Managing Brands for success

Brands are critical for saccess of the company. A Brand name gives the company much needed recognition with the customer with customer associating a brand with a quality or attribute he admires or desires of. To be a successful brand it becomes essential for company to associate themselves with the weakness of the customer and continuously stroke it to gain successive purchases and promotion for the brand. Companies spend huge amount of money to gain Image in the minds of customers and potential customers and resulting output is in most cases not clearly defined or measurable. Often it is not clear how much the money spent on promoting the brand actually effected the customer and influenced him towards the brand.

Managing multiple brands is even more complicated in the sense that these brands should not create confusion in the minds of customers. The company must be clear in its communication to the customers and these communication should be targeted accurately to the different customer segmentation accurately and the company must have the behaviour analysis of every customer segment in a very accurate manner. The emphasis on accuracy in communication is key since mis-commnication would result in confused customer, lost opportunities and wasted marketing efforts.

Today there is greater stress on marketing productivity and returns for the investment spent on marketing. The fact huge amount of money was spent by companies in past with failed products in the past have CEO's stressing on the result-oriented marketing. The rush for fast results has created tendencies of marketeers trying to rush potential customers to quick action through vigorous promotion and burnout syndrome in unprepared customers due to hurrying through the various stages of customer selection processes. Customers do need sufficient and unpredictable amount of time to make up their mind and transition through various phases in product selection process.

Brand managers who tend to produce results in long run are often considered outdated and there is emphasis on the need for brand managers to create brands in short span of time and produce results for the company. The shortening of the product life cycles and emergence of new products in shorter spans of time results in cluttering of products and completion for targeted customers. The bombarding of the customer with frequent and boisterous campaigns results in customer fatigue and burnout.

Customers entertainment space hence gets jammed with these promotions resulting in customer aversion for newer brands resulting in lesser effective even the most creative advertisements. Companies must look into strategies of de-congesting the customer's entertainment space and elongating brand life time and product life time and allowing more time for customer to stay in each of the selection processes without having him hurrying through these processes adding more value to the customer with appropriate selection and higher value to the company with more satisfied customers.

RBI's central role in macro-economic activity

Big countries do not change overnight. Change is a continous process of constant communication to citizens on need to change and happens one day at a time. Each passing day the emphasis on change brings about change in the mindset of citizens causing them to change the way they do things. When thousands of people in the country start changing, the country has automatically changed.

The commitment made in the last Budget was that the fiscal deficit as a percentage of GDP will be 5.5 per cent in 2010-11. RBI needs to support the government borrowing programme, as well as the growing demand for credit from the private sector. exchange rate movement during the last couple of years — from a bottom of around Rs 52 (a dollar) to a top of Rs 39. massive swings in the exchange rate are disruptive, as many participants in the market do not have the capacity to mitigate foreign exchange risk. GDP trend rate of growth is in the 8-9 per cent range. If the economy grows beyond that trend, that is overheating. We cannot remain over the trend for a long period of time without stoking inflationary pressure, for the simple reason that the economy does not have the capacity to grow faster than that rate. Dr. Subir Gokarn, Deputy Governor, RBI, Interview with Business Standard,

For a public policy institution like the Reserve Bank, there is no final destination; the goal posts keep moving with new challenges and tasks replacing current ones. The learning too never stops. From each development and crisis, lessons are drawn and applied to policy and institutional reform

"The Halo Effect"

In The Halo Effect ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers, Phil Rosenzweig tears into some of the most popular business books of recent years, including the bestsellers In Search of Excellence and Good to Great. Along the way, he argues that many of the pat principles bandied about in the business world are based on misguided thinking and flimsy research.

Rosenzweig ends by listing five things that enlightened managers should know:

1. Good strategies involve risk and no strategy is foolproof.

2 . Execution also is uncertain. What works well for one company may not be effective for another company.

3. Chance plays a greater role in success than managers may want to admit. Bad outcomes don't always mean that managers made mistakes.Likewise, favorable outcomes don't necessarily mean that the managers made brilliant decisions.

4. Finally, Rosenzweig says that "when the die is cast, the best managers act as if chance is irrelevant. Persistence and tenacity are everything."

"No Jerk" rule in Office

Interesting article from Mckinsey quarterly on "No Jerk" rule in firms. Companies are increasingly finding that cost of managing difficult people is very high. Robert Sutton is professor in Stanford university and the article is adapted from his book "The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t". Robert talks about dirty Dozen that Jerks do at workplace.

He talks about the Total economic cost of these jerks and ways and methodologies to measure them.

btw, doesn't this apply to our society as well and there is huge economic cost that society pays for actions of these jerks?

India a future Tiger?

Akash Prakash presents highlights some scenarios and problems with India Growth Story here

Excerpting some interesting part:

On education, only about 65 per cent of males across the country are literate, 10 per cent have passed the 10th grade and about 5 per cent have a graduate degree; the figures are even lower for women (2001 census/CERG Advisory). By 2010 we will have 460 million people between 5 and 24 (source: CERG Advisory) who will need to be educated and trained. How will the government handle this challenge, when it has failed miserably till date? Unless we see reform in the government response to the education challenge and much greater private sector participation and innovation, we will have a crisis. The beginnings of change and private sector participation are visible, but a lot more needs to be done.

The second issue is employment. By 2010, we will have more than 105 million young adults in the age group of 20-24 looking for work (source: CERG Advisory). For our economy to generate employment of that magnitude, we need to improve our growth mix and ensure that people can move off farms and into light manufacturing and basic services. We cannot afford to have another decade of no organised sector job growth. We need to deliver on the required reforms in labour, agriculture and infrastructure. Again, initial signs are positive, but more needs to be done.

Two urgent and high priority reforms need to be done by the government if the country is to do any progress. One in the sector of educational reforms: Government should regulate and ensure the entry of large number of private players into the field who can come in and increase the quality and quantity of education that this country can provide. If suitable action is not taken in this regard, there will be large number of uneducated youths in this country which will lead to widespread unrest and chaos due to the rising inequality. Capitalism and free markets are ruthless in the sense that they make high differentiation between the highly skilled and non-skilled workers. The gradation in this differentiation is so huge that the lowly skilled workers without proper incentive would have to suffer huge downside due to the liberalization regime undertaken by the government so far.

Second most important reform is in the area of labor reform. The trade unions are hitting on their own foot when they try to stall any move by the government towards labour reforms. The manufacturing sector needs huge amount of labor and they would still be able to grow by introducing capital intensive machinery in lieu for labor. Some people have termed India's economic growth as jobless growth, which is precisely the reason why India needs labor reforms wherein there is incentive for the manufacturing sector to trade machinery for labor. Manufacturing sector has nothing to gain by appeasing the labor unions, but the labor unions have much to gain by going along with the demands of manufacturing sector. Government needs to create appropriate skill levels by opening up the education sector and appropriate level of jobs creation incentive for manufacturing sector in order to prevent economic unrest and prevent rising inequality as India moves further towards free markets and capitalism.

"distributed computing economics"

Microsoft Researcher Jim Gray's insights into economics of computing 3 years ago are now bearing fruits in terms of services over web and web 2.0.

Computing is free. Actually, it's not free, but most computing is now so inexpensive that advertising can pay for it.Computing costs hundreds of billions of dollars per year.Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is more than a trillion dollars per year.Megaservices like Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft Live have relatively low operations staff costs. Most applications do not benefit from megaservice economies of scale.outsourcing is seen as a way for smaller services to benefit from megaservice efficiencies.The outsourcing business evolved from service bureaus through timesharing and is now having a renaissance. The premise is that an outsourcing megaservice can offer routine services much more efficiently than an in-house service. Today, companies routinely outsource applications like payroll, insurance, Web presence, and email.So a Web service is an enabling technology to reduce data interchange costs

interesting video from computer museum.

Processing and disk costs are so low now that we might as well just store the data more redundantly, Jim argues in an interview in ACM Queue.

"Why Apple may not win the PC market"

Apple's revenue is at $5.7 billion dollars compared to the entire PC market revenue for last year being at $250 billion dollars, giving apple around 2-3% market share in the PC market. Apple's strength lies in ipods, music and entertainment and it fails to impress the genuine PC geek in spite of its good features and ease of use. Apple's adamant on building the entire PC using its own components goes against it as with this strategy the industry does not work with standard products and does not create the needed momentum to push the products into markets place in spite of being good ones.

Apple's competitors include the reset of the industry consisting of the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and their muscle power and influence in the market is tremendous and have the ability to push standardization and other software vendors and application developers to their bandwagon. Embracing open standard would a logical thing for apple to do. Apple's business model is more closer to Dell's model of selling through Internet with not very predominant retail presence and apple needs to strengthen its retail presence in a large way in order to be visible to entire range of PC customers. The visibility of apple is restricted to the geeks and the knowledgeable in the industry with no visibility among the not so computer literate person.

It's inability to form alliance with component suppliers and other companies in order to give a broader push to the market is causing apple huge loss in potential revenue space. Also, the strategy of apple to not sell components and operating system separately to OEMs so they can produce apple laptops with windows operating system or dell/HP PCs with Mac OS is resulting in huge loss of potential revenue for the company.

Apples doesn't boast of the efficiency in managing the supply chain like Dell. Dell's core competency lies in its agile and efficient supply chain and apple's manufacturing and assembly units fall short of even the worst of industry standards. All this adds to cost to the customers with they having to pay for the inefficiency in apple's supply chain and not necessarily for the cool products. To replicate Dell's supply chain would require years of hard work and dedication and building of work ethic culture which is not characteristic of apple culture.

Apple's products are priced higher with a premium attached to it compared to competitive products resulting it not attracting the lower end of the pyramid and increasing the market share. Also, at the higher end of pyramid the performance of apple PCs are not ultra superior to those of the competitors for them to be charging the premium.

Apple currently sells only due to the cult like fanatic following that Steve Jobs is able to create for apple products by being different from the market. This drive for being different pushes apple further from its customers, since when customers try to be like Apple, Apple moves away trying to be more different from the rest. Apple products needs to be made for consumption of mainstream population, needs be more accessible, standardized and given the huge marketing push.

Apple continues to do the same mistakes it has been doing for last thirty years and squandering the weath of its share holders. It needs to be more aware of its customers, investors, suppliers and other players in the ecosystem and must not drive itself to madness in urge to be different from the rest.