Tuesday, April 20, 2004
The media’s media
I’m reading Faster (#), James Gleick’s excellent chronicle of humankind’s 20th century obsession with time. The book was written in 1999 and therefore misses the Internet almost completely (Gleick pays scant attention to boom-time hoopla). Gleick has however rekindled my interest in understanding the relationship between media and consumers.
The Internet is a bad place for this sort of study: too few users, too little (Indian) media presence, no clear lines binding media and consumers to geographical proximity and associates (culture, society, etc.). It is of course useful for other things like community studies, but I’m not interested in that right now.
I’m therefore looking offline, in either print or television. We don’t have a local equivalent to Folio: magazine and Pradyuman Maheshwari’s late, lamented Mediaah! was more watchdog than study. The information I seek is common knowledge to media planners and editorial boards; hopefully, their insight is also available to the general public.
Current candidates: A&M magazine, AgencyFAQs and MagIndia (but websites are unusable without RSS feeds).
Can you folks recommend anything?
The Internet is a bad place for this sort of study: too few users, too little (Indian) media presence, no clear lines binding media and consumers to geographical proximity and associates (culture, society, etc.). It is of course useful for other things like community studies, but I’m not interested in that right now.
I’m therefore looking offline, in either print or television. We don’t have a local equivalent to Folio: magazine and Pradyuman Maheshwari’s late, lamented Mediaah! was more watchdog than study. The information I seek is common knowledge to media planners and editorial boards; hopefully, their insight is also available to the general public.
Current candidates: A&M magazine, AgencyFAQs and MagIndia (but websites are unusable without RSS feeds).
Can you folks recommend anything?
basrya — Apr 20, 2004 7:19:38 AM — # ↩
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Apr 20, 2004 7:58:16 AM — # ↩
- Are short on time and therefore want to shop everything in one place,
- Have a car to carry their purchases, or a friend to hold the bags in the rear seat,
- Can find parking space, and
- Can afford the higher rates due to the cost of infrastructure.
I'm not surprised Indian retailers are still struggling to find the "right formula".basrya — Apr 20, 2004 8:41:58 AM — # ↩
there's still a very unique set of people who flock to multiplexes and even though prices are low (there's a plex in Ahmedabad which charges 20 bucks for an English movie in the morning slot), consumers have a set perception and its very difficult to break that.
The Indian consumer has an unique mindset, cracking which will surely require 'the formula'
amoghavarsha — Apr 20, 2004 5:05:36 PM — # ↩