S Anand

Packaging

April 12, 2006 / Business realities / 1 Comment

Packaging can make a huge difference to products. It really hit me when I saw this bottle of Heinz’s ketchup. My two big problems with normal ketchup bottles are: (a) the sauce spills to the side of the bottle and sticks to the cap, and (b) it’s tough to pour the last bits of sauce — you have to hit the bottle a lot.

Heinz Inverted Ketchup

Now, I didn’t know I had these problems. But when I saw this bottle, it hit me. You keep the bottle upside down — so it’s easy to pour the last bits of sauce. And they way the nozzle valve is designed, the sauce doesn’t stick to the cap. Perfect! Since then, I don’t buy any other ketchup bottle. Even if I WANT ketchup, I don’t buy it unless I get this bottle. Packaging made be brand loyal. (Caveat: I’m not REALLY brand loyal. I’d buy any ketchup with this packaging. But only Heinz has it right now.)

The same thing with honey. The same packaging with honey gives me a third advantage. I can drink a bit of honey directly by holding up the bottle over my mouth and squeezing it. Plus, I don’t need a spoon. Because of this, my consumption of honey has shot up to 1 bottle of honey every month. Further, I have started spreading honey over ice cream these days. Note: packaging changed my eating pattern.

So, impressed by all this, I wandered around superstores, exploring the innovations in packaging (mainly in food). I will shortly blog about that. In the meantime, here are some innovative packages introduced around when Heinz’s inverted ketchup was.

The Personal MBA

April 7, 2006 / Top 10 lists / Leave a Comment

The Personal MBA. John Kaufman says reading (and practicing) these 42 books should be as good as any MBA (and that an MBA is, perhaps excessively, expensive). Some of these books are worth a read in any case.

Master Yourself

Manage Your Life and Work

Learn the Fundamentals

Strategic Thinking

The Only Thing Constant is Change

Masters of Management

The Finest Minds in Business

Dollars on the Books

Numbers and Negotiations

Operational Effectiveness

Form and Function

Project Management and Marketing

Do Your Own Thing

Speak Your Mind

The Delicate Art of Human Relations

Sell, Sell, Sell!

Economics and Worldviews

Businesses, Past and Present

Rules and Morals

Analyze This

Voices of Experience

Search queries to my site

April 6, 2006 / How I do things / 5 Comments

On a related note, 60% of the search queries that lead to my site this year were Calvin and Hobbes quotes. “i can’t help but wonder what kind of desperate straits would drive a man to invent this thing.” topped the list (Calvin referring to a yo-yo), with i always catch these trick questions following closely.

People searching for Excel related stuff were next (20%): excel indirect(address(, row() excel offset address and the like.

A few were also looking for me by name or school (10%).

The last 10% ranged from the puzzling to the bizarre, including these gems.

IMDB Top 250 outliers

April 4, 2006 / How I do things / 9 Comments

On the IMDb top 250, you normally see a correlation between the number of votes and the rating for a movie. Better rated movies are more watched. The outliers are interesting.

IMDb: Correlation between number of votes and rating

The movies that are popular despite not having a high rating are:

I can understand why The Sixth Sense, Pirates of the Caribbean and especially The Matrix are on this list — geeks would have watched these and voted on IMDb, though their voting need not have been high. But why are Gladiator and Sixth Sense on that list?

Movies that are highly rated, but not as popular are:

Seven Samurai and The Good, The Bad, The Ugly probably didn’t get the votes they deserve because they’re written in their Japanese and Mexican names on IMDb. I hadn’t seen them for a long time for the same reason. As for The Godfather, I personally think it’s just overrated. But Rear Window? That’s a surprise. Hitchcock thriller with all the classic elements…

Another correlation is between the rating and the year of the movie. Early movies get lower ratings than recent movies. Technique could be the reason, but I doubt it. In any case, some movies stand out of their time.

IMDb: Correlation between rating and year of movie

I haven’t seen Metropolis or M. But among the others, I think Citizen Kane is the one that deserves to stand out, if only for portraying the anti-hero, and for not having a happy ending. The Shawshank Redemption was a bit of a surprise. Few people that I know have heard of it. And yet, there it is, right on top.