Which Car ?

Hatchbacks

• Jazz by Honda. Big car features in a hatchback – a promise left half fulfilled.
• Grande Punto by Fiat. Beautiful car competing for zero to hundered time with bullock carts.
• Ritz by Suzuki. Looks like it broke its back in a childhood accident. Go for it only if service networks and reliability is of utmost importance.
• Fabia by Skoda. Comfortable and reliable. Exactly what a taxi should be. Looks like one too.
• i20 by Hyundai. All the features for a reasonable price. If you get one, try not hogging the highways.

Sedans

• Laura TSI by Skoda. Once you’re through the terrible service, go racing with a C – class.
• Corolla Altis by Toyota. Yes it’s boring. But not terribly so. Grab it for its features.
• Civic by Honda. When being space age is more important than comfort.

Touchpoint Management for Startup’s

Touchpoints are the points of interaction of customers or prospective customers with your brand. Advertisements, Dealerships, Sales Calls, Websites, Customer Service are all examples of touchpoints of a brand.

Why are they so important?  Because these interactions often define (a) the level of awareness and (b) the attitude of customers towards your brand, both of which are of utmost importance in the first stage of your marketing effort. And without strategic management of touchpoints, it likely that subsequent stages such as ‘creation of buying situation’ are far less successful.

If you’re a start up, one of the most effective way of marketing yourself is to concentrate on these touchpoints. Here’s how:

1. Start with the pre-interaction touchpoints. One of the most challenging tasks of a startup is to build credibility in its brand name. And since credibility is a kind of thing that is better built by others than yourself, some of the pre-interaction touch points (where you are not directly involved) could prove to be especially useful. Try focusing on:

(a) word of mouth communication : everyone is trying to be the smartest person on the street (/office/cubicle). If somebody tells you that a really cool product can do your task in half the time with doubly better results, you’re not going to be left behind in the race to get that product. Remember how Gmail got its popularity?

(b) limited exposure : a short or limited exposure to your product is beneficial in a variety of ways. Firstly, being limited or scarce allows a product to be perceived as more valuable and exclusive. Secondly, too long an exposure may not be worth the time of your customer or maybe simply disregarded as a marketing gimmick. Thirdly, a short exposure increases curiosity of your prospective customer to learn about your product. What can be a more cost effective way of explaining your product than the customers going to your website to find more about it!?

c) positive PR : compared to word of mouth, PR could help reach wider audiences and also provide similar credibility. Remember ‘limited exposure’ when deciding on your PR materials as journalists may be too keen to come out with a premature evaluation of your product. Don’t let them get their hands dirty on all the features of your product. Show it slowly, in bits and parts.

d) limit it : just like your product exposure needs to be short, so do your initial users of a product. Anything that is freely available has much less perceived value when compared to things which are scarce. This always works: think of diamonds, gmail or even the iPhone. Depending upon your product, either increase the price or limit the quantity. Let them crave for it.

2. Follow it up with On – Interaction touchpoints. Go do this exercise: go to the website of Hyundai motors and then go to the website of Mercedes Benz. What is the difference that you notice? Mercedes Benz’s website appears to be more premium and sophisticated. A website is an on – interaction touchpoint. And like other on – interaction touchpoints, it could be a deal maker or deal breaker. If your brand has done a fantastic job with pre interaction touchpoints but fails to deliver on – interaction, it leaves prospective customers in a rather disoriented state and thus leaving your brand very vulnerable to being disregarded as another effort to create hype.

So stick to your brand values which may be something like customer service, reliability, value for money and so on. Whatever your brand values maybe, on- interaction touch points are the opportunities to nail these values together with your brand name. If your brand help your customers bolster their self esteem, give them the treatment that raises their self esteem – make them feel like they are the smartest people to decide on your brand and the most priviliged ones to get a chance to interact. Owners of Vaio’s, Apple’s, Mercedes and even electric cars are happy to buy the respective brands because of this.

3. Post Interaction for Re-Interactions and New Interactions. The post interaction experience of a customer is beneficial in many regards. Firstly, and rather obviously, it converts them from just customers to loyal customers, which most possibly explains why people buy an i-pod, buy a new version of an i-pod a year later and even buy an i-phone alongside. The customer service and the positive feelings generated by being recognized for owning a product are clearly pivotal in creating repeat purchases. But great post interaction experiences are more beneficial than that. Word of mouth from your existing customers acts as a touch point for your new interactions which makes it greatly important to keep the customer pleased even after the purchase has been completed. No wonder Maxtor was happy to take back my external hard drive to replace it with another one when it got spoilt.

one day

One day, genuineness will prevail

One day, innocence shall be hailed

One day, happiness will spread

One day, differences shall shred

 

One day, love will surround

One day, kindness shall be around

One day, we will be enlightened 

One day, nobody shall frighten

 

One day, there will be harmony

One day, we shall hear no cacophony

One day, we will do our prayers

One day, we shan’t care about those chairs

 

One day, character will count

One day, we will stand on moral grounds

One day, god will be in people

One day, the world shall be regal

 

That day, I may not see

But I will hear, for smiles shall set free

And fly like birds with their chee chee’s

Right to my ears, in the heaven’s blissees

Getting Inspired?

Geographical spread of ideas is an interesting process which may or may not involve the originator of the idea. From my understanding, more often than not, the process doesn’t include the originator of the idea . Some of the reasons for this phenomenon are: 

1. Some of the best ideas are often found by start-ups which are financially strained to fully realize the potential of an idea even in their home nation. To expand to a new location might be spreading yourself too thin to gain a competitive advantage in any of the locations of your operation. By the time the firms are financially rich, the idea’s corresponding product / service is already reaching the maturity stage which is enough time for other firms to get ‘inspired’. 

2. New products and services are often built arond the specific needs of  clients / customers / consumers of the home country of the originator of the idea. This is probably because of the fact that the market research is primarily focused in the home country. Hence, a lot of new products are built to be too specific to the market they originate in which implies the task of customizing the products results in a greater inertia than for a standardized product.

3. People / Companies often ignore the need of patenting their products / services in countries of great potential due to the lack of industry knowledge in these countries amongst the founder / management.

These and various other reasons often lead various start ups in the ‘other’ countries to get ‘inspired’ from some of the ideas, customize the products according to local demands and play the game of risk and return backed on confidence arising from the originating firm’s success.

Is this a good process? I’d guess so. It allows the whole world to see the future products much more quickly than otherwise, making the world a more globalized place to live in. Will the originating company / team like this? Depends on whether they are after money(like netjets) or about the spread of an idea (like ideas of linux).

Hunting for ideas?

I have always believed in the importance of external brains in bringing fresh ideas and processes to an organization which is critical in building up a strong foundation for innovation. But only after gaining exposure of work in different corporate environments, I have begun to appreciate the fact that some of the most important ideas for innovations can be generated within the organization. 

Consider Riverbed Technologies, a San Franscisco based start up which specializes in reducing data transfer times (through compression, a few special algorithms and some really obvious things) which subsequently helps organizations save huge amounts of bandwidth and processing costs. What would be the probability of a a person from an unrelated industry where such problems didn’t exist to to think of ideas in finding solutions for these problems? Definetly much lesser than compared to a person who wastes a few hours of his day everyday trying to backup data or the management of a company which is required to heavily invest in buying greater bandwidth and more processing power. 

My understanding is that organizations need to do invest a far greater amount to promote internal innovation. The challenge of course remains with finding the optimium between ‘running existing processes efficiently’ and ‘developing new processes / technologies’. And the answer lies in the far sightedness of your thinking.

adoption rates and business models

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s President and CEO has put a thing or two in perspective when it comes to competing amongst functionally equivalent products. Here is an excerpt from his blog (http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/ Feb 13 2009) about the importance of adoption rates and business models:

“over the long haul, my view is adoption rates and business models will be a greater driver of success than the technologies themselves”

I’d strongly agree with Jonathan about the importance of adoption rates  – especially in an industry where supporting technologies / trained developers make the switching costs for customers especially higher.

So what’s the lesson? Remember to weigh the trade off between bringing your product when it’s still nascent and bringing your products too late to be adopted!

If

Found this poem written on a wall at my office during my last internship – if you haven’t yet, read it and admire its beauty here:  http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm

what’s your target

There are two kinds of people: one those who are technology savvy and the others who are not. Traditionally, those in the first category generally download the latest stuff, keep themselves updated with technology news, are more likely to blog, have their own websites etc.  Those in the second category would be rather hesistant to be involved with such ‘brain intensive’ and ‘time consuming’ jobs, as they would call it. 

However, in the recent years, with availability of simple tools which provide easy to use methods of creating blogs (wordpress), making websites (freewebs), staying in touch online (facebook), the second category of users has widely increased the size of web users.

Other examples, such as that of the Personal Computer also show a similar story. When Apple released the first ever PC, the second category of users were less than interested to buy those interesting geeky machines. But as the user interface became more usable by humans, PC has found a place in every middle class home.  

What’s the lesson? Focus on the second category of users – the less tech savvy users, and make your applications easy enough for them to use. Afterall, they are too huge to be ignored for the sake of the first category of users.

Google Chrome

In terms of User Interface, Google Chrome has set the war of the browsers  to another level. With minimal icons and a sophisticated feel, ease of use comes automatically with Chrome. Icing on cake is its blitzing fast loading speed which beats firefox, safari, ie, opera, you name it! 

With a very convinient impoort wizard, switching to Chrome from any other browser won’t take more than a sixth of a minute! Go ahead and try yourself!

failure – the mother of success?

They call failure as the mother of success. And how true does that sound. After all, history has proved it time and again that those who have succeeded have faced failure time and again but kept their perseverance to succeed ultimately. Take for example, Thomas Edison, the great inventor and businessman who played a pivotal role in influencing life in modern world. Not before he found out 10,000 ways of not doing things that he was able to finally find out the way to success.

If my guess is correct, you are likely agreeing with the above. After all it’s so difficult to mould one’s brain to prepare a counter argument when the likes of Thomas Edison testify the theory of failure as the mother of success. But even if you might agree, does your appetite for risks increase? By how much?

For most of us, failure is just not an option. It means THE END. Consider the average Joe: he wants to achieve great things in life – his own business, lots of profits, good standard of life and all that. But why does he still not go ahead opening his own business by loaning some amount from the local bank? Because failure is not an option for him. If the business fails to generate profits even temporarily, the bankers are down to squeeze all of his little assets out of him. Our average Joe will then be on the road. Will he take the chance to be on the road or will he find himself better in a low paying but secure job?

You know what the answer is for the most of us. Yet we hear of those rags to riches story which don’t fail to fascinate us.  How come they achieve success without being bothered by losing all their assets? Maybe, because they have no assets to lose?

So does the theory of failure as the mother of success apply to you? Or is it only for those who can risk failure – like Thomas Edison or Dhirubhai Ambani.