No Complaints Please!

Your friendly reminder to stop complaining... - Holy Kaw!


In addition to its incisive message, the design of the poster is equally forceful.
I remember ignoring the same message some time back when the content was placed in power point slides with bullets for each of the messages...worst still, imagine if it were to be in a poster with loads of pictures from poor and war prone regions....

Thanks to the design above the message clicks far deeper!

The war for information and knowledge

YouTube has been blocked in Turkey for long and now, according to some news reports, the government has also blocked Google Docs, Google Books, Google Analytics, Google Translate and most other Google services in the country.Unhappy at the ban, a group of Turkish bloggers has created an interesting poster mocking the censors!

[Poster] We Don’t Need No Google!

The trigger for first world war was material control, the second one was forced by ego ...to get back the glory and pride ....wondering if the next world wide war could be triggered for the control of information and knowledge.......?

Do You Really Want Aircel To Save Tigers?

Marketing And Social Cause: Is It A Marketing Gimmick Or The New Success Mantra?

It started with Idea Cellular, JagoRe - Tata tea was next and the latest one seems to be Aircel - save our tiger initiative. However, it's interesting to explore the strengths of business logic to associate with a social cause for marketing?

How many people really 'want' to save tigers? Add to it, how many want their mobile service provider to do the job?

From a marketers perspective, it certainly helps you to stand apart from the crowd. But is it enough to get customers' attention and drive sales? That is the qualifier...

While the save our tiger initiative generated a lot of buzz, it translated into very little sales. The problem with marketing through a 'cause' is it demands lot of 'on the ground' efforts. Like for example, Tata Tea recruited volunteers to reach out to people and ask them to exercise voting rights. However, the Aircel campaign is pretty much limited to hoardings, t-shirts, logos, micro-site and facebook fan page. As a consumer the whole campaign is more of 'brought to you by Aircel'.

The success of marketing through any social cause is in 'on the ground' activity, supported by all other tools, to take the initiative beyond the buzz! In its current form, marketing and social cause are way apart to be the 'success mantra'

"Purpose" as a source of differentiation as opposed to "promise" (read brand)!

Today customers know more about suppliers than they did in the past. Markets have become more transparent with sharing of information, experience and knowledge amongst customers. All this while the actual difference between products and services is vanishing quickly.

With a huge range of products and services, customers face a classic problem - to borrow the term from Alvin Tofler - its the problem of "over-choice". Its tough, as a customer, to mark out the real difference (if any) between products available. In many industries, mostly, everything can be commiditized and that too very quickly.

Today, to build and sustain 'differentiation' companies have to create variety in actual product or its promises (read brand) or some times both. There are serious problems with both the options. Product variety is adding little to customer satisfaction but adds further complexity to the problem of overchoice. While it might be fun to create promises around your products its relatively tough to make the products deliver on those promises.

With China still going strong its mostly suicidal to get into price based differentiation.

While marketers explore for other factors on which 'differentiation' can be loaded..."purpose" of the company, to produce and reach out to customers with the a particular product, remains hugely untapped and a highly meaningful factor for differentiation. For example, every product of google has a simple undercurrent and users can almost immediately identify with its core purpose - organizing information to provide better search results for you!

Its difficult to take customers for a ride with purpose as a key differentiator - a purpose has to be honest in both - its argument and realization. But it does not take any effort to keep customers with you once they identify with your purpose...

Offcourse many of today's products, as a first step, will find it tough to identify a 'purpose' for themselves in the market... i mean imagine what could be the purpose of feeding someone an areated drink? further, difference between purpose of feeding someone with coca-cola as opposed to pepsi? seems farcical...

While the large established companies continue to experiment with 'promise' as source for differentiation the relatively smaller companies can take on the larger ones on 'purpose'. (If you cant defeat the enemy on the battleground try changing the battleground and you stand a better chance.) Smaller companies or new products in commoditized world can start on a totally different plane by focusing the marketing message on their 'purpose' as opposed to price, product features and promise!

Well, just a thought....what do you say?

New year resolutions or wish lists?

"Resolution" is firm determination to do something in a certain time frame. Wish lists are like must-do tasks with no particular implementation date. So why do most resolutions often end up as items in a wish list?

Resolutions without an appraisal naturally gravitate to wish lists!

Appraisal, especially self appraisal, is tricky. The rating forms in annual job appraisals is the time when we come closest to structuring a self appraiasal. A new year, for most of us is about resolutions...appraisals can wait.

But then resolutions will start falling apart from next month. We forget some, cant hold on to most and never start with the rest. Appraisals can be of great help in uncovering the obvious.

Simply put, imagine this year we are out for a journey and we have our vehicle. Resolutions are the destinations that we intend to reach. And what we do is simply start driving ....without really checking how far one has to go? is there enough fuel for the journey? What about battery, air pressure, shocks (crucial if we intend to take the bumpy road) engine maintenance? Do we have the map? Have we figured out how and where to ask for help to get the right directions?

And the disaster begins, for most journeys the fuel ends mid-way, for others you are not sure about the road and so on...Appraisals can help in testing things you already know and uncovering issues which could be critical but are currently hidden from you.

Do a self-appraisal and check your fitness for each of the resolutions that you have taken up for 2010.

Happy New Year!

Productivity Paradox

IT is everywhere but in productivity...that is the great productivity paradox!

While evaluating a CRM software for my earlier employer, I realized there was little or no difference between most of the software products that we had short-listed. The only difference (aggressively made visible by product companies) was in features and the price associated with it. However, none of us were in a position to comprehend how does the difference matter to us....?

We set out to do a must have, good to have and nice to have categorization of features and again realized that all software products ranked the same. Eventually, we selected the brand that was most reputed and the cheapest; ended up using very little of the product features and marginally improved our productivity.

Some days back I attended the demonstration of a software product developed to manage 'ideas' in a company. It had features where you could post ideas, classify them, vote and accept, reject or reward the best ones. Most of these were a mix of bookmark, email, share and tag features in google ad-ons and other similar applications. Do we need a separate tool for managing ideas now? I am not sure!

Both these instances were a realization to C K Pralhad's view that "technology has produced great diversity and choice in products but has contributed little to increase the satisfaction"

Perhaps, we need more IT companies that think about and advise customers on how to get the most out of a particular software tool than to develop more of these tools!

As customers we need to focus more time on implementing the software than evaluating IT ;)!

Any other ways to get rid of the productivity paradox?

Urban Infrastructure in India - All Planning No Expertise!

Most of the leadership at state as well as center level in India has its mass base (or roots) in rural India (Bharat and all). Their political thought, aspirations are woven around the rural fabric. In fact a pro-urban stand for many of these would be suicidal. So who is taking the cause for urban India? corporates and NGOs?

Again, the rest of the leadership from urban areas has little or no authority in assembly or even center. Besides they have a limited understanding of the scale and depth of urban issues leave apart expertise to solve the problems.

The muncipal councils operate at a tactical level and are seldom seen taking any pragmatic decisions. Unlike panchayati raj, the urban civic system allows little or no public participation....result an alienated and ignorant urban civilian.

Add to this an unprecedented growth, migration and the urban infrastructure will collapse in absence of a rapid upgrade that match the demand. But given the lack of leadership, expertise and a platform to drive the up-gradation of urban infrastructure, the disaster seems unaviodable....

Time for some serious leadership and representation for urban India?...