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.

The last couple of weeks have been really tough in terms of bringing Projects up to speed. There has been a constant back and forth where my expectations and deliveries were a complete mismatch. A couple of colleagues kept asking, ” How do you make Project work” especially when I kept pushing the 90 day turn around. And this is what I shared with them.

Build your team (existing or new)

List all the people who are part of the project team
Factor all the skills that are required
Talk to each member about his/her skill set
Match people to the skills & tasks required

Once this is ready, it is important to list down:

Steps to schedule Management

1) Know which deadlines are sacrosanct (hard and fast) and which have some flexibility
2) No task should last longer than 4-6 weeks
3) Don’t schedule more detail than you can yourself oversee
4) Develop schedules according to what is logistically possible
5) Record all time segments in the same increments such as in days or weeks
6) Have some flexibility in project schedule for handling problems that might occur later

Believe me this works wonders for execution. If you feel something more can be added, please comment & I will update the post.

10/9 Conscience won’t prevent sin, it only prevents us frm enjoying it.

11/9 Half of the 100 largest economies of the world are countries. The other half are companies. Read the rest of this entry »

Received this as a forward today along with the Warren Buffet rules that seem to be doing the rounds these days:

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world. Read the rest of this entry »

(This was sent to me by someone a couple of years ago. Find it pretty relevant; more so in today’s scenario) Read the rest of this entry »

This post goes specially to my friends:

Tehmasp Printer; Hemant Shah; Wajid Ansari; Vishal Bhatia; Bela Gupta; Aparna Gupta who have been regular in sharing their wishes & thoughts during the past so many months. Read the rest of this entry »