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer quits against the backdrop of US action on company: TikTok’s chief executive, Kevin Mayer, is going to leave the company. Mayer has sent a letter to employees announcing his departure, and Vanessa Pappas, who is the general manager of TikTok in the US right now, will be taking over from him in the interim. Mayer had joined TikTok earlier this year from Disney. The development suggests the company is in the process of breaking up operations, perhaps selling the US arm of TikTok.
BUSINESS LOUNGE
Arcade Gaming
Netflix docu-series High Score examines early video game history, including the arcade boom in the late ’70s and ’80s. In Episode 1, “Boom & Bust,” three former MIT students are featured: Doug Macrae, Steve Golson, and Mike Horowitz. Macrae and Golson created a booming black market arcade in their dorm room — by hacking Atari’s Missile Command to make the game harder to beat.
Macrae, who started at MIT in 1976 and eventually dropped out before completing his degree, started a small business by placing a pinball machine in his dorm room. By junior year, he and Golson had at least 20 arcade machines in various dorms on campus, including Missile Command cabinets. They collected the quarters from the machines in backpacks and took them to the bank, making enough money to actually pay their tuition.
Unfortunately, revenue streams began to slow as people got better at the games, which allowed them to play for longer without having to deposit as many quarters. Thus, Macrae and Golson came up with a plan: Make Missile Command harder to beat. The theory was simple: If the game is challenging, people will lose faster, which will push them to play again. Therefore, the operator makes more money from a challenging game than from one that people have mastered.
To accomplish their goal, Macrae and Golson created software enhancement kits during spring break 1981 that could be installed in the arcade cabinet to make Missile Command more difficult. They called the new and improved game Super Missile Attack. It had more missiles, faster missiles, smaller clouds, different attack modes, and new colors and sounds. It also had a brand new attack object: The UFO.
In his interview for High Score, Golson said the pair sold about 1,000 enhancement kits to arcade owners over the course of a few months, at $295 each – which added up to a quarter of a million dollars. Considering the early 80s, that’s a sizeable fortune. And that too in a few weeks. After upgrading Missile Command, Macrae and Golson turned their attention to another game: Pac-Man.
TMT VARSITY
Undercover Marketing
At a private party in 2009 for a large group of Philadelphia’s most socially active 20-somethings, a man named Tommy Upgrove, owner of 32 Degrees Luxe Lounge, a popular nightclub, spent the night pouring shots of vodka for his guests. The vodka Upgrove poured was called Turi Vodka. His guests were unaware that Tommy Upgrove wasn’t just a nightclub owner, but also an undercover marketer for the evening.
Bacardi hired a marketing agency called SoulKool to generate buzz about Turi, a brand they had imported from Estonia. Hoping to make Turi stand out in the very crowded field of vodka brands, SoulKool hired Tommy Upgrove to act as an undercover marketing agent. Upgrove didn’t promote Turi in any overt way. He didn’t talk it up, he didn’t offer a special deal with it, and he didn’t call attention to the logo on the bottle. The only thing Upgrove did to bring Turi to market was make it available to the right people in the right place. Best of all, none of those people knew they were seeing an advertisement, so they never felt pressured to adopt an opinion about it.
What is Undercover Marketing – Undercover marketing strategies involve introducing a product to consumers in a way that does not seem like advertising. It is a strategy within the broader technique of stealth marketing, where agents pose as regular people and show products to others who are unaware of the marketing push.
The two greatest advantages of undercover marketing are its low cost and its ability to generate word-of-mouth recommendations. This makes it ideal for small companies with limited advertising budgets, as well as large companies that want to generate buzz for a product ahead of a more traditional marketing campaign.
With market research data, a company can craft an effective message for the public part of the undercover campaign. With research complete, the company now knows what its target demographic values and where people who fit in that demographic can be found, allowing them to create scripts or talking points that appeal to those individuals.
Now you can create your Undercover Marketing Plan!!
Written by Kumar Sourav Mohanty, Akansh Bhatt, and Shashank Dobhal
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