Dead but still living

Mortality is a myth. Nothing EVER dies. Osama may be gone but is he really dead? Hell, no! He’s just been sent on a forced sabbatical to purgatory. In all probability, he’ll visit us soon as Hurricane Harami. You think I am kidding, don’t you?

The fact of life is everything keeps coming back. The colleague whom you gladly bade farewell to - will return to haunt you as a client! Well, such is the cycle of karma. Whether you like it or not, it does a wicked about-turn, and lands up at your doorstep, unannounced, like that pesky little encyclopaedia salesman!

The positive way of looking at it is, if the theory of Grand Recycling of Karma were true, there must be some hope for the good guys who just vanished from this face of earth without getting their due. Since brands have a soul too, the karmic reincarnation possibilities could throw up some fascinating comeback scenarios for dead brands that still live in our collective consciousness. Especially brands like Solidaire (French word for ‘the bond’).

An eighties synonym for hi-tech televisions in South India, Solidaire can easily pass off today as a mobile phone maker. I am almost certain that if some marketer puts his muscle behind this brand, it has the legs to give Micromax a run for its money.

Illustrated Weekly is another brand, worthy of a rebirth. With its lovely mix of humour, mind sport, scoops, comics and ballsiness, this magazine is any day more readable than the opinionated Outlook and the insipid India Today. Methinks it will be a runaway hit if it hits the newsstands as a tabloid.

Forhans (named after the dentist Richard Forhan) was a brand buried many times over in India. With its super strong equity in oral care, I reckon, it has the DNA to self-mutate into a chewing gum that cleans your teeth!

Likewise TVS 50, the two-wheeler that carried our nation’s ambitions for a decade, can be reinvented as a Segway type bike for the elderly (over 50). All these ideas are way better than flogging the same old dead horses. What say you?