Uber - throwing the Service Provider Away with the ....

I have been reading a lot of reactions on the banning of Uber in New Delhi after the unfortunate happening. I would agree that there would have been fault at Uber's end in verifying the Driver but does that mean that we will ban the service.

Let us come to the basic issue , why is suddenly that one finds these app based services becoming popular across cities in the country, first is the poor state in which our urban transport infrastructure is in. Second, is that the other formats of public transport like Auto or Cabs are very expensive and one has to rely on the whims and fancies of the drivers to reach your destination,. Anyone who has travelled in a Auto in Chennai or Bangalore will testify for that.

I was reading an article in the TOI in which the author lamented the fact that the incident had snatched away the sense of security which women use to have when one travelled through these app based services.

In terms of the verification process, we all know that how difficult it is to get a genuine verification from a authorities and the other way round too...

I think the solution does not lie is just banning these services but to reflect back on what processes can we have in place where the verification processes are more reliable and of course the overall safety levels improve....

Swachh Bharat - Onus of Success Lies with us..

Whenever we travel out most of us are struck by the cleanliness in cities likes Singapore, Seoul or a Hong Kong and come back home thinking - why are our cities dirty...

We try to console ourselves saying they are much smaller places and so easier to maintain perhaps, income levels are higher and so on....

This is where the Swachh Bharat  nitiative of Prime Minister Modi is significant, as it brings the issue of cleanliness back into focus, on the top agenda in your to-do-list. This is something which I sure do not remember happening in my life time, yes we have read about it in Gandhi Ji experiments with truth and so on,...but it is something which we read and ... Whenever I read something about Gandhi Ji the first thing which strikes me is the vision that the person had and clarity of thought ( things which he spoke about and wrote and so relevant today) ...I think in the recent years it was the “Munna Bhai” Movies which had the maximum impact on making the youngsters remember the principles of Gandhi Ji than anyone else,

Coming back to the campaign I sincerely hope we succeed at and we get our Swachh Bharat...and the onus lies with each of us, and a lot of MNCs are also eager to pitch in ....

Let us start with our offices, homes and then expand and hopefully change our habits of treating our homes sacred, but the road on which the dorr opens as the responsibility of the Munciplaity. The three cities which I spoke about in the starting also were as bad as many of our cities a few decades back, but then today …so we do have hope

Chhota Bheem & Kellogg's

Gap between Promise and Execution in Marketing I

As a marketer we spend a lot of time and energy on conceptualization - how to position, advertise the brand. The message strategy, the right celebrity for the ad... and the list is long 

But do we put enough effort on execution of what gets promised..???

By execution I will give examples, Bingo has something called Mad Angles, the product is in the shape of triangles, what happens when more than half of the pack has broken triangle? You buy an Cadbury's Bourneville chocolate and once you have moved away from the shop and start eating it you realize that the product has been refrozen. These examples are not of the serious kind which can lead to health hazards, which obviously these also have serious implications.

And coming back to the theme with which I started the post, whom would you assign the responsibility to the retailer, the distributor, or the distributor sales man who loads the packets in the morning in the vehicle or the logistics guy... 

In theory we do talk about the internal marketing where other departments are also sensitised about marketing. I will continue this post with more examples from the ecommerce domain...

Auto rickshaw in Bangalore

I think many of you when you see the title of the post will start-off with a lot of bad experiences with auto drivers in Bangalore. Many years back I use to feel that Chennai auto guys were the worst , but in the last few years the Bangalore fellows seem to have caught up with them. But this post is not about a bad experience, for a change it is about a good one !!!!!

A few months back when I was travelling I came across this auto driver (in the photo) who had a small TV installed inside the auto, meant for the passengers. He would switch it on as soon as you get on and also engage in explaining the fact that he had put it for the passengers and ensure that you enjoy the experience. Now people like these auto drivers are an exception than a rule, but then some of these kind are also around and we tend to ignore them. I thought I should do my bit by sharing my positive experience...

Is "Fear of Bacteria" under threat

I think the last decade has seen the marketers capitalize on our fear of bacteria. The USP , if I were to use the term has been used by all from the toilet cleaners to the soaps to toothpaste guys. And this has been helping the sale of these products. But if suppose some one were to turn the concept on it's head and tell the consumers that some amount of bacteria (even the bad ones) is essential for healthy growth of children the fear of bacteria will come under threat and the marketers would be a worried lot.

This theory is called "hygiene hypothesis", which essentially says that diseases affect more individuals in the modern world where hygiene is given utmost importance.The exposure of bacteria early on helps develop a better immune system. But then what happens to the "100% Bacteria Free" proposition...

Too Much of Steve Jobs??

Missing out is Pepsi to Apple.....

Understanding the customer !!!!!!

Dhoni & McDowells

disappointed by Dhoni on this....

Perhaps I was expecting too much from him, with the status he has achieved he could have always said 'No' to this surrogate ad and it wouldn’t have made a difference to the crores he would anyway make. But ....

Does season influence a marketer's mood?

With the advent of winter in the plains of north India, I was thinking how two of my marketer friends would react to this change,one looks forward to it with a wide smile and other one is looks depressed and is cursing the cold winds which are sweeping the place. Both of them are in the beverages business , but one is with soft drinks and the other one sells tea. The change of season has a different impact on the sales of both the product categories...

There are many other product categories where this shift happens, Air conditioners, you can see the sales guy dusting his stock of room heaters and getting ready to sell, the street vendors also shifting from selling of cucumbers to boiled eggs, the street side cloth shops shifting from cotton to woolen...

But what is interesting to note how the mood of a marketers also gets influenced, if you talk to my soft drinks friend he is all cheerful when the summer is at its worst, it maybe also a reflection of how involve one is in his business, and how far your job influences you..

Oct 2nd...

Social Media, A Good Video

For most of us who believe in social media the video is a reinforcement , but there are obviously a huge number which still would like to believe it is a fad or a bubble(for more on the debate check out the comments on the video on youtube, comments).

In India we are still a few years behind, so maybe it gives us a glimpse how the future would be ...as has been indicated by the TCS web 2.0 survey...

Saw the video on John Battelle's blog...

Negative fall-outs of technology

I think most if us have a difficulty in appreciating, both negative as well as positive sides of a given situation, if we are positive then it will be all positive and the same other way...

I realised this yesterday when I was talking to group of senior Bank officials of a reputed bank. They were lamenting the fact that though there are many benefits from technology like core-banking and computerisation and the customer has gained enormous amount of convenience because of the advent of ATMs and net banking , this according to them is happening at a cost. The cost is the loss of one-to-one interaction with the customer. To quote what one of the senior managers said "Today a customer can close an account at the click of a button and I might come to know about it much later". In the earlier days, if the customer wanted to close the account he would have come to the branch and spend time , and thus providing a opportunity for the banker to retain the customer. And maybe in a situation of close personal interaction chances of one identifying and solving a problem at much ealier stage is much easier.

This is not the first time that I hearing such a fear being expressed, this was also said by senior railway officials about the increasing acceptance of Internet based ticketing.

This concern is mainly from the organization's end , which fears that technology might over a period of time convert their customers into mere numbers, but on the other end many customers are becoming uneasy with this lack of human interaction. Maybe this is one the reasons why many erstwhile pure-play companies like makemytrip.com and shaadi.com are coming up with physical offices and interaction point where one can go a actually talk to a person....

Fallen Tree & Implications for Marketers

We had a lot of wind and rain a couple of days back, called "Andhi" in this part of the country and as with every year there were trees uprooted and other damage ... In the park in front of my house there was a reasonably big tree which also fell during this and i observed the tree only after it fell, before that though it was there I had never observed it. Though it might seem strange but this kind of oversight or not seeing something which is there happens quite often, and the marketers also tend to suffer because of that, though this happens more in the case of services than products.

How many of us notice when the service in a restaurant is good, we take it for granted that it has to be that way, ...basic services like power which runs the computers and AC in my room, mobile services, the list goes on ... and a customer also develops a blind spot over time for any additional service or a new feature , over a very short period of time the new service or a feature is accepted as normal and if you want to surprise the customer you have to think about something new...

Life for a marketer is becoming more and more tough..

Learning Sales From Movies

Was looking for a sales clip to use in my sales management class, found a few clips from movies which I thought would are worth sharing , need to think which of these could be used in the classroom context,

First one is from one of my best movie, In Pursuit of happiness



Second is the clip from a sales meeting , goose bumps...



The last one is a phone sales demo

Cusine the Missing Component Tourism Promotion

Discussing diversity in India is like peeling an onion...

Today I was thinking about how our food habits differ across the country. It will not be wrong to say that food taste and habits change with every 100 kms that one travels. And most of us look forward to trying out the regional specality whenever we visit another region.

Be it the ubiquitous "Gujarati Thali" when one is on Gujarat or the fact that a visit to Bhuwaneshwar is not complete without a meal at "Dalma" resturants. The list is endless,

MTR in Bangalore
Sarvanna Bhawan in Chennai
Thunda Kabbab in Lucknow
Paradise Birayani in Hyderabad
......

But what surprises me is that one has to dig for this sort of info through talking to local people , though this information should be an integral part of the tourism websites and tourist itinerary...

A visit to the websites of a few of these city does not show any sign of these details ???

This would actually go a long way in promoting tourism in many of these cities and more than that they would give a more holistic experience to the tourist and make his visit more memorable....

Apple and Steve Jobs

Many companies tend to be driven by vision of individuals, especially in their initial years. Akio Morita with Sony, Microsoft and Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Oracle, though it tends to add a lot of value as the aura and charm of the individual rubs on to the company and the brand. But it  can also have some negative fall outs....... 

Actually in the list of company and individuals first name should have been that of ' Apple and Steve Jobs'. Today success apple is intrinsically linked to Steve Jobs, in fact the connection of the individual and the company fortunes is so strong that we can see the share prices of apple tumbling after the news that Steve Jobs has taken a six month medical leave. The reasons is that the series of successful products from apple stable i pod, i phone and the turn around of the company have been attributed so much to Steve Jobs that his absence is being taken as seen as a sure indicator that the company would not be able keep coming up with block-buster products at the same pace as it could do when Steve Jobs was around..

Whenever we have a talk about market-driving companies we cite the example of Steve Jobs, because of his ability to lead innovation in the market, and create product categories. People have asked me the utility of the typical new product development process which tries to capture the consumer exiting needs and develop products in the context of an individual driven process. My reasoning has been that if one is not able to institutionalise the process then we will come into issue of the process being associated with an individual that his absence would be seen as impacting the fortunes of the company....

Lot of blogger have aritten about this incident, link

Twitter is active

Had started with twitter sme time back, but then forgot. But now onwards plan to keep it updated. Put a link on the blog too..

An interesting product ...

I saw this ad in business today and could'nt ressit sharing it with my readers. Made me think on how much has been done in a seemingly basic product....

All-Women Car

Whenever i see products like a All Women Car, An exclusive shampoo for men..., it makes me think are we pushing things a little too far, though some of my reader have disagreed with me when I had written earlier on men's shampoo issue, but the proposed launch of All Women Car has again raked-up the issue in my mind....

A excerpt from the article "The car, with electronic parking aids and a jack making it easier to change a wheel, will be painted in soft "feminine" colours and include interior design features aimed specifically at women,"

To read more on the All-Women car, link

The company - Iran Khodro