Consumer Protection Bill 2019: A good move for the customers

While the earlier law did cover unfair trade practices, the current one makes it more comprehensive. It also defines unfair contracts

The passing of the Consumer Protection Bill by the Lok Sabha in the ongoing session of Parliament is a welcome step. Originally brought out in 2015, the Bill was referred to a standing committee and later reintroduced in 2018, only to lapse with the end of the term of the earlier government. A lot has changed in the way goods and services are bought and sold since 1986, when the first Consumer Protection Act was enacted. The Bill recognises this, bringing within its fold online sales, tele-shopping, direct selling and multi-level marketing in addition to the traditional methods. The new law will apply to all goods and services, including sale or construction of homes or flats and telecom services. While the earlier law did cover unfair trade practices, the current one makes it more comprehensive. It also defines unfair contracts.

The Bill improves upon the Act of 1986 on a few counts. It provides for product liability action on account of harm caused to consumers due to a defective product or by deficiency in services. Manufacturers, sellers or service providers are legally bound to compensate consumers for defects or deficiency. It envisages a regulatory authority known as the Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) with powers of enforcement, unlike the existing Consumer Protection Councils which are only advisory bodies. The CCPA will have powers to initiate class action including enforcing recall, refund and return of products. Considering that even consumer courts face piling up and backlog of cases, there is now room for an alternative dispute resolution mechanism as the Bill sets up mediation cells attached to district forums, state and national commissions. Whether it is MS Dhoni in the Amrapali case or Amitabh Bachchan or Madhuri Dixit in the Maggi case, celebrities have drawn much flak for endorsing faulty goods and services. The Bill calls upon the endorsers to exercise due diligence before they plunge into advertisements. Failure to do so will attract a penalty of ₹10-50 lakh and/or a ban from further endorsements for a period of 1-3 years.

The Bill is commendable for its efforts to move further towards caveat venditor from the days of caveat emptor. Some areas may need more consideration, though. For one, since many sectors have their own regulators, duplication or clashes between CCPA and these bodies may arise. By not imposing judicial qualifications like in the Act of 1986 for members of the redressal body, the Bill indirectly allows appointment of non-judicial members to the district/state and national commissions. Conflict of interest could arise when government nominees hear cases involving a government entity. Finally, easy access, simple process and time-bound resolution must be ensured.

Source: https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/editorial/the-new-consumer-protection-bill-is-a-big-step-forward-in-consumer-empowerment/article28804949.ece

Why should boys have all the fun?

Today when I was checking my facebook updates, I came across this ad and that made me write this blog after such a long gap. What a biased advertisement it is! I pity the maker’s perception of presenting this concept. 

Apart from the stereotypical ad, we need to closely look at the business model of the company. It clearly states that would be brides need training. What about our bridegrooms? Don’t they need any training?  It closely states about our social structure. And I won't be surprised if the batches are running full. Marriage is such an institution where both partners need to learn and in today's situation where both the partners are working, typical role expectations have changed.

People were commenting on this ad and some of them criticized it. They demanded feminism so that such ads can be stopped. Why do we need feminism? The fact is even men are imprisoned in gender stereotypes. We need a movement for both men and women and by men and women. Women were never in extreme minority to wait for some movement to take place and then act upon it. They were marginalized because they let it happen. Women are in equal numbers. If not superior but they are no less than men. Anyway, that’s not the topic of discussion today. May be I will write on it sometime later.

Coming back to the advertisement, it has used a women master chef as the face that too for her gender than her capabilities. The color used is red (of course for it being the bridal color), the body copy reads “help her prepare it for well” as if she needs help again demeaning her capabilities and yes not to forget the language of the much wanted services of the company.

I feel the ad is totally biased. This could have been handled better. What say?  

Need for studying advertising from communication perspective

Continued from my previous post:

Another important problem with advertising programs is that they are often seen as a specialty programs and not inherently central within the paradigm of the traditional university faculties such as pure sciences, natural sciences, management, commerce or arts. So the question arises here is that in which academic discipline should advertising be taught? Or a separate need of faculty of communication is there within which advertising education must be fitted. In such a case, the purpose of this advertising division must be to:

1.      encourage the study of advertising as an integral part of our communication and marketing system.

2.      encourage the study of advertising as it relates to other institutions in society.

3.      encourage its members to bring to their teaching and research as a conception of the whole of advertising and not just its individual parts.

4.      provide liaison between its members and scholars in other areas who are interested in advertising and its role in society.

5.      stay abreast of current research; recent publications and research grant opportunities through its regular newsletters, conferences and periodicals.

6.      incorporate diversity in curriculum.

7.      maintain consistency in the content and title of such programs.

Charles H. Sandage once humorously explained the early history of advertising in his book, ‘Advertising as a Social Force’, 1998. He wrote:

From these early beginnings what has become recognized as an academic discipline of advertising was born. The father of this child was psychology and the mother, journalism. It might, therefore, be said that advertising education was sired by psychology and damned by journalism ... The child was abandoned by its father at an early age, but business-marketing moved in as a sort of stepfather to share with journalism the task of rearing the child in its formative years. There was some conflict in the family as to how the child should be brought up. One parent thought it should be nurtured on a diet of creativity, while the other recommended a menu closely related and subservient to the marketing aspect of business. Both parents viewed the child as chattel and directed its life toward serving the particular interests of journalism and business.

....to be continued.

Need for studying advertising from communication perspective

It is more than 100 years now that Advertising as a subject got introduced in education system. There have been two approaches to advertising learning- one from marketing perspective and the other in journalism schools. In both the cases it is looked at as a part of a larger system wherein advertising as a field has the capability of being studied as a separate stream. The academicians need to understand these differences in approaches of advertising education as neither of the approaches offer best platform for the teaching-learning process of advertising.

Can advertising sell? Well, the answer is-No. The ultimate objective of all the marketing programs is sales. Advertising is a small yet important aspect of the marketing mix. It supports the sales process but cannot sell on its own.  Advertising primarily influences and persuades target audience. My argument here is influence or persuasion studies fall into communication studies and therefore advertising education should be given more importance as compared to what it is given now with vigilant exclusion of sales from advertising studies.

Advertising education, as with most other types of professional education, has had its ups and downs in the 100 years it has been a part of curricula. Also, during this period diverse academic interests have created diffused patterns of curricula and emphasis. It is difficult to obtain a clear picture of the extent and scope of advertising education in India. Following issues can be observed in advertising education:

·         Which academic divisions teach advertising courses?

·         And, what courses are included in various advertising curricula?

·         What do various educational institutions call these programs?

·         What advertising courses are taught by the institutions with advertising programs?

·         What institutions offer advertising courses on the graduate level? How extensive are these programs?

·         In what way do advertising practitioners and organizations cooperate?

·         How many and what are the backgrounds of the faculty members who teach advertising courses?

·         Too many advertising students are enrolled in various advertising programs? How many of them are oriented towards learning advertising and taking it up as a career?

What is the level expected by the industry? Are they fulfilling the criteria? Are there enough job opportunities for these graduates?

·         Should advertising education be accredited by its own peers?

·         What do advertising educators think about the future of advertising education?

Most of these journalism or business programs have small components in advertising. In some cases it is clubbed with public relations wherein both Advertising and PR have the capability of being studied separately and independently. Some of the programs do offer a specialized degree in advertising but even these programs have various small components like media planning, event management, public relations, integrated marketing communication etc. These subjects are also important but in order to accommodate everything these courses fail to understand the core of the degree and deviate from advertising as a subject.

....to be continued.

Advertisers Should Act More Like Newsrooms

by Baba Shetty and Jerry Wind  |  10:00 AM February 15, 2013   

A  fascinating thing happened at the Super Bowl this year. Typically, Super Bowl advertisers meticulously plan every aspect of their presence months in advance of the big game. But this time, Coca-Cola, Audi, and Oreo didn't just limit themselves to pre-packaged creative — they also had in place rapid response teams that adapted to events as they happened. So when the rest of America was reacting to the power outage in the stadium, the brands were, too — appropriately and in their own brand voice.

Recently, the Wharton Future of Advertising Program asked more than 175 industry leaders to describe their vision of what advertising would be like in the year 2020. Based on our analysis of the responses to the 2020 Project, the Super Bowl case isn't just a once-a-year stunt — it's a preview of a model that will scale and become a foundational characteristic of major brand advertising.

The industry experts had a varied take, but a remarkably consistent theme emerged: the rigid campaign-based model of advertising, perfected over decades of one-way mass media, is headed for extinction.

For messages to be heard in 2020, brands will need to create an enormous amount of useful, appealing, and timely content. To get there, brands will have to leave behind organizations and thinking built solely around the campaign model, and instead adopt the defining characteristics of the real-time, data-driven newsroom — a model that's prolific, agile and audience-centric.

Prolific

The campaign model, relatively speaking, is miserly. Ad units like TV spots are produced in small batches and doled out across channels. Even digital advertising is versioned with relatively minor variations that most people would have a hard time evaluating as "different".

As Jacques Bughin and David Edelman of McKinsey & Company predict in their submission to the 2020 project, "The need for relevance will drive consumer demand and shape advertising supply. There will be billions of interaction points that will place enormous demands on brands to create and deliver just the right piece of content."

This previously unimagined scale of content production will require brands to adopt every option available to them to increase their content output — from building internal content teams (like Red Bull Media House), to extensive media company partnerships (like the Intel Creators Project with Vice, to large-scale agency initiatives (like the Responsibility Project from Liberty Mutual and Hill Holliday).

Agile

The traditional campaign model is rigid. Ad units are created at a point in time and don't generally adapt to emerging themes in culture. In contrast, the newsroom metaphor suggests that content has to be produced and delivered in a continuous stream rather than through a ponderous, slow-moving process of months of campaign development. Wieden+Kennedy understood this when they produced 200 Old Spice YouTube videos in 48 hours. Calle Sjoenell, Chief Creative Office O&M, predicts that by 2020 at least half of the production budget will be spent while the campaign is running to adapt it in real time instead of blowing it all in one go, before the campaign runs.

Ad agencies and creatives will need to work more like a news organization, constantly adapting existing material and creating new content across all media. As Ian Schaeffer of digital agency Deep Focus puts it: "The process of arriving at the best social content looks more like 'Newsroom' than 'The Pitch'. Creative and social staffers merge the zeitgeist with the brand ethos all day, every day."

Audience-centric

The campaign model has for decades been decidedly brand-oriented. Typically, brands tell stories about themselves. In the shift to a newsroom model, we'll ask "what will our user be interested in?" And then we'll check that expectation with evidence: in a modern newsroom, data circulates continuously about the relative performance of each unit of content produced, from tweets to text-based stories, to images and video served — and future editorial content decisions reflect consumers' response to previous content. Just as the news content that meets the audience's needs rises to the top according to various performance metrics — think of news organizations' "most emailed" lists — brand-publishing content that meets consumers' needs will similarly get top performance ratings.

Getting There

Consumers have new expectations. Social media and digital news offer a continuously-updated reflection of the culture consumers live within.The overwhelming consensus from the Wharton Future of Advertising panel is that the current campaign-based model is ill-equipped to deal with this new reality. We believe the newsroom metaphor offers a powerful way to rethink the way advertising content is being developed and delivered, the roles of the advertiser, agencies, the users and other content generators, and the entire organizational architecture of advertising and marketing.

The road ahead certainly won't be smooth — we know the transition will be culturally and operationally difficult. If your brand, agency or media company has useful insight for the marketing community on your experiments with a newsroom model, we invite you to share them with us in the comments below and at the Wharton Future of Advertising Project. Contact cathays@wharton.upenn.edu.

Social Media and the 'F' word

I wrote this article on evil effects of social media for a youth magazine 'The Lantern'.

With the advent of new media in the form of social networking sites like Facebook, video sharing sites such as YouTube, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), WhatsApp, and microblogging platforms like Twitter; social media has become a hub of social connections. The growth of social media and its penetration into our life has become undeniable.  It indeed has redefined communication and is setting new set of social norms and mannerisms.

People use this media to meet long lost schoolmates, college mates, meet new like-minded friends and online dating. They discuss on different topics, share information, and exchange files and pictures. Marketers use it to promote their products and services and professionals use it for business networking and get noticed.

Critics keep stating about the dark or rather evil side of social media. Now the question arises, do social media really have one? Well, to some extent yes. Parents, teachers and bosses are frightful on the usage of the ‘F’ word. I am talking about Facebook here.

The fast paced technology driven 21st century youth have become totally addicted to the social media. My personal experiences in the classroom regarding mobile usage are annoying. Most of the students spend their class time even during lectures checking, updating and communicating on social media sites. Students have become obsessed regarding their online presence. They spend hours on these sites even during exam period failing to realise the importance of high priority tasks.

Employees at work have been said to be equally distracted by social media sites, particularly BBM. Even if they keep the mobile phones on silent profiles during meeting, one has the tendency to check them regularly. The focus on work is easily lost and work begins to suffer as a result of it.

It has been observed that those who are addicted to social media particularly youth find it difficult to successfully interact with people face to face. Majority of them spend most of their time online; making friends and interacting with them in virtual world thus hampering their interpersonal relationships in real world. They can gossip, quarrel, build their fake image, boast about their life and most importantly do ‘sexting’ online thus giving them more power in virtual world. 

Social media encourages people to share personal information and people do not mind sharing it, many a times they share their email id and personal numbers too. Anti-social elements can use this information through fake identity to indulge into illegal activities. Hackers can commit fraud, send spams and do virus attacks using this information.

Social media users rarely cross check the information and keep forwarding it resulting in hoax messages getting spread all over. By doing this one is inviting trouble for him/her to become part of online scams and in worst situations identity theft also. Some of these sites sell this personal information to anyone who wants to buy it. On top of it these sites always carry a disclaimer stating that they are free to change their privacy policy any time. One cannot legally sue them for their misconduct. Let me ask you one simple question, how many times have you read the terms and conditions before signing up on any social networking platform?

One also needs to understand that whatever is posted and shared online is being closely watched by family members and potential employers. They may check your online profile to find your persona and judge you.

Researchers have also stated that social media is leading to narcissistic behaviour in people. Narcissism can be explained as “excessive vanity and a sense of entitlement”, meaning it leads to self loving tendencies in people. They further warn that such narcissist tendencies are anti-social as it can lead to an artificial life, increased aggression amongst users and also making people less sympathetic to others feelings in non-virtual world.

The time spent on social media is on the cost of social activities. People will look at the posts, updates and pictures of their friends and acquaintances on social media but rarely will they meet in person. This also affects their family life.  

Regular use of social media is resulting in decreased value of written word, slang language is used more over internet and overall disregard for grammar and punctuation is seen. Prolonged use of internet can also have severe health implications as it may affect your eyes, and result in back and neck problems.

There is no doubt that social media is having adverse effects. But any medium by default does not have good or bad characteristics. It’s the use of those media that makes it useful or useless. If one uses social media strategically, it can do wonders.

In a recent American study, it was found out that social media can actually increase students’ learning techniques. Students comfort level on social media is more while interacting and thus they can solve their queries and discuss their subject here in a better manner. Visiting right kind of pages will only enhance their knowledge. Lot of educational videos are also found on social media that makes learning process as a much more enjoyable experience.

It is not for the first time any media is criticised. Whenever anything new comes up people are awkward about its correct usage. There were cases where critics had confidently predicted that the changes would result in total shutdown of the society at large and individuals in particular. Definitely when new concept comes, it has to make space in the existing old set up sometimes there is loss of quality in the process but we need to carefully observe that the loss here is also eventually resulting in profit there.

What is needed is the right frame of mind and appropriate approach to fight the evil and stress on the good? This changed approach may help users to stand out by using the social media platforms.

A study of public opinion on internet as public sphere: A case study of Tata Tea’s Jaago Re! Campaign

This research paper was presented at the International Conference organized by Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC), Singapore, 2011. 

ABSTRACT

Key words: Tata tea, Jaago re campaign, Public Sphere, Public Opinion, Internet

Tata tea has managed to gain success in terms of both market share and brand value over the years that appeals to large number of audiences spread over all demographics. After achieving market leadership through their initial marketing communication focused on physical and functional aspects the brand like packaging, freshness, taste, energy, etc , Tata tea decided to move on to the highest level of Maslow’s Need Hierarchy i.e. self actualization through their campaign ‘Jaago Re’ (Wake Up).

The paper seeks answers to the questions like: What has been the effect of this campaign on public and whether it is leading to generation of public opinion in the public sphere? Is this discourse leading to any meaningful conversation? Does use of Internet help in reaching maximum number of target audiences? What type of feedback is expected from these public sphere discourses?

Researcher used both Quantitative and Qualitative Content Analysis to analyze content collected from 30 videos downloaded from YouTube. The sampling technique used is purposive and convenient sampling of non-probabilistic sampling designs.

Major findings are that internet; does lead to generation of public opinion in the public sphere whether positive or negative is a secondary issue.  Such virtual public discourse is not leading in meaningful direction. Use of YouTube can be useful only in reaching to wider audiences but may not be always useful in reaching to target audiences.