Targetted beauty

August 28th, 2007 • Culture Briefings

A woman’s vanity case and her medicine cabinet are crowded places – with fancy tubes and bottles of all shapes and sizes clamouring for her attention.  The American women spends an average of of $12K to $15K a year on beauty products and beauty treatments and with teh plethora of products flooding the market, there’s always room for something niche, something targetted, something overlooked. Signal micro-segmented and highly targetted beauty products. Targetted by demographics, lifestyles and climates among other segments.

Mama Mio, one such new company, produces a highly targetted line of products to a highly targetted group of women: pregnant women and recent moms.  I think Mama Mio has very cleverly created products for specific needs of pregnant women (itchy skin, body aches, toning etc) (It helps that they don’t take themselves too seriously. Their irreverent product names (that are also achingly obvious) Boob Tube, the Tummy Toner and Stretch Mark Minimizer set the tone for the brand.)

I cant gaurantee whether the product works, but the brand will atleast be picked up from the department store counter and make it’s way to the famed medicine cabinet- of that, I am sure.

Buy em’ some maps please

August 28th, 2007 • 3 comments Culture Briefings, On my mind...

I’m a cultural misfit almost anywhere I am so I don’t sterotype, but instances like these make it very very hard to not follow the herd. 4Million + views in over 3 days.

Social networking etiquette

August 14th, 2007 • 4 comments Social Media

Ever since facebook.com opened it’s doors to the general public, the original inhabitants of the space (a.k.a former and current college students like me) have been dealing with some really important etiquette rules. For example, when you add someone on linkedin – do you also add them on facebook? Linkedin is like inviting yourself to someone’s office – fairly acceptable but facebook feels like inviting yourself to someone’s home- not so sure if that’s so acceptable.

Also how do you respond when colleagues, former bosses or people you simply admire and want to maintain a professional relationship with, add you on facebook? Can you realy decline, "Uhh – no thank you. I’m not sure I want you seeing my wall." Or my photographs. Or following my updates on twitter.

Facebook was a sanctuary – not anymore. It has become sadly become yet another social front that has to be maintained. My friends have become used to messaging me privately instead of writing on my wall as have I learnt to return the respect. Writings on walls are deleted in no second and for current college students who have some 300 plus photographs of themselves on facebook – I’d delete them before I launch on my job-hunt. Or atleast make them invisible. It’s like being found on a crime-scene — so many tracks to cover, hide and sometimes, create new ones if necessary.

I’m no Master, but I’ve figured out some pointers that, hopefully will help you as they helped me maintain a dual existence on facebook.

1. Always have a limited profile, but have it with just enough (general) information on it so that the person doesn’t know it’s a limited profile.
2. Try to not add people upfront – have them add you. This will automatically let you grant them access to limited or full profile and help you avoid the embarrasment in case you forget to limit someone while adding them. If you want them to notice you – send them a private message and hopefully, they’ll get the hint and add you.
3. This might be a tough act to follow but sadly it has come down to it: be careful about the photos you post on facebook and your photos that your friends post. De-tag yourself from photos your friends post so you won’t be easily found. Limit access to your photo albums under limited profile views.
4. Don’t twitter too much on facebook – really, if you are having a sucky Monday morning – your facebook followers don’t always need to know that. Esp. if your current boss is on facebook.