Do you really need that?

That is the question you should be asking yourself whenever you are about to buy something.

If you are not clear then, check out this site. The content is presented by Anne Leonard, who manages to deliver the message so clearly and logically; it’s a shame that we did not notice it earlier. We Indians are copying the western culture to the hilt, so much so that we are trying to adopt the same practices at work, at home, at how we treat things, becoming more of consumers and less of contributors.

Half of the stuff that we buy, do we really need that? A new phone, a brand new gaming desktop (I was thinking of getting this one), a flat screen tv, a dishwasher, an A/C, the list goes on. And once we buy that, we dont stop … we keep on buying newer versions of that. Our perceived obsolescence drives us to trash our already existing goods for the sake of the newer and better. Such a waste.

Please go through the site – storyofstuff.com. And try to make a difference.

The kids arent gonna be alright

I was reading this article on how the kids of this generation. The article is more centered towards the American kids, but it does strike a chord home. Are’nt we following their lifestyle a little too blindly?

Follow it up with this article, and you start feeling bad for businesses in the US.

Foxkeh

With the new impending release of Firefox 3.1 (aptly named Shiretoko – after the Japanese park), the Firefox community is considering adopting Foxkeh, a japanese mascot which is cute to say the least. It is a fox which has a flame as its tail. See for yourself. Here is one of the buttons available on the firefox community site – Spread Firefox

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Idea - Adapting or Confusing?

You must have seen those ads - "What an Idea! Sirji!!" of Abhishek Bachhan and how having a generic phone number ensures that all problems due to differences in caste, sect, religion are removed. Novel way to target and position yourself to the masses indeed.

Come to the streets of Mumbai, there you see a different picture. Idea ads have celebrities declaring proudly, that they have an Idea Mumbai No., and that makes them a Mumbaikar. The niche is well defined and it does have an appeal to it. I consider myself a Mumbaikar, but would I go to the extent of getting an Idea Mumbai No. :-P. But it's a good ad nonetheless.

So in one case, Idea is seen generalizing their service offering, whereas in the other, the same offering (viz., the phone number that you get) is a way of defining and segregating the masses. Interesting, wouldn't you say? Kind of like Glocalisation.

No more IE readers

Following up from my last post. I have decided to take my hate for IE to the next level. Readers will not be able to read my blog in IE. I have used the browser specific HTML to identify the browser, and dish out customized content to the reader. If you are a Firefox user, you should see the blog as it is without any changes. IE users, beware, you will see that nice grey banner across this content asking you to use Firefox :).

I checked the site statistics, turns out a hefty 35% of my readers use Internet Explorer. Call it creating a niche, or call it active evangelism.

Stay Safe. Get Firefox.

Twitter uses

I have posted earlier on Twitter as well, but this time, its for a more practical purpose. It is on how to use this web tool to market your site online, to get those readers/customers to your portal. Social media is a powerful thing, and using it to promote your product/service online at minimal cost is even better :-)

So here are a few ways you can use twitter to tweet your way to more hits.

1. Have an RSS Feed on your site, if it is content based, eg. Crazy Engineers, put that RSS in Twitterfeed, and push out regular updates through twitter! Similar updates can then be sent to your twitter of your blog/corporate blog as well.
2. Once you have your twitter account setup and your tweets are flowing a-go-go, then you can have your social networking accounts like Facebook, to display the same tweet.
3. Take care not to over do the feeds, since your followers can get bugged with you. I know a few friends who have complained of me tweeting of what songs I am listening to and all that jazz, so keep a filter on those feeds.
4. It also helps if you are tweeting every once in a while by yourself, so you get a more human face. For eg. Zappos' CEO, Tony Hsieh is there on twitter, and he actively tweets about his daily routine. How cool is that, direct access to a firms CEO, can you be more customer-centric?
5. Use twitter for simple market surveys, qualitative and quantitative as well. For eg. You can tweet, "What do you think is going to happen to the Indian economy?", the answers would be more than enough to put forth a blog post. Later, you can tweet that post url, and there is a likely chance that people who participated in your twitisurvey would also read your post

Try it out, give twitter a twhirl!!

 

Related Links:-

Pipes, Twits and Feeds

Microblogging

Digg Suxx

I am a Digg fan ... or rather, I was one. Since the past month or so, I am reading about Sarah Palin. Finally curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to click on one of the links. Read her wikipedia entry, you might get some insight into her. Anyway, that's not the point.

Today, I am going through Digg, to find out six articles about Sarah Palin doing the rounds on the same Digg page ... blehhh!! There have been rumours that Digg is rigged, now its just confirmed. The stories are made popular only by a select few and their followers. Is web2.0 a collaborative content management system always going to be plagued by a few leaders and a throng of their followers? If that's the case, then I see Digg as nothing but a PR tool. Sad really.

Facebook or Orkut?

I was mulling over Alexa this weekend, when I decided to compare the web traffics of the three networking sites; facebook, myspace and orkut. The annual traffic graph revealed an interesting picture I must say. The myspace traffic is more or less constant with its brief set of fluctuations, Fox Interactive Media should be a happy puppy. Their market share has remained solid,whew!!

But look at orkut and facebook, facebook (in red) has been steadily growing from milestone to milestone, and recently was crowned as the top social network site on the blue nothing (that's the internet). The sudden spurt you see in all the curves, I think its the announcement of Facebook, when they announced their predator safegaurds. Remember that time in May, when a youth in India was kidnapped by some strangers through orkut? Well, could that explain the sudden dip in orkut traffic?

Strangely, during that time, orkut went the facebook way by having a few orkut apps, could this culture shift have thrown more traffic towards facebook?

I know a lot of people have not put too much thought into social communities, et al, but community management and monetization of the same is the only revenue models for both orkut and facebook. I wonder whether the orkut product manager is breaking a sweat on this? Incidentally, the orkut development and engineering team has shifted entirely to Brazil, where it is the no. 1 social networking site.

Addendum

I don't know how he came across this blog, but Gaurav Dua gave a very logical explanation for the sudden dip in the traffic. If you see the Orkut url, then for Indian users it is nowadays orkut.co.in, same for Brazil, hence the traffic figures have dropped to 33% (approx.). I feel like such a dunderhead :-)

Customer Loyalty

I was coming back from Mumbai via Indian Airlines (now known as Air India). As you would have it, the flight was delayed by 90 minutes ... the passengers were sitting in the flight without the airplane moving a single inch. Finally, when the flight reached Hyderabad, I took a cab to office, half the day was wasted ... hrrrumph!!

On my way to the office, I receive a call from an Air India representative, saying that 4 air miles have been accrued to my account and I can check those at so and so url, all I need to do is keep my boarding passes with me. Just how idiotic is this ... for travelling 1600 miles, I get 4 air miles ... so after 400 trips with Air India, I will finally get one flight free of cost. That's a discount of 0.25%

If only they can take that discount and use the savings to bolster their infrastructure and setup so that such flight delays do not occur. I would rather pay that discount instead of waiting those additional 90 minutes. Does the marketing department of Air India have a warped definition of customer loyalty?

Direct from Dell (to Hell)

No its not a complete, "I hate Dell" post.

I was the student representative for IIM Indore, in handling all the IT problems. I loved it, and liked fixing the varied problems that my classmates, juniors and seniors had. Back then, we had a tie up with Dell for laptops. Roughly at any point of time, at least 70 laptops were there from Dell. The warranty on them had lapsed in a years' time, so ... as Murphy would have it, the problems started cropping up only after then. Thus started the telephone calls over Warranty issues, and the constant bartering ... over warranty given on paper ... then comes the line, read the fine print. I was glad to hand over the ITCom Secretary post to my able junior .. whew!!

Now I do not own a Dell laptop anymore, but two of my colleagues do. Both have malfunctioning laptop batteries and chargers to boot, so the machine refuses to run without AC power and a functioning battery. Ok ... easy solution ... go to support dot dell dot com and raise a request. One month wait for customer care to respond. Fine, lets raise a sales enquiry of purchasing a new battery and a charger ... one month wait for sales to respond. Is the site working anymore?

If you have a website and are making case studies of it in so many b-schools, then can you make sure it works properly; and if it is working properly, then why not respond to the customer, establishing their expectations. No response is a no-no. That has not only resulted in lost sales, but more importantly lost customers. An easier approach would be to sell extended warranty support to them and retain them as customers.

IPE taking on Ibibo!

I was just checking out the alexa rankings of this new site I read about in Deccan Chronicle (yeah! sometimes I do read newspapers ... no, I actually dont!!). Its apparently the firstIndian pr0n toon star (the IPE in the title stands for Indian Porn Empire)!! Her name is Savita Bhabhi, and the site is a daily comic strip of her shall we say "exploits".

I compared the pageviews of savitabhabhi dot com to ibibo dot com (no links, I do not wish to link myself to these sites), and lo behold! check out for yourself ...


Just an interesting piece of stats and comparison, if nothing else. But, isnt it interesting to note that the same time the traffic stats on ibibo went down, those on savitabhabhi went up.

Sidenote - What do you think would be ibibo's target market?

PS - This post in no ways is an attempt to offend any of the owners of the sites mentioned.

7C Model

When I was doing my PGDM at IIM-I, I had taken one course known as IT Enabled Marketing (ITEM). The crux of that course was a simple model known as the 7C model. The point I am rekindling this knowledge is because I aim to use it in real life business for a change. The theory that was taught two years back is finally going through chrysalis and culminating (in what I hope) to reality. Any web portal should have as many of the 7C's as possible, they would be -

1. Context
   
2. Content
   
3. Community
   
4. Customization
   
5. Communication
   
6. Connection
   
7. Commerce

The latest web portal that I was working on had just 4C's ... we are currently working on the 5th one. Will keep you posted on this.

Ad or Mud-slinging

Pink Slip!

Our recruitment advertisement that we had put in TOI got the Pink Slip Award for best recruitment ad. Kudos Ethames!!

Customer Orientation

One day after a good satisfying lunch, Don and I hitched an autorickshaw back to our office. The road on which we got the ride is a one-way and the autowallah was reluctant to come along, saying that his children will have to wait. We assured him that we knew a shortcut (that we did), and we would walk the rest of the way ensuring that he gets to his kids on time.

On seating in his auto, I noticed seat belts (yes, seat belts!!) on both sides of the auto. In Hyderabad, upto 6 children are allowed inside an auto. So, in order to maximize revenues, a lof of these drivers have put in a small wooden bench on the opposite side of the seats. This one was cushioned, and to take the cake with a seat belt. Although I seriously wonder, which thin kid must be seating in that position. Watching this, we decided to strike a conversation with the driver. The chappie was a friendly fellow who seemed to be genuinely concerned about the kids.

In a market, where the customer is the king, how many service providers really go the distance and take pains to ensure that the end-customer is happy? The autowallah in this case has gone a step further than norms (and peers) and has tried to re-assure the customers (the parents) about the safety of his end-customers (the children). If the driver can do it, then why oh why cant all the bigger service providers follow suit?

Advertising is the new Content!

Got to read this from here.

In the new web savvy world, catching the attention of users is getting more and more difficult for advertisers. Gone are the days when unsuspecting users would click on banners that would say Click here! in bold letters. Google came up with the concept of inconspicuous ads with Google Ads. Added to that the context sensitive Google Ads ensured that the customization factor was there.

Now, Google has gone one step further ... widget based ads that actually draw the attention of the user to it. Not only drawing the users' attention, but also ensuring a healthy level of interaction with the ad itself! Be sure to check out the Intel ad in the link I have provided. The way new features of the processor are highlighted are just too good. At one point of time I was just playing the game to see which feature comes up next. The ad was the content I was interested in.

Is this just another form of subliminal marketing that we are seeing here?

Indians are Brand Conscious

This is from LiveMint. They say that Indians rank third in the world in terms of being brand conscious. The study further says that Indians are not only conscious about the imported brands but also know about the domestic brands as well. Heres a quote -

In a luxury brands survey conducted by The Nielsen Company, a global information and media research company, India ranked third after Greece and Hong Kong in the list of most brand conscious countries in the world.

And if you look at it, its true! Heck, I just bought an iPod ... I would categorize Apple as a luxury brand. Just take a look around you, and you will see brands everywhere ...

• He is an IIM grad
• I just took a Kingfisher flight, the air hostesses were worth it
  
• Moods please
• It's a SONY
• One Signature large please

Need I say more?

Vanity Brands

We were having a team lunch ... the four of us, Manish, Mayank, Ranjith and myself. One of the rare occasions these days when all four had a free time slot in the middle of the day. So, sitting at Eat Street, Hyderabad near the Hussain sagar lake, having fast foods like the rest of urban India. As I reached for the Subway Cookie that I had bought, Manish remarked that I could have bought an entire packet of biscuits at 60% of that cookie's price.

While the others were laughing, I informed him that the utilities in both the cases are different. In case of Hide&Seek, the utility is value-for-hunger, in case of a Subway Cookie, its more or less Vanity (well actually its not vanity, but I just like them). But then we got into a discussion where other well known brands are often flaunted for vanity. There are so many of them ... Ferrari, Mercedes, Maybach, Apple, Tommy Hilfiger, Rolls Royce ... effectively all brands that could be used as a status symbol.

God as a Brand

I tend to have these philosophical discussions with my roomies. It can meander from God to Good and from behavior to endeavor. The works. If I document these entire discussions, then that itself would be a blog. So, one fine day we were discussing God. I know, its such a great topic ... if only I had a rupee for every time god was discussed on a blog, I would not need to work then.

We were discussing God as a Brand ... and a very successful brand at that as well. Imagine, even the non-believers discuss god ... effectively people who refuse to accept the existence of the brand also accept the brand. Can there be a greater brand recall and brand value. I think not!!

Also, imagine, each religion has a different brand of its own. So the concept of god is actually a category and not a brand :-). Being a Hindu, I can only say that my religion has a multi-pronged strategy ... multiple brands. A good example of Segmentation-Targeting-Position. What say?