This article first appeared in StoRai magazine page 44 and can be read here.

With the pundits, government and people believing that the economy is on an upswing, there are some learning’s that the past year or so has provided.

1) Stay the course - It is extremely relevant to continue on the same course, adopted in the past year such as control of costs, evaluate each project, product before taking a plunge, in short not to get swayed by the hubris of good times.

2) Capitalize on the spurt of business opportunities - The idea is to explore different business opportunities that have come up or grown with things looking better.

3) Capitalize on market place opportunities - The past couple of years have shown a trend that besides the metros, different niches & markets have sprung up, which would only grow in the years and it’s important to capitalize before it becomes to expensive.

4) Focus on consistent awareness - A key area, be consistent in creating awareness of your brand, product, merchandise through the bad & good times.

5) Acknowledge potential increase in consumer’s knowledge & changes in shopping behavior - The past year or two has shown a consumer who is intelligent, gathering knowledge from multiple sources & looking for value and as a brand it is critical that this is kept in mind.

6) Emphasize authenticity, optimism & connection - Piggy back on the optimism wave connecting to your consumers, sharing the authenticity of your brand and value provided to them.

7) Maintain constant and consistent dialog with loyal consumers - These are the people who have carried you through the turbulent times and it is important to keep in touch with them, talk to them continuously and consistently.

Focus on developed brands - Do not get gungho about launching a slew of brands, focus on the developed brands for the immediate two quarters before introducing new ones.

The word luxury bandied around these days is a clear misnomer. What was Luxury then is a part of a good life now.

In fact the sooner brands clear the gross misconception that

- Luxury is only for the rich & famous older population
- Luxury must be unaffordable to be appealing
- My rich & famous will always love me & only my brand.

the faster they would grow and this is extremely valid in India. What was thought of as luxury is now Lifestyle & more importantly the numbers have undergone a meteoric rise in this segment.

CRM - Customer Relationship Management as it is called, though I prefer calling it Customer Retention Management.

It is the core component of effective brand visibility as well as resultant sales. Whilst, everyone jumps on the band wagon of CRM, they forget that concept needs to be tailored to their industry, brand, people which involves a fair amount of Personalization, Training and some Trend forecasting which should add some unique value to the brand.

The customer with variety of options has become quite fickle & loyalty is now at a premium.

It is quite interesting to see what companies have done in the recent past and how CRM is actually evolving rather than the same vanilla offering of card, points etc.

Shoppers Stop arguably has one of the best programs which they have invested a lot over the 10+ years.

Personally, I like the Future Group - Green Card - which offers instant gratification - 5 - 15% off on immediate purchase, no worries about collation of points etc. And mind you they offer this discount during their Sale time also.

Tata, Westside, Landmark et all offer the vanilla card calling it CRM but which is of no real use. You collect points and encash at their outlets, which is fine, but 1 point for Rs. 50/100 means spending a Lakh or more to get something worthwhile, but yes there are people who keep collecting these cards and then of course need a bigger wallet to carry all of them & then get a back ache because it digs into their rump.

However, there are some good samples of how some brands are changing rules of engagement; some of them

Brioni believes in intensive direct marketing & ensuring sale conversion in a consumer’s own space.

Ferragamo/Kenzo/Cavalli/Paul Smith/Canali all hold Trunk shows in different cities where they don’t have a retail presence. This enables luxury brands to increase not only their sales, but also customer brand awareness, before they finally take the plunge to enter the location.

Emporio Mall in Delhi introduced the concept of Personal Shoppers probably the first time in India where an experienced stylist finds clothes & accessories that fit your tastes, size & budget thereby increasing probability of a sale at relatively low cost and it worked well, but I do not know if it still continues.

Some brands inc liquor brands began referral programs, which were a bit different than the Pyramid scheme or member get member scheme, but these eventually die out, having finished its cycle.

Then of course there are those extended distress sales; SMS marketing; New Brand Ambassadors but is this really aggressive marketing or retailers fear a spillover effect of brand equity dilution.

But in this broad spectrum of generation, catchment, geography that one needs to address in India the only ones that shall succeed would be those who would be able to communicate across multiple channels, quickly, crisply and answer the consumer’s basic question “What is in it for me”?

Some thoughts on Networking, Social Media in Financial Express

Last Friday I had an extremely interactive discussion with a medium sized company’s owner about his Branding & Marketing processes. Whilst, he had done some innovative things, the basics were still lacking. Having convinced him of them, decided to pen down those thoughts.

Product and promotion

Offline:
• Branding
• Image through communication
• Image through medium used

Online:
• Branding and colors on the site
• Branding and colors on the newsletters
• Branding and colors used for any new application or module

Place and physical evidence

• Sign board at the entrance of Office, Stores
• Entrance to be maintained consistently
• Reception, needs to be clean & maintained so there are posters, reading material of relevant products –
necessary to get the visitor to feel that he/ she has come to a great place!
• Security to greet customers well
• Receptionist to greet customers well and cater to the basic courtesies – ask for tea/coffee/water; ask what
they have come for; keep the area for brochures and newspapers in order.
• To keep the reception area well stocked with brochures and any reading material so that the customer’s wait is
pleasurable and worthwhile.

People in service

• The concerned person should not keep the customer waiting for long
• Each and every employee to make the process easy for the customer
• Every employee to adhere to dress code so a uniform and desirable image is formed
• People to adhere to the selling process steps strictly while attending a customer.

Process in service

• Whether it’s online or offline, every department to make the process easy and pleasurable for the customer

I am sure this is not a complete & comprehensive list. But it is the bare minimum. It is extremely easy to get a lot of ideas, however to execute ONE of them takes a lot of effort & time. All products, companies that are BRANDS today are because of CONSISTENCY.

I have been always an experimenter so to speak with basic applied technology (that is to say, I use what I am comfortable with) for the past 10 years and found it pretty effective.

Ryze, Blog, Linkedin, Facebook & finally Twitter used it all. Some good, some bad but it all balances out.

And it was in 2009 that I kept hearing this “Social Media” being used very often. Gentleman from a company that I was consulting about their Online foray kept throwing it to me and soon enough their agency got into the act, giving me the whole nine yards.

Trying to understand the entire social media jungle, I started delving deeper into it - reading about it, meeting people, trying my little experiments that I have chronicled on this blog.

After having joined my current organization, I was bombarded by everyone (except the peon, receptionist & driver) about online strategies, social media (there again) & how PR would help.

In a bid to get away from all these I finally caved in & agreed to meet the shortlisted PR agencies (three in number). And there began my nightmares…

All of them came in with the CEO/VP; Account Director; Account Executive and practically the same Power Point Presentation of 30 plus slides which could be broken up as:

1-10 About their company & our company (straight lift from brouchere)
11-20 About PR snapshots - how it works, value vs straight advertisements etc.
21-30 Social Media - snap shots - print screen of some clients

None of them could answer the following basic questions that should have been internally prepared at their end:

1) Why have you not studied the client? (not even googled it properly)
2) Do you think the client 106 years old has no clue of PR
3) Did the PR brief not tell you client expectations? In which case where are they on any of the 30 slides
4) Social Media - nice meaning from a host of sites etc. But do you think we need it? What should be our strategy? (Answer was FaceBook, Twitter & mind you our Ecommerce site is yet to go up)
5) How would PR work keeping in mind the recommendations? (Sir, worked for our other clients)

Nowhere during the course of the three meetings was the work complete integration, interaction with old, new consumers, commitment used anywhere. Retainer mila, bus kaam ho gaya. And YES they are yet to get back on the questions asked.

I guess this may be one of the reasons that some of my agency friends, acquaintances avoid talking shop with me, which actually may be a good thing.

But that leaves one with a Question - Is PR harnessing the power of social networking sites & blogs to help businesses generate strategic mind share & presence. and If so how many Indian Brands have enjoyed the fruits till now.

I sure would welcome suggestions, criticism, inputs, thoughts on the above….it does not matter whether you understand social media or not; whether you are an agency or client.

I had been hearing about Startup Saturday from Netra for a while, when one fine day in October, whilst cruising past on the Rajeev Gandhi Sea Link or #bwsl as made popular by b50 I received a call from Annkur asking me if I could attend the interactive session the following week.

In my enthusiasm, I said Yes, and had second thoughts when I received his email “Referring your talk at Startup Saturday, it would be great if you can share your experience with the psyche of Indian consumer in creating international brands out of what has always been a commodity.”

But it was too late, because by then Jeev Daya Netra Prabha had swung into action.

I reached there on the designated Date & Time, entered the room & saw some 35-40 people sitting there listening raptly to the previous speaker. I was hurriedly introduced to the Originator of the idea Aditya Mishra and waited for my turn. (Felt just like waiting before an exam)

Soon enough it was my turn & we started it off. Quite an interactive session it turned out to be, with a lot of questions flying back & forth, before it ended.

I managed to acquit myself reasonably well, I think & for those of you who had asked for a copy of the presentation startupsat10thoct09.

I had been meaning to write this post a while back, but got sidetracked with my daughter’s results, experiment with Twitter so got delayed a bit.

A lot has already been written about how much money all the Franchise, BCCI et all have made; but the common refrain being India did not benefit much. Read the rest of this entry »

I had been on Twitter for a couple of months, attended a minor tweetup organised by Netra before I saw a tweet from @90di that got me thinking.

Trying to find out the methodology got me nowhere, but I decided to run an experiment myself rather to amuse myself and if possible understand what makes Twitter tick here.

From the 5th May 2009 to 13th June 2009 whilst the experiment continued I was No Rank - 90’s - 60’s - 20’s sub 10’s with a final high of sub 03 for nearly 5-6 days.

As @90di commented that “Usual Suspects” contained ShaaqT Gul Panag Keeda Shashi Tharoor amongst others; so was in real august Indian Tweeter company.

Now here is where I presumed the following:

• Some of the names on the list came up, due to followers talking about them
• Some of the names on the list came up because they followed norms laid down by twitter:)
• Some of the names came up the list because they were trend setters/followers like Keeda

Doodle by @keeda on Twitter Trend

My experiment was divided into 3 parts:

1)  Break into the first 100 Indian Twitters

2)  Break into the first 30 Indian Twitters

3)  Finally, break into top 10 for a period of week or more.

1)  Break into the first 100 Indian Twitters

• After analysing my tweets - used some of the applications - but could not make head or tail out of it so finally relied on myself.
• Realized that Twitter advocates being yourself, which is fine but so does Indian Democracy - then why in spite of cribbing et all we elect the same politicians - because in spite of voters changing the politicos remain the same.
• But, how do you be yourself - if the nick is something else & your name is something else - luckily that did not affect me.
• Having been a hoarder of some text; thoughts; jokes or all bundled as gyan decided to share this with the tweeters, of course hoping for a couple of shoutdowns.
• Parallel started following some known names that looked good from their bio - this helped in retweets
• From April 3 to May 25 I jumped from 150 to 400 odd followers that included a whole lot of bots & people based out of India who did not have any kind of interaction with me.
• Slowly I found myself inching up the scale to speak till I finally broke in on the 5th May

2)  Break into the first 30 Indian Twitters

• Then it became tougher to break in with a wide variety of variations floating around.
• Started tweeting seriously - bit of gyan; news with comments; interacting; replying.
• Finally I thought I was ready to conclude the experiment around the 30th May & so the final push began.

3)  Finally, break into top 10 for a period of week or more.

• Had prepared a fair amount of interactive tweets for different days
• Worked on the background that would make people want to RT
• Some completely new thoughts that could be shared with a variety of groups
• Heavy interaction in terms of replies; help; DM everything.

And, hence managed to conclude it successfully. My personal findings:-

• Irrespective of how “be yourself” you are, perceptions matter
• Most of the followers do not read your bio, go thru your blog before deciding to follow you. Only your Tweets matter.
• A great Blogger may not be a great Tweeter & vice versa
• Common searchable knowledge is tweeted by everyone; try something that is personally relevant.
• The pareto principle applies here also.
• Whilst PR; Advertising - online & offline; media; brands talk about Social Media & recently Twitter, fact is how relevant to daily life, work environment are the top 100 twitters that is crucial
• If a chunk keep talking about just technology, crib about government & civic the feeling is ‘Hey we read & listen to this all the time’ Tell us how Twitter can help us.
• Irrespective of whether you may live it, love it, hate it fact remains that it is MLM, with of course no transactions involved.
• Everyone eventually manages to create a pyramid or a banyan tree which helps them & all their connections, mostly always in a positive manner.
• Embrace it as another channel, medium - it shall deliver results. Remember as somebody said “The use of electronic networks and associated technologies is to enable, improve, enhance, transform or invent a business process or business system to create superior value for current or potential customers.”
• AND Finally remember with the right approach, attitude & bit of hardwork you can overcome the System i.e. Twitter:)

Approximate data has been taken from Twitterholic & 90di I hereby acknowledge that I have not been guided by any Social Media Agencies, Gurus; but am thankful to the everyday tweeters who made this possible.