Marketing via controversy

The latest book on Jinnah by Mr Jaswant Singh has created a lot of controversy. The subsequent expulsion of the politician from his parent party for the last 30 years and the huge cry over “how can someone hold the national leaders responsible for partition?” were all part of the controversy.

But the point that made me curious was the fact that the book was written with a purpose of being sold and was it making progress in that front. I tried to find out and it seems that the book is being sold like hot cakes in the last week!!! So I knew it – the controversy is definitely going to make Mr Jaswant Singh rich!!

The term used in “Controversial marketing”!! It is short term and lasts for couple of weeks..and it gives immediate results with higher eyeballs and subsequent customers!

Now, can we think that the author had a real marketing mind for his book to bring out this controversy by intention?? You never know:-) But then I guess, the controversy could have become more than expected in the sense that he was expelled from his long term bread giving firm [I mean political party:-)]!!!

Mahatma Gandhi as a brand!

I happened to read an article which described Mahatma Gandhi as one of the best brands globally still. It is true given the fact that he was able to do the following -

1. Message Awareness – During his time, each and every Indian was aware of the mesasge of independance. Even the enemies knew this, even though they tried to suppress this message spread. Such was the awareness level that the more they tried to suppress, the more stronger the message became.

2. Adoption – Mahatma was able to convince many a folks to adopt the message, evident from the fact that many of the famous personalities tried to help the cause of independence and felt proud about it.

3. Trial – The message of self sustainability was adopted and tried out by the masses – the Dandi satyagraha and the adoption of charka to symbolize the unanimity in the struggle is an example

4. Usage – The constant struggle taken up by the masses culminating in independance using the principles of non-violence and simplicity is mind blowing.

Mahatma Gandhi is said to be very clever in sending the right messages to the british and to the world regarding the objectives of his mission. I believe that this unidirectional objective and flexibility in messaging makes him a brand invaluable!!

But I wish he could have send the right message and went through the right Adoption and Usage methods in the case of partitioning of India!!

Product Adoption cycle

As a sales and marketing personnel your ultimate goal is to get the customer buying your product and continue using it over a long period of time.

So ideally you would follow the steps as below -

1. Awareness – This phase will allow the customer to know that there is a product or a service that is available for him and that will satisfy some of his unmet needs or the met needs in a better manner.

2. Trial – The customer would want to take a trial to understand whether the understanding he has about the product is correct or not. This could be through actual trial, through recommendations from sources who have used it, through research done online or by talking to others or just by observing the product.

3. The customer decides to purchase the service or product. This stage is only a beginning for the long lasting relationship the firm can start with the customer for 2 reasons -
a. A satisfied customer will continue using the product over and over again.
b. A brand trust developed which will help the firm to market its new or other products to this customer in an easier manner. A good experience with a brand tends to convince the customer that whatever the firm promises can be trusted and hence the purchase cycle gets shortened a lot. Also word of mouth publicity that the firm gets is also beneficial.

Market research techniques are available to measure the parameters in each of these phases and helps the firm to identify the barriers to their success in the market.

Now, what if we have all the players in the market following the scientific methods to come to decisions regarding how to play in the market?? no issues..the ultimate beneficiary is the customer himself!! or the firm that employs the best vendor for doing this market research wins over the rest:-))

VC tips

A nice article on “entrepreneur” vs “VC” relationship..

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124781609763756921.html

Jackfruit Festival 2009

A piece of news

“Kenlove, fruit farmer and photojournalist from Hawaii, inaugurated the Jackfruit Festival-2009 at the Uravu auditorium at Thrikkaippatta in the district on Friday.”

This festival happened in Kerala. In the inuagaral function, Mr Kenlove said that the western countries are big markets for jackfruits. Currently Philippines caters to the demand from the US, but then more suppliers are required to satisfy the demand and India has a great opportunity in doing so, provided the farmers are able to assure consistency and quality of value-added jackfruit products. He also highlighted the nutritional value of jackfruit.

Now I remembers the days when each and every house in kerala had jackfruits in abundance and everybody used to relish the season. But the trend is on decline in the recent years. People do not really consider jack fruit farming as anything of prestige and mostly convert the land to some better use.

Now since a westerner has said that jackfruit is nutritious and have got huge potential in the western markets, somebody will take pride in farming land for jackfruits!

Retain the valuable customers

I wanted to ship some stuffs from kerala to maharashtra. So I headed to see the carrier options I have. Checked VRL Logistics. They gave a quote for Rs1500. For door delivery they wanted to charge an extra of Rs 1000. [So a total of Rs 2500]

I went on to Indian Railways. The quote obtained was surprsingly low. I went ahead and booked the same consignment for Rs 200!!!

Interesting rite?

2 things I could understand -

1. VRL never considered small customers as their major chunk. For them, more of industrial and big consignments made business sense. Hence obviously they wanted to avoid me being their customer [which was evident from the way the VRL service representative dealt with my quotation request]
2. The logistics arrangement that railways had was suited for small consignments as well as elaborate. Thanks to the very large network of railway lines!

These factors enabled railways to take up my consignment and charge a very reasonable fee.

Yes. A business cannot cater to all types of customers. They need to understand the segment they need and retain them..and then do all that is required to keep the unwanted customers away:-) A good marketeer/salesman can do this effectively!!

CMM Process – A bottleneck sometimes?

“Motorola is in a bad shape” – this is not a statement by me. A friend of mine working with Motorola projects, all of them hard core development and design projects, had this view in this recessionary period. My obvious question to him was to tell me the reasons why he thinks that Motorola is doing bad in business. Even before recession, they were not doing that great.

The first point mentioned was that the processes are so stringent in Motorola that it overides the project quality and agility! He says that the Motorola senior management still holds onto the old processes even in the newest of critical development projects..this delays the projects and the time to market is high..which is exploited by the competitors big time..

Now the question is, for a product oriented company such as Motorola, should process get priority or product creation/innovation independence get priority? Understandeable that a process oriented services company stands to gain..But a product company stressing on processes overly may hamper its competitive edge and even destroy the innovative minds at work…so it is a fine balance that a firm needs to strategize..

I wonder how firms like GE, microsoft and Apple manage..they are innovative, product oriented and leaders in their domain..I wish I knew!!

Consumer Behavior – Kerala

I happened to discuss something interesting on the behavior of the keralites across the length of the state when they receive guest. The people on the northern part of kerala tend to  insist on their guests a lot on having food and drinks. Even if the guest say ‘No, Thanks’, it does not prevent them from going on insisting until the guest has no other option than to have something out of compulsion.

But you go towards the middle and south, this tendency declines. The guest will be asked whether they need something and if they say ‘No’, there is no more pressure. In the extremes, it is also said that the guests are expected to tell them what they need, if they need something!

Now, the confusion happens when a northerner visits a southerners house. As a guest, the northerner expects the host to insist on having something and hence politely refuses to have something in the beginning. On the other side, the host, being a southerner, takes his decline as a signal and then do not press on anything. As a matter of fact, the guest ends up hungry or thirsty in the end:-))

Now, I was thinking whether the advertisers in kerala market understand this. Do they really tweak their advertisements to cater to this regional differences in the people behavior? or does this not affect the advertisement effectiveness at all? even if they change the advertisments regionally, how do they change?

But anyway, above all, is Kerala such a big market for any firm to invest in a multipronged advertising strategy?? !!

Marketing Elections 2009

Election results were declared yesterday. The results encompass the efforts and strategies that each of the participants devised over a period of time. As per the common man’s knowledge of elections, the strategies that happen are alliances and selecting the right candidate with enough muscle power. But as a matter of fact, party stalwarts also have textbook based strategies in use. For example, one of the parties in the recent elections segmented their vote base into the following -

High Caste, OBC, Financially Backward, Financially very poor and Minority Communities.

I am informed that this party did see positive results in the elections. Pretty intersting:-)

But I believe that there is a huge difference between marketeers of an enterprise and the marketeers of political parties – The former also gives emphasis on after sales service..but the latter [atlease in India] does not seem to bother about it. The latter sells the party and wins and forgets about the customer for the next 5 years. He comes up with the same marketing in a new bottle for the next elections:-)

Wish our voting customers had the discretion to vote based on the performance parameters based on a 5 year appraisal cycle!

KSRTC – any signs of revival

Kerala State Road Transport Corporation [KSRTC] is a flagship organization which exemplifies a government organization -  running into losses YOY:-)

But today I happened to talk to a KSRTC employee..and he seemed to provide me a positive picture of the way the organization is managed. Some of the points he mentioned were -

1. KSRTC setting up shopping malls in and around the bus stand on its own land and obtaining rental revenues. The shopping center construction is currently Work in Progress [WIP] and hence are expected to be a major source of revenue going forward.

2. Strict targets provided to drivers in terms of usage of petrol per kilometer. Drivers given training to practice fuel efficient driving and hence equipped to meet the challenge. Any deviations from the target on a regular basis will lead to punishment transfer to a different bus route [obviously not very favoured:-)]

3. Strict monitoring done in the collections done in each route. two shifts of drivers and conductors come in. If one shift consistently outperforms the other in terms of collection, the DE [thats what he said] will call for a meeting with the underperforming shift resources:-) [to check why are they the underperforming lot!]

Overall, it seems that this government organization is keen on efficiency, cost reduction, performance monitoring!! Impressive:-)

I was told by the person that during this government, KSRTC has turned into profits this year! But then in my research I find that this organization is still  under huge losses as of 2008! They are plagued by mu;tiple other issues [pension burden, private transport vehicles, private transport lobby etc etc].

Will need to wait and see how things turn out for KSRTC:-) May be we could loan Lalu for a year from Bihar:-)))) after he is credited with the turnaround of Indian Railways!!