2MB - Media, Marketing & Business

Media Scenario in India

2013-03-20T01:44:00.004+05:30

Technology has taken control over our day to day activities or rather I should say our lives. Things are changing faster than our thoughts and it has also changed the way we consume media. The trend is not limited to any particular part or region of the world, but has almost spread across the globe.

But, today I am writing about Media Scenario in India, the world's largest democracy and 2^nd populous country after China. Also, it’s amongst the youngest countries in the world, having more than 60% of its population under the age of 40. India witnessed the highest growth in number of mobile users for many years in past decade. Although the pace has slowed down in recent times, it’s still among the fastest growing markets in the world.

PRINT : In India,Print media is going very strong and growing. Although magazines have lost some ground, dailies are growing YOY. The main reason behind this is the increase in literacy and the habit of reading newspapers in the morning. One thing that must be noted here is, baring the metro cities, regional language dailies are enjoying far bigger readership than the English dailies (might be the emotional attachment of mother tongue!).

Clustered space of media

TELEVISION : TV has grown by many folds as a medium in India. Not so long ago, there was a time when people used to be proud of having a tv set in there home. Today it has reached to their bedrooms. People are having more than one TV at home. The growth of tv has witnessed the growth of private channels and vice versa. The GECs, Movies and News channels have risen like anything. Last few years have seen big jump in kids’ channels as well as regional language channels. But in television, regional channels aren't having such strong viewership as the national players. In India, tv is yet to reach it’s highest peak.

Radio : Radio is having very little reach as compared to others. In spite of private FM players entering into the radio industry and each singing to its own tune, radio is yet to find its place as a strong medium for advertisers and listeners both. It has a big opportunity to grow and penetrate out of Tier I & II cities. But overall, Radio is more of a local medium having a very minimum area of reach with a minimum audience. It also has its own limitation of no visuals.

INTERNET : Now, lets talk about the current HOT CAKE around the globe, INTERNET. Many marketers believe that internet is the future of media. Some believe up to the extent that it will lead to the death of traditional media as it has all the pluses to take over the old media such as, interactivity and no location barrier. May be or may not be. As smartphones and tablets users increase in India, net usage will rise too. It will definitely lead to change in the media consumption habit of the people. But will it mark an end to traditional media any-time soon ? NOT EXACTLY.

Why I believe so? The answer is...because people love things the way they are. Just like people love to stay connected and updated, they also love to see and read stuff created and written by others. They love the local news in newspapers and daily sops on tv. They want to check out others opinion on issues like society, politics, economy, etc. and these are served by news channels very well. More than all these things , people love to watch tv sitting idle and munching something. So all these media consumptions are part of our habits rather than choices, and as all wise people know...habits are hard to change. It’s even harder to change on a macro level, where it becomes a tradition instead of habit.

Also, in India, net penetration is still very low and the average bandwidth is far far lower than other developed countries. If not more, it will take another decade to connect the whole country through internet. So, dailies and tv media will be having a good run ahead, at least in India.

Sales...the art of persuasion!

2012-07-25T20:35:00.001+05:30

In this 21st century, for any company or any organisation or even an individual, selling is one of the most important tasks to perform. Sales, nowadays is a very common word in daily life, but is it that simple to perform or too hard to learn? I believe, when it comes to sales, there are generally 4 types of people in the world.

1. Those who know sales

2. Those who don't know sales

3. Those who know that they don't know sales

4. Those who just don't believe they don't know sales

Sales, in very common words, means the exchange of any commodity for money. But it's not that simple when one needs to perform it on daily basis. In life everybody needs to sell, be it a product or service to a client or just a simple idea to a dear friend or family member.

I believe that sales is one of the easiest profession to get a start for the career but very difficult to survive and when it comes to moving up to the top, it's the toughest one. And that's true because one doesn't need a very high professional degree to get the entry, but s/he needs the willingness to work hard and little bit command over the words. (No need of a very high command over language either). In this profession, one needs to tackle the living individuals with great art at every front, not the machines. Machines runs as per ones command, they never argue. But in the case of a live human being, one surely gets some or more obstacles. And that's where most of the sales personnel fail and try to run away from the profession.

There are many out there, who believe that those who can't do anything else well enough, become sales persons. But I differ from this point of view. While it may be true in some cases, can't be true for all. I really believe that sales is more of an art and one needs a lot of presence of mind, intellect and long term strategy with fast actions to be successful in the profession.

But the main question arises here is what does it takes to be better at sales? Does it require only the hard work or something more than that? The obvious answer is, sales does not merely includes hard work but also requires an art of dealing with people. No good product or service can be sold only on the basis of the quality. Customers simply need more than that and that's the feeling of being important. No matter how hard you try to convince the customer just on the basis of quality, without giving the proper treatment to customer you can't enjoy success in any market. That's the reason why a sales person needs to be more persuasive than being argumentative!

Every person who is involved in the process of sales needs to develop a habit of dealing with people and that too with a sense of care. Today, there are thousands of books available out there in the market which are focusing on training the sales staff, but one book which is highly recommended for everyone is Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Though the book, written almost seven decades ago, was never meant for sales people only, but is highly effective when one is in the business of dealing with people.

For a sales person there are few points which I can think of as essential and must be practised in the process of sales.

1. First and foremost, find out the customer's need, not the demand. In other words, try to offer solution, not just day dreams.

2. Give the customer enough space to feel relaxed and free so that the conversation can reach to a level of comfort.

3. Don't try to sell the product or service immediately (or rather in the first meeting) when you have visited the client. Provide him some time to think.

4. Never utter any bad word about your competitor in the market (your prospect might already be the customer of your competition).

5. 'No wrong commitments' is the most important thing for a long lasting relationship with your client which leads to customer loyalty(repeat sales) and a positive word of mouth.

Although there is nothing new I have mentioned in above written points which might not have been discussed before, but I feel, reminding all these aspects may surely be helpful to someone out there in becoming better at sales.

What will happen to Indian e-commerce mushrooms?

2012-07-15T01:54:00.000+05:30

Why I call it 'mushrooms' ? The reason is the speed they are coming up from nowhere, almost everyday. Today, there are hundreds of B2C and B2B portals, trying to gain profit out of the rising e-commerce in India. But, what I find is very few of them are very clear about what they want to offer to the user or in other words they lack core competency. Everybody is trying to get more and more clicks and push the sale up. But where are the users?

India, the 2nd most populous country in the world after China, with a population of over 1.2 billion seems very potential for the future of e-comm. Almost 41% of the population is below 35 and 51% is below the age of 25. These are very promising figures for an industry which is targeting the youth. But that's it. The real scenario is very different.

Till date, India has only 5% broadband penetration and less than 15% are regular net users (those who access within a certain period of time; a week or month). Out of these regular net users most of the population spend their time on social networking or emailing. Though, the distance to a shopping site is just a click away, most of the time it seems far beyond the reach.

The e-commerce industry is still in very initial stage in India, but the competition is already at a high. There are more than 300 players in the market and the numbers are going up everyday. There are niche players such as makemytrip.com & yatra.com for travellers, bookmyshow.com and kyazoonga.com for moviegoers and concert lovers. There are generic players such as flipkart.com, infibeam.com, etc. and then there is a big category of deal sites such as snapdeal.com, dealsandyou.com, etc.

Venture capitalists are pouring money for almost every new e-commerce idea as if they badly need a dot com venture in their portfolio. Today, every other management graduate wants to become entrepreneur with a domain online. But is this trend healthy for the future? How many of these online ventures grow with time and how many will be buried with a fine dot com cover over it? These are the questions which only time will answer.

The e-comm sites are spending big bucks on promotional activities in almost every media they can afford. Whether it is tv, radio, print or the internet itself, e-comm sites are everywhere. Sometimes they even try to get their users from advertising on Rikshaws and smallest of the events. But how far this trend can continue and how much money they can just throw away like this?

For me, this trend is really unhealthy and the bubble will blast sooner or later. Below are few points why I feel the industry will suffer badly in this kind of scenario...

1. Wrong Marketing Strategies : The first thing that's coming to my mind are the promotional strategies for obvious. When one doesn't have a unique service or product to offer in market and still want to get a success with marketing activities only, it must be far beyond the good, but in most cases they are not even good. Everybody is following the same route without trying anything new. It's hard for me to understand the logic of advertising a lifestyle shopping site on TV or radio. How many of the viewers can really recall the ad and remember the website's name after watching the ad on television that too in a market like India? Some of them have so quirky names that are very hard to remember!

2. Unclear/Uninteresting Advertising : Now, when you have decided to go for mass media activities, why can't you have an advertisement which is really interesting and easy to recall? for mass media audience the communication must be interesting enough. One can't just take time slot and bombard ads for cash on delivery for branded lifestyle products. While talking about interesting ads of e-comm sites on television, there is only one brand I can remember and that's flipkart.com. They have found some really catchy ideas to communicate. Most others are failing to find enough creativity or just lack the will to be creative!

3. Nothing's cheap and no good deals : While in this industry, everybody is claiming to be the cheapest and offering the best deals, reality is very much different. I have observed it many times for gadgets. One can easily find a smartphone or a laptop for a lower price (with bill and company warranty) in a nearby retail outlet most of the times. While it differs from product to product, the discount offered on an e-commerce sites is rarely a price benefit to the buyer. The deals offered are sometimes complex in nature and sometimes of no good at all. I don't think coupon culture can work in India for a long time. Who plans out a lunch or dinner at a restaurant or a massage at a spa on the basis of offered deals and coupons s/he gets? For me, it's like adding more complexity to very scarce leisure!

4. The Brandname : I have already mentioned this point before in this post. Almost every time I come across a new e-comm name, I wonder for what might be the inspiration or reason behind that weird name?! I agree, one needs to be different in any competitive market, but doesn't one require to be familiar too, when there is nothing new to offer in a product or service? Why can't they have a name which can be sweet to ears and easy for mind?

Above points aren't the only factors which can adversely affect the rising Indian e-commerce business. There are also challenges like warehousing, supply chain management and client servicing. Keeping all these in mind, one can easily predict tough times ahead for e-comm players in the country.

The Fall of the Giants : Nokia and Blackberry

2012-06-29T23:30:00.003+05:30

In last two years or so, the fast and ever changing world of technology has witnessed a fall of two giants named Nokia and Blackberry (BB) to a near death. One, a more than hundred year old Finnish brand, the other one a Canadian tech giant. Both the brands are struggling to survive and hopes are minimizing with each passing day. Nokia had announced more than 10000 job cuts a few weeks back and after the latest dismal results, BB, too has announced a job cuts of 5000 employees. So, what went wrong with the two big players in the mobile and communication market?

Though the results are similar for both the companies in current market situation, the reasons aren't. While Nokia failed in evolving to the next gen of communication and new product offerings, the case of BB was little different with a failure in wrong marketing strategies and positioning of products.

In this post, I am not trying to get into figures and other inside details with timeline, but trying to take a brief and short view from a layman's point of view. Let's take individual cases.

Nokia

The one time market leader has lost it's position to Korean electronics giant Samsung in 2012. Untill 2007, the year when the first ever iphone was launched, everything was fine with the company. A year before, in 2006, Nokia had more than half of the smartphone market across the globe. Although, Apple's iphone took the market by storm, Nokia's position at the top was unshaken. Then came the Google's Android in 2008, which too, got a fast success with plenty of hardware manufacturers opting for it. And that was the time when the company started seeing a chink in its armour (read : empire).

Nokia had a presence in all the mobile segments (from basic models to smarthphones) but was very slow in reacting to a sudden change in the market. It seemed like it was in a position of 'where to go and what to do'. On one side, there were new mobile manufacturers coming from nowhere, who were capturing the 'lower end' mobile handset market and on the other side, Apple's iOS and Google's Android were digging deeply into its smartphone markets.

Nokia badly failed in offering good products in any segment. When low cost handset markets were moving towards dual and triple sims, it tried to run on single sim with higher prices as compared to its Chinese and Indian competitors. In the smarthphone markets, it had nothing new to offer on its age old symbian OS while the markets were getting polarised by iOS and Android. Although, the company had a chance to go with Android OS, it went with the highly unsuccessful mobile operating system, Microsoft's Windows, trying to be different, or giving one more option to the users (?)! Be it anything, Nokia has failed miserably till now. Likes of Apple iphone and Samsung's Galaxy series smarthphones have taken the market share far away from Nokia.

Recent developments in Nokia aren't looking in the right direction of a healthy future, too. It has announced 300 job cuts in R&D department. The company, which once pioneered in the mobile and communication industry, has lost the market due to lack of innovation. And now the announcement of reducing R&D employees clearly suggests that, Nokia is disconnected from people.

Blackberry

It saw a big success in the market for it's BBM and email services with QWERTY smarthphones for years. A few years back, it was considered as smartphone for smart people. But that was it. BB always positioned it's smartphones as made for corporate enterprises till the market got dominated by iphones and Android phones. Suddenly, it was a wake up call for RIM, the parent company of BB mobiles. They woke up, but did all the wrongs they could do to benefit the competitors.

Instead of reviving the BB OS completely or launching new phones with different looks, they went ahead and positioned the phones for youth and all. For me, that was a terrible mistake. BB was considered as the best offering for enterprises (and for some, it's still the best). Its services were trusted and used across the globe. And it was not losing that niche market to the competitors. The market where iphone and Android played, was never of BB. Indeed, the company never tried to capture that space of audience.

But, then they tried miserably. They took out of the niche target group loudly and marketed the mobiles for all out there smartphone users. It didn't help any ways. The company couldn't snatch the market share from competitors and lost the loyalty of its corporate clients. That marketing activity hit back hard on BB's face.

Instead, it could have come out with different offerings for different segments. An open source OS would have been a great advantage for targeting different segments. But they didn't open up. As a result, company started losing market share in all the segments year after year. It has been posting higher losses with each passing quarter for almost a year now. As of now, it's difficult to predict the future of once leading smartphone maker in the world, but it's definitely not going to be easy to turn around the fortune either.

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In a world, where technology changes faster than the thoughts, no position can assure a guaranteed future without continuous innovation and customer satisfaction.

Why Facebook advertising, for most, not working yet?

2012-06-24T12:23:00.000+05:30

As I write this article, Facebook has already become one of the most spoken words in the world today and facebooking is probably one of the most time consuming activities under the sky. Though the giant social network has got more than 900 million users (more than most countries' population in the world), it's still struggling to get most out of it.

A recent Reuteres survey revealed that advertising on Facebook has the least impact or influence on the buying decision of a person. It has not helped many in increasing sales of their products or services. Last month, just days before the Facebook's IPO, General Motors(GM) announced that they would no more advertise with Facebook, which made a dent in social network's strengths as an advertising medium. So, the question arises why the largest human network (though, virtual) is not able to generate the maximum benefit out of it's database for it's investors? It's a question which is on the minds of marketers around the globe.

Below are the few reasons that I can think of for why FB ads are not working for marketers :

1. Irrelevant or poorly targeted ads :

Though, it is believed that FB shows advertisements on your home page as per your likes and interests, that's not the case at all. I have noticed on my profile, most of the ads displayed are either of men's accessories or 'lingerie' !? Showing men's accessories are ok, but how about displaying lingerie ad regularly on a male's profile? Another thing I have noticed is two liquor brands displaying on my profile. So, don't they care about my geographical location? I mean, I stay in a dry state! Few others, were too, uninteresting for me.

2. Size and Creativity :

Unlike Google AdWords, FB ads will be there on your page, regardless of you search anything or not. They needs to be more attention grabbing. But, that's not the case with most ads. The size is very small and leaves no room for creativity. That might be the reason why most of the ads fail to generate any interest in the user and are going unnoticed.

3. Timing & Positoining :

While Google AdWords, displays advertisements according to your search, FB ads are always there whenever you login. In this manner, AdWords ads are very target oriented (and that's the main reason why Google is so successful in it's ad programme) while FB ads are just like another case of mass advertising. Different brands of different segments are displayed together on the screen. It's not impressive advertising at all for a new medium ! That for me is 'being everywhere, but reaching nowhere'.

4. Untapped Mobile users :

Out of over 900 million monthly users, almost half of them are mobile users and the social network giant is yet to figure out a proper way to tap them. Although it has launched mobile advertising (as sponsored stories) few weeks back, and claims are very high of it's succes, most results are from FB's largest Ads API partners only. So, even if we believe those figures, it's yet to be seen whether they are working for marketers or not.

On one side, FB is trying very hard to make it's advertising programmes work for marketers, be it desktop computers or mobiles, and on the other side, users are losing trust in it for privacy concerns. So, the success of FB ads depends on how it keeps users engaged on the network and how innovative it can be for marketers for a successful campaign. Tough times ahead, FB.

The beginning...The Fundamentals...

2011-11-06T13:59:00.000+05:30

Starting a new blog and that's about corporate and business cultures around, was never an idea in first place. But countless thoughts and ideas that going without being implemented or coming into actions, forced to think harder and deeper which finally led to another idea of starting a blog about my thoughts, feelings, ideas, etc. on business in life and life in business. So, before this idea too gets out of focus and blur with every passing day, I decided to start giving words to thoughts...and here it is!

After spending almost five years in professional life, and that too into Sales & business Development, I have experienced many things from target oriented meetings (often going without any outcome), to insulting behavior of client to sleepless nights over targets. All these things are part of almost all businesses these days. Sometimes somethings bother me, sometimes they don't at all. But, all these things have filled the mind with plenty of questions and still raising more...

The 1st and fundamental question is that why most organisations fail to develop a culture which is more 'client-centric' instead of being more 'profit-centric'? How can the policy makers or thetop bosses of companies be so ignorant or even careless in many cases about the purpose of the existence? Why do they fail to understand that selling a product or service is one thing and after sale service is another thing. What I have found is, most organisations out there have mastered the skill of selling, but are failing in creating a system for after sale, which, I feel is the most important factor for repeat revenue and thus growth. You can't ignore the word of mouth, which has become more powerful than ever before in this era of social networking and micro blogging? And the older you get, the harder it becomes to generate new business without positive word of mouth.

Investing more into after sales and creating a strong system for client service/customer carewill be unavoidable in coming days, instead of focusing more and more on promotional activities on almost every empty space available around or the waves in the air !