Who’s the winner?

Not very long ago, a philosopher once said, “When one standpoint gets to an extreme, sooner or later it will fall to the other extreme”. This logic didn’t make more sense to me for a while. But, with time, I realized, it works. And now, after this year’s Valentine’s Day (V-Day), I realized this logic works very well.

No matter, which part of the world you live in; you surely would have seen the visuals of some hooligans displaying their bad behavior in the city of Mangalore, Karnataka, a few days ago. Later, these hooligans made their act look and sound as a deed of bravery and protective one. Our dear media sold this news probably with little addition, subtraction, multiplication and division!

So, what was this bunch of people trying to do, on the forthcoming V-Day? What message they tried to pass down to the common people, like me and you? You don’t require a brain of Rocket Scientist to give the answer to this question… Do you? By selecting a blasphemous issue of V-Day celebration, a lot of hue and cry was created. These people made their intention of disrupting the planned celebration very clear. And what was the impact of all this on the society. Firstly, there was a divided opinion amongst people as to who was right and who was wrong! Secondly people got more determined to celebrate V-Day and visit pubs.

The impact was a big one… A fairly large number of people celebrated V-Day in their own way. Most of them celebrated it with greets and gift articles from multinational galleries, etc. Then there was the popular act of sending the “Pink Chaddis” to the people who were opposed to the celebration. As a result, the past V-Day celebration was the biggest ever in India. An American company estimated the expenses in India on account of V-Day, on gifts, restaurants, pubs, etc to approximately Rs. 50 crore. Remember, this is not the best of years to spend money, as the grey clouds of recession are existing all over the world.

Now, let’s give our brain some work out. Imagine I am entrepreneur. So, my main objective in this recession hit year would be to increase my sales. How do I do that? The main way to promote any sale is by working on human psychology (ask any MBA holder in Marketing, if you don’t trust me). If I am aware of the logic, that by pushing one stand to extreme, sooner or later it will fall to the other extreme; I can control my prospective customer’s mind. It’s simple, instead of spending money on marketing, distribute it amongst some jobless people (you see there are quite a few jobless people in our country). Ask them to do something, which makes people feel that they would not be allowed to celebrate V-Day. As a result, out of more curiosity, more people would go out and celebrate (spend money).

I guess this method works wonders and can be applied in our day to day life as well. Regarding the V-Day, I would say neither the common people nor the extremist ended up as winners. The unanimous winners for me were pub owners, gift-gallery owners, and not to forget the garment manufacturers (thanks to the Pink Chaddi campaign). And if you are one of those who considered V-Day as impious event, and didn’t end up spending big bucks, I should admit, you outsmarted a good business strategy!