Monday, October 29, 2012

The Strategist Quiz (#277) Gaurav Sri Krishna / New Delhi Oct 29, 2012, 00:33 IST


  1. The variety of a particular agricultural produce gets its name from the fact that its high yields supposedly allow growers to pay their debts. Name it and mention the region/country where it is grown.
     
  2. The CEO of this organisation got battered in a mugging incident a couple of years back. He was forced to handover a $11,000 watch. Post the incident, he called the company that makes that brand of watches and rest is history. Identify the person, the brand, and the resultant of his call.
     
  3. This brand has variants named, Napoleon, Marco, Voyager and Royal. Its base line is No Gas only _____. Complete the baseline and name the brand.
     
  4. What are gravity phones and name the first Indian brand to make them?
     
  5. Expand the acronym DAGMAR and mention when and who coined it?
     
  6. Mohammed Ali and Jimmy Connors were this brand’s spokesmen. At one point in time it launched a budget range variant of its product with the number 33 because it contained 33% of the fragrance of the original product. The company that introduced this brand is named after a Russian family. Name the brand and the company that first introduced it.
     
  7. If one is tracking the share prices of infrastructure companies DPTP, GMR Group, India Bulls and DLF, what is the colloquial term being used for them?
     
  8. Which brand’s baseline when translated means “The Car” in English?
     
  9. Who said this “Many people use research as a drunk uses a lamppost – for support and not illumination”?
     
  10. Identify this European luxury brand from its logo.

Answers to last week's quiz (#276


  1. The founder of this company launched this brand in the 1890s in the northwest of UK. He wanted to make it affordable for people living in the overcrowded slums of Liverpool to protect themselves from the spread of cholera. Name the brand?Lifebuoy soap. William Lever, who founded Lever Brothers, one of the forerunners of Unilever, launched Lifebuoy soap in the northwest of England in 1894. He wanted to produce an affordable soap that people living in the overcrowded slums of Liverpool could use to protect themselves from the spread of cholera. He saw a business opportunity in a social issue
     
  2. The ______. With a delivery like a brick through a plate glass window, the American CIA swear by them. Fill in the blank with the brand name and mention film from which this dialogue is taken.Walther PPK 7.65 mm. It’s a dialogue from the movie Dr.No (1962)
     
  3. Name the founder of an Indian business group who was always known as “King of Coal”?Karam Chand Thapar, founder of the Thapar group. His first business was that of coal which he operated based at Calcutta.
     
  4. Link a company who is enlightening the TERA era with MTNL and what do you arrive at?The Lofty tab. Digital tablets made by Teracom and launched by MTNL.
     
  5. Some of the constituents of this brand are - Lemon peel from Spain, Coriander seeds from Morocco, Liquorice from China, root of the angelica plant from Dresden Germany, Cassia bark from Indonesia. It gets its name from an item gifted by actor Douglas Fairbanks to his actress wife Mary Pickford. Identify the brand?The Bombay Sapphire Gin distributed by Bacardi. Its name originates from the gin’s popularity in India during the British Raj and the sapphire in question is the Star of Bombay. It is a 182 carat (36.4 g) cabochon-cut star tar sapphire originating from Sri Lanka. The violet-blue gem was given to silent film actress Mary Pickford by her husband, Douglas Fairbanks. She bequeathed it to the Smithsonian Institution.
     
  6. Which hospitality group has recently launched a new brand which is the Urdu/Hindi word for personal style?
    Hyatt Andaz. The first Andaz Hotel was opened in California.
     
  7. What is common to Dolomitenmann, one of the toughest extreme sport relays on the planet that is held yearly in September in the East Tyrolean, or Dolomite Mountains of Austria, and a wakeboarding exhibition held at the 1,500-year-old Basilica Cistern in Istanbul Turkey?Initiatives supported by the Energy drink brand Red Bull.
     
  8. Hon Hai Precision Industry Company is better known as?Foxconn Electronics.
     
  9. For which brand was actor Salman Khan its first brand ambassador?Suzuki Motorcycle India.
     
  10. Identify the company from its logo.
    Indus Towers, a JV between Vodafone Essar (42%), Bharti Group (42%) and Aditya Birla Telecom Limited (16%) and is India’s leading mobile towers company. The company, which operates in 16 telecom circles across India, provides services to all telecom operators and other wireless service providers Nadu.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

he Strategist Quiz (#275) Gaurav Sri Krishna / New Delhi Oct 15, 2012, 00:11 IST


  1. Where would one find these products and why? Gorilla balls vitamin enriched malt candy, Touch of Yoghurt Shampoo, Northwoods Egg Coffee, Male Chauvinist “awfully arrogant” aftershave?
     
  2. Who took out a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal with the lines “Welcome, IBM. Seriously and why?”
     
  3. A product which film star Jeetendra endorsed some years ago is being revived with Malaika Arora as its new brand ambassador. Name the brand and the company that owns it
     
  4. Which company’s corporate mission or objective is stated as “Creating Kando Together”? Also mention what Kando means
     
  5. What are the three-inch Dorothy, and the two-inch Dotty?
     
  6. This brand has editions of its products inspired by the Hindu Gods — Lord Balaji, Lord Ganesh and Lord Shiva. It was established in 1915 and was named after the pseudonym of a leading Russian artist then. The artist’s pen name when translated into English meant “pencil”. Name the founder and the brand.
     
  7. What is the first-of-its-kind initiative that is linked to Yamaha’s scooter brand Ray launched in India recently?
     
  8. Who made this statement “I could prove God, statistically”?
     
  9. What is the term used to describe assorted orthodoxies that govern the thinking of key enterprise decision makers? It is the main means a company uses to make a profit. It includes the cultural norms and beliefs that the company espouses that is deeply held, widely shared, and rooted in the behaviour of the company. It also has a negative connotation when arrogance and resistance to change set in
     
  10. Identify both the images and establish the connection between them. An Indian connection.

Answers to last week's quiz (#274)


  1. This top ranked company got its name as a result of a search for a word that was meaningless and without connotation in any language. 10,000 names were produced by a computer which was finally reduced to 234 by extensive opinion polls amongst 7000 people and finally 6 names were short listed. Further these 6 names were examined for meaninglessness in more than100 languages. Name the company. The Fortune No.1 ranked company Exxon. It is now known as Exxon Mobil after it merged with Mobil in 1999.
     
  2. What was launched with the proclamation “as the friend of The Honest Financier and the Respectable Broker”?The Financial Times of London was launched in 1888, as the friend of The Honest Financier and the Respectable Broker.
     
  3. Connect the Please Touch museum in Philadelphia and the creator of the price tag in organised retail and arrive at the name of a person.Johan Wanamaker, America’s most innovative retailer invented the price tag and also the concept of department stores in 1861. His 8th floor toy department had another first in retailing history: a monorail for the kids that traveled around the entire department, camera dept, piano and organ dept. The monorail car is a feature at Philadelphia's Please Touch Museum now.
     
  4. Which brand ran the Be Idiotsafe campaign? Ceat Tyres
     
  5. What is common to Winston Churchill, The Rothschild family and the Gurkhas of Nepal?Cigars. Churchill and Rothschild are types of Parejo cigars. The Gurkha is a cigar brand. These were first made by the British soldiers from the local tobacco when they occupied the Indian sub continent. The fondness of the British for the legendary Nepalese fighters inspired them to name their cigars “Gurkhas. Currently an Indian K Hansotia owns the brand and it is manufactured in the US.
     
  6. This brand was truly born when the founder observed that his twin daughters suffering from cerebral palsy, were finding it difficult in gripping a pen or a pencil due to lack of co-ordination and undeveloped muscles. He went on to invent a writing instrument which is now a popular brand. Name the founder and the brand. The Yoro pen was invented in Taiwan by Bao Shen Liu. It is named after his daughters Yoyo and Roro.
     
  7. The history of this product can be traced back to a recipe created by the Roman chef Apicius, in which “a thick paste of fine wheat flour was boiled and spread out on a plate. When it had dried and hardened it was cut up and then fried until crisp, then served with honey and pepper.” Name it. Biscuits.
     
  8. Which brand’s loyalty program is christened GoodLife?Hero Motorcorp
     
  9. What is the term used to describe an advertising campaign in which the advertisements are shown infrequently over a period of time?Drip Campaign
     
  10. Identify this comic character and the NASDAQ listed company that created it. A series of comics related to this character are published online in various languages embedded with stories that have elements of its products.Captian Zilog created by Zilog Inc the microprocessor company