Dear Keith Riggs, thanks for nicely researched article that can enlighten consumer, advertisement companies and seller or manufacturer.
I am an Indian living in India which is quite a complex country - by number of ethnicities, number of religions, number of cultures and mentionably a lot of contrast - on the one hand India successfully carries out its space program and on the other hand there is a large number of semi-naked (and even totally naked) hindu religion hermits who can be sen congregating on banks of river Ganga at different places for certain religious practices to vanish in Himalayas for rest of the time. India is world’s largest manufacturer of ultramodern Vaccines and at the same time it has a treasure of natural medicines (herbs & ashes of various substances) and Yoga (total and permanent cure from special body postures and methods of breathing.
In a place named Haridwar in Uttarakhand (name of a province in North close to foot hills of Himalayas) there is an enterprise named “PATANJALI AYURVED LIMITED” that manufactuers Herbal Medicines and teaches nature cure and Yoga (It also runs an educational institution that covers class of teaching starting from kindergarten to post-graduation and covers teaching from basic indian values and cultural roots modern subjects. In order to get an idea about this venture one may visit the following Link:
www.patanjaliayurved.org
The reason of mentioning the above is to highlight one uniqueness of this enterprise. The uniqueness if that it doesn’t advertise its products in conventional manner. All that its Chief, Swamy Ramdev, does if that he appears personally on a TV Channel named “India TV” just for 30 minutes once from morning 8.00 am to 8.30 am and then again in the evening from 4.30 pm to 5.00 pm and during these 30 minutes he mostly teaches “DIY of Natural Medicines, plus Patanjali Ayurveda products and body postures and methods of breathing”.
The beauty is that the said enterprise is minting money without any substantial expense on advertising. The money saved by the company is used to subsidise the goods that are sold as its products. This model of advertisement can be called “Word-of-mouth Advertising”.
This method is proving to be highly effective.
I thought of bringing this unique business model to your kind notice.
