Girl, uninterrupted
They exist on the margins even within their families in small town India.
Patriarchy has defined what they can and must do.
But somewhere within that shell, things are stirring. And it is important to see that change in progress.
That's the focus of Gaytri Sapru's deep dive research project into the minds of girls largely ignored by the mainstream.
She and her team at Folk Frequency are able to connect disparate dots, something marketers of all stripes will benefit from. When they listen to what the girls are saying about their own future.
In the late 90s, Cavin Kare launched a brand called Fairever against the behemoth that was Fair & Lovely.
For decades, Fair & Lovely had coasted on the positioning of Fairness for Marriage. And grabbed a 95% market share.
Fairever made it about confidence, about the little victories that young girls then were managing. The timing was perfect.
It resonated with the girls because they weren't out to change the world, only widen their own horizons.
The advertising never touched upon marriage, only on the girl's dreams and personal triumphs. In just a matter of months, the brand managed a 30% market share in Andhra Pradesh where it was first launched.
Fair & Lovely did not sit still. They went into overdrive and blurred the positioning divide Fairever had managed to create.
They were able to put their marketing might and resources to strategic use and outspend the nascent brand that threatened their dominance.
The lesson here is not to be caught napping.
The young women are clear about who they relate to and why. The people they worship may not be role models for urban and educated young Indians.
But they will make their presence felt as they transit from this phase in their lives.
The time to catch a trend is before everyone is talking about it. At the groundswell, not when the wave is breaking.
Are we afraid of being wrong?
What's worse, we have problems admitting it.
Learning is not an easy process. Every radical concept we learn challenges our existing assumptions and beliefs.
Let's take digestion - the process of breaking down food in the body and absorbing nutrients.
Hardly radical and in our minds, we think we know exactly what it means.
We learn about the basic process in school and doctors learn a lot more about what can go wrong and about how to diagnose problems.
Prakash Venglat, a plant biologist had a different realisation when he first went to a medical exhibition and saw a cadaver opened up. Practically all the digestion happens in the large intestines and the body knows or learns to break down everything we put into it.
But plants have no visible organs - so how they digest food and grow?
That question consumed him and began a journey into the evolution of plants and how they do everything from fixing food and the atmosphere with no sense of consciousness and deliberation - at least the way we understand it.
They are the builders of ecosystems and perform complex chemical reactions that we have little knowledge of.
So, how do plants adapt to different habitats and conditions? They know when to germinate and when the environment is conducive to growth, even though we don't know precisely how they do it.
This post started with a definition of the word digest. And we assumed we understood it perfectly.
It's still about breaking down food. But plants have evolved in a completely different way to how we have - and their success has been our sustenance.
We don't have to worry about being wrong - only about closing our minds to new possibilities.
When good ideas stumble
Product Hunt began with a simple premise in 2013.
A community-based website allowing makers and marketers to launch digital products or services.
The idea was to build a base of real users and launching on Product Hunt was free.
It was a way to test if the concept had traction and gauge the level of interest people had in the product. Like Reddit, users could upvote products they liked and increase traction.
When YCombinator invested and endorsed the concept, it took wing.
It became the watering hole for startups looking for early traction. And soon, the leaderboard of the Top 10 products became the list to be in.
In the early days, there was sense of genuine products getting to the top.
Then came the guides, strategies and ways in which startups looking to launch needed to follow.
The number of products being launched everyday was enormous and finding the top 10 became a highly charged game.
Product Hunt built a massive email list with tens of thousands of subscribers and they got a daily dose of the latest launches in the market.
And then, the fervour gave way to a sense that this list was no longer reliable. The best products of the day seemed to be no better than hundreds of their competitors.
The upvotes looked manufactured, as if the bots and reviews were gamed, not what people actually felt.
It's hard to see where things went wrong.
One of the comments on Hacker News states the problem in clear and succinct terms:
Product Hunt was once a curated collection of interesting new products, shared to a small newsletter list of enthusiasts.
Today, it has become a pyramid scheme of paid upvotes, shill accounts, and rampant spam. And nobody is talking about it.
Looks like the old gatekeepers had a purpose!