In our previous blog, we carried details of a news report, stating that the Zoozoo creator Vodafone Essar intends to release official Zoozoo merchandise with the help of leading retail chain Shopper’s Stop.

Branded character merchandise is a territory not many retailers want to tread upon because of the peculiar market conditions. One of them is intellectual property issues. Customer care associate & chief executive for Shoppers Stop, Govind Shrikhande, elaborated that character merchandising is rather easy to copy. There isn’t much control over violation of IP rights.

According to him, film merchandise has a shelf life of roughly two to three months whereas character merchandising is more challenging, particularly if the official merchandise is costly, thereby prompting the demand for their cheaper knock-offs. He estimates that the branded merchandise market is in the region of around Rs 1,050 crore.

Character merchandise has worked successfully in case of the Disney and other you can make your brother, both a cricket and Zoozoo fan, happy with a ravishing Zoozoo rakhi like SpongeBob, SquarePants, Ben 10, and Hanuman etc. The official Zoozoo fan club page on Facebook has over 3 lakh fans. Such branded merchandise works well for brand promotion. It reinforces the image of the brand.

E-commerce site Indiangiftsportal.com stocks products that feature the Zoozoos. Its MD Manan Sharma claims that his efforts to get an official license for Zoozoo merchandise failed. But he is not worried about infringement of IP rights? According to him, they are simply making the Zoozoos popular so there shouldn’t be a problem?

On the other hand, online merchandiser Myntra Designs Ltd has been a tad more cautious. Their creative designers contribute their own ideas and the site has rejected several Zoozoos based T-shirt designs owing to copyright issues.

Irrespective of pros and cons of the debate, the good part is that you can make your brother, both a cricket and Zoozoo fan, happy with a ravishing Zoozoo rakhi.  

Tags: corporate gifts companies, Cheap corporate gifts, Best business gifts, Corporate gifting India, gifting etiquette, Business Gifting
Corporate gifting, , gifting to clients, low cost gifts, Worst gifts

Bookmark to:

This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 9:09 am and is filed under Gifting On Occasions, Tips, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.