Simply Talking

Managing Brands for success

2010-02-09T20:45:00.000-08:00

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Brand managers who tend to produce results in long run are often considered outdated and there is emphasis on the need for brand managers to create brands in short span of time and produce results for the company.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

2010-02-07T20:12:00.000-08:00

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"

2007-07-23T22:16:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-18T19:52:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-02-12T19:57:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-05-02T20:58:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-01-17T20:06:00.000-08:00

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.

"Indian Parliament and good governance?"

2006-01-03T21:34:00.000-08:00

The government needs to do dig detail into the public issues with thoughtful scrutiny, meaningful dialogue, frank questioning, careful planning and candid probing of the bureaucracy in order they function effectively. Parliament needs to be a role model for integrity, accountability, decency, quality and service attitude so that its prestige, reputation and confidence among citizens is maintained. The bureaucrats benefit from collegial, frank and private discussions with experienced parliamentarians.

The parliament is responsible for effective governance of the country. The parliament is responsible for ensuring that adequate controls are present in the bureaucracy and should appropriate policies on control and seek regular assurance that the system is functioning effectively. Shouldn't good governance be an implicit expectation, much like good character, a set of principles that are simply inherent and understood? Much like the in the corporate world where the management is accountable to the board, the government is accountable to the parliament, with this 'board' being elected by the single share of billion voters of the country, and the parliament is responsible to ensure the effective functioning of the government. Parliament has the right to ask the difficult questions and ensure that the government is functioning effectively in the best interest of the shareholders, aka voters. Effective monitoring on a continuous basis is an essential component of a sound system of control.

Parliament is the right forum to discuss and approve the correct growth and development strategy for the country. The parliament must ensure that the country has the best strategy while competing with other countries in order to pursue the single minded objective, that is to maximize the wealth of the nation. Parliament must ensure that right controls are in place to respond to serious issues relating to infrastructure, education, health and sanitation for the citizens and the right environment be provided for the flourishing of businesses for creation of wealth. Parliament should, at least annually conduct review of the effectiveness of bureaucracy and should report to the citizens that they have done so.

This should cover all controls, including financial, operational, compliance and law and order. Parliament needs to have a strategic vision and must ensure that right culture is promoted, effective communication and commitment is shown by the government. The responsibility of prevention of corruption lies with both the government and the parliament. Parliament with oversight must create proper tone, create and maintain a culture of honesty and high ethics and must establish effective controls to prevent corruption and fraud. Suffice to say that if you don\'t keep the citizens happy at the end of the day you don\'t have government. Regular attendance to the parliamentarians to all sessions of the parliament should be made mandatory, a requirement which needs to be etched into Constitution or parliamentary procedures. Good governance, effective functioning of the parliament and the development of the country are linked. Countries with effective parliament fetch premium for external foreign investments into the country further accentuating growth.

This should cover all controls, including financial, operational, compliance and law and order. Parliament needs to have a strategic vision and must ensure that right culture is promoted, effective communication and commitment is shown by the government. The responsibility of prevention of corruption lies with both the government and the parliament. Parliament with oversight must create proper tone, create and maintain a culture of honesty and high ethics and must establish effective controls to prevent corruption and fraud. Suffice to say that if you don't keep the citizens happy at the end of the day you don't have government. Regular attendance to the parliamentarians to all sessions of the parliament should be made mandatory, a requirement which needs to be etched into Constitution or parliamentary procedures. Good governance, effective functioning of the parliament and the development of the country are linked. Countries with effective parliament fetch premium for external foreign investments into the country further accentuating growth.

"Men are from mars and Women are from Venus"

2005-12-29T19:28:00.000-08:00

latest report on behaviour on internet suggests that men pursue many Internet activities more intensively than women, and that men are still first out-of-the-block in trying the latest technologies.

Compared with women, online men are more likely to check the weather, get news, get do-it-yourself information, check for sports information, get political information, get financial information, do job-related research, download software, listen to music, rate a product/person/service through an online reputation system, download music files, use a web-cam, take a class.

Compared with men, online women are more likely to use e-mail, get maps and directions, look for health and medical information, use web sites to get support for health or personal problems, get religious information.

More than men, women are enthusiastic online communicators, and they use e-mail in a more robust way. Women are more likely than men to use e-mail to write to friends and family about a variety of topics like sharing news and worries, planning events, forwarding jokes and funny stories. Women are more likely to feel satisfied with the role e-mail plays in their lives, especially when it comes to nurturing their relationships. And women include a wider range of topics and activities in their personal e-mails. Men use e-mail more than women to communicate with various kinds of organizations.

More online men than women perform online transactions. Men and women are equally likely to use the Internet to buy products and take part in online banking, but men are more likely to use the Internet to pay bills, participate in auctions, trade stocks and bonds, and pay for digital content. Men are more avid consumers than women of online information. Men look for information on a wider variety of topics and issues than women do. Men are more likely than women to use the Internet as a destination for recreation. Men are more likely to: gather material for their hobbies, read online for pleasure, take informal classes, participate in sports fantasy leagues, download music and videos, remix files, and listen to radio.

How will marketing agencies use this information to their benefit in online advertizing? What will google do differently in their search engine in order to incorporate these finding? Behaviour related changes in marketers would be interested in such data in major way.

"Corruption and Weakening Institutions"

2005-12-28T19:04:00.000-08:00

Excerpts of Naryanmurthy's speech in the second international alumni meet of National Institute of Technology in Bangalore:

"There is a strong incentive for our politicians to maintain the current status quo -- where the government is not accountable to the public on the most basic issues -- by keeping people ignorant and illiterate,"

"Corruption has become a norm in the country and our institutions — Parliament and legislatures, courts and distribution systems — have become pervaded with corruption"

On India's private radio stations are only allowed to broadcast entertainment and not news and information programmes: "There is absolutely no good reason for this restriction. Only reason is they (politicians) do not want the poor people to know what's happening in the country."

"India has the highest percentage of reservation in the world -- it is the only country where merit has been relegated to second place,"

"As a country, India has achieved political freedom but we lack economic freedom,"

"The chasm between the haves and have-nots in our country is increasing,"

A sound and well-functioning institutional framework in a country, whether in the private or public sector, acts as a reference for future economic and social progress. Strong efforts should be made to build institutions in country which are resilient to forces of corruption.

"Law and Order in Bangalore and BPO issue"

2005-12-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

A sense of Law and order in an egalitarian society would mean feeling of security to the weaker sections of the society like women, the aged people and the children. In our society the common citizens are more afraid of the police and the issues involved in dealing with them than to prevent themselves from criminals. Hence once sees that people take their own precaution and safety rather than depend upon the state to provide security.

When I was a kid we were told stories of Ramayana where in which we were told that the Kings role is not only to rule the state but also protect his citizens against criminals. So powerful it seems was the sense of justice in those stories that people would sleep with the front door of their house open without fear of criminals. Things have dramatically change since then with the egalitarian governments elected by us now are incapable of governing on one hand and on other are so weak that they cannot even assure their own citizens a sense of safety in the state.

This point was clearly highlighted in the recent BPO episode that rocked Bangalore. The state government and the Bangalore police unabashedly refused to take up their responsibilities of creating a safe and secure society and advice the citizens to have their own means of protection against criminals. One fails to understand that if the government is unable to protect its citizens and provide a civic society what is the need for such a government and what is the need to feed such police force with tax payers money.

Even the BPO case one must notice that the family with the help of the company did much of the detective work in order to catch the culprit before the police came and took over to take all the credit for having cracked the case. Often one finds that police gives flimsy excuses of outdated equipment, ill trained personnel and variety of other reasoning's for their inefficiency and inability to catch criminals swiftly and in time bound manner. The whole justice system has been subverted by this inefficiency and they have been solely responsible for creating a vicious circle of good people having to live in constant fear and tension rather than to live a peaceful and happy life.

You think of cops when you see a traffic jam, when you see people violating rules. often one finds that most traffic police are ill-trained and are themselves unaware of mechanisms for preventing congestion and flow management. Police which is the most visible front of the government is often found wanting in their interface with citizens in their inability to distinguish between a honourable citizen and anti-social criminal. Also citizens are not trained and an incentive framework is not provided for citizens to approach the police for help or resolution of conflicts, with citizens preferring to resolve issue among themselves rather than to get the justice system involved in matters. hence, on most occasions highly unresolvable conflicts enter into the legal system which in turn takes large amount of time in getting resolved further reducing the citizen confidence on the legal machinery in their country.

To further accentuate the problem is the pervasive corruption in every part of the system. Justice gets twisted in favour of Rs. 50 note at the constable level and at higher denomination at the higher levels of hierarchy leaving common citizens to believe that justice can be only accrued through monetary means and economically weaker sections do not have a right for justice. With the creation of this kind of draconian society has resulted in loss of confidence in the police system by the common man.

When the BPO issue the Bangalore police conveniently absolved themselves from any responsibility of protecting the citizens of the city. This has resulted in common people loosing complete faith in the justice system and protection of weaker section concept of the government and a major backward step from creation of a more civic and egalitarian society.

Shame on the Bangalore police and Karnataka government for shirking responsibility !!

"Burgeoning Growth"

2005-12-18T19:53:00.000-08:00

India's dream of $80 billion from the IT and BPO sector by 2008 has just been scaled up to $150 billion by 2015. In 2004, they were at $17.9 billion (2.1% of GDP). But the Nasscom-McKinsey Report 2005 has raised the magical figure even higher by forecasting the Indian IT-ITeS industry will grow to $120-$150 billion in revenues by 2015, contributing 10-12% to GDP.

While in 2002, the projected compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) running up to 2008 was pegged at 34%, in 2005, it's been lowered to just 28% (2005-10). By 2010, India will be teeming with a graduate pool of 17,73,000 in the age of 20-35 years. According to McKinsey, only 10% of arts and science graduates and 25% of engineers in India are suitable for employment by MNCs. By 2010, there would be a shortfall of 0.5 million suitable talent in Indian IT-ITeS sector.

Currently, Rs 74,000 cr of the total Rs 78,000 crore of IT-ITeS comes from software technology parks. Of the Rs 74,000 cr, 88% comes from just five cities i.e. Bangalore (37%), NCR(17%), Chennai(15%), Hyderabad (11%) and Mumbai(8%). By 2010, IT and BPO industries will have to employ an additional 1 million workers near Tier I cities and 6 lakh workers in other towns. Cost of operation in Tier II and Tier III cities is typically 15-20% lower than Tier I cities.

All these forecasts create a rosy picture of the future growth potential. Whether we will reach them will depend on how we will tackle issues relating to infrastructure, poor governance, bureaucracy and red-tapism, corruption, security and IP related issues, promotion of innovation and development of educational institutions. Infrastructure is going to be critical bane and the way out would be for companies to move into tierII cities or the governmant to put its act together. The former seems to be a better viable option than the latter.

"Rationality and Indian Behaviour"

2005-11-28T19:52:00.000-08:00

A rational person is one who uses logical reasoning in his thought processes and actions. Often one finds that a complete rational person are a very rare breed of their kind often finding his life difficult among the normal irrational ones. Most people on most occasions are highly irrational. No matter how scientific a person claims himself to be, there would be a point in time in ones life when one would have acquiesced to a irrationality around oneself.

Most of our movies promote irrationality. The concept of love is irrational.One does not have a reasoning behind why one likes a person and hates another.The tendency of people to be obsessive on a particular object of desire is completely irrational. A logical person has no reason to hate or love another person. However, movies propagate and encourage concepts of love and promote in a sense irrationality in the thought process. One sees variety of irrational scenarios being propagandized through Hindi movies and other languages, in variety of forms like the concept of love at first sight, re-incarnation in order to avenge the death, the praying of God to give life to a man dying from accident, twin lookalike brothers, etc. Most movies goers accept this with pinch of salt, while many accept this irrationality to be true and might even experiment with them in their daily life. Even the fact that the hero wins at the end against all odds is also highly irrational and the projection of the unreal creates a sense of disconnect with the audience.

Religion often promotes irrationality. Religion promotes irrational logic so as to be accepted among its followers and acceptance of supreme power. The fact that most of concepts propagated by religion such a pray to god, belief in god without proof of his existence, experience the god by doing good turn, doing penance for false doings etc are examples of irrationality propagated by religion. A religious person hence, cannot call himself a rational person, since he prays god it times of trouble with no logical explanation as to how his problem would be solved, if he were to pray god, who for all practical purpose might not even exist. However, all this irrationality has not hindered the popularity of religions. Religions baptize followers at a very young age and brain wash them to accept the irrationality that they propagate. Religions importunes upon its followers to not reason out God, but to become one with him by connecting to him. A rational person who needs reason would not accept this philosophy without a reasonably and plausible explanation. However, the fact that most of us are highly religious proves that we can accept irrationality in our daily life without having conflict with it.

Apart from this people also experience variety of phobias and irrational fears. Some are very superstitious in their daily life. For example a friend of mine would say that if he were to sit on sofa set in a particular position and watch Indians' play Cricket, Sachin would always score a century. People tend to rationalise all kinds of unscientific and non-logical behaviour and are surprise when they find others not accepting their thought process.

Politicians of all people are the most irrational people in our country. They can attribute any reason for any activity for their convenience. They have manipulated the system with twisted arguments and seemingly rational explanations of incompetence and underdevelopment. The twisted irrational thought process coupled with miniaturising all huge problems leads to suboptimal solutions and more grave problems for future. A minister would claim his fame for all good work accidentally that occur ed during his tenure and would blame the opposition for all wrong done. His followers would lovingly accept his logic without even questioning his thought process.

Hence, One often finds even the person who call himself the most rational and logical in his thought process might not be so. To promote scientific temper among the future generation one needs to promote the concept of rationality without picking fights with the propagators of concept of religion and love. The reason the society is filled with irrational behaviour is due to absence of questioning culture in our society. The society being hierarchical considers it as disrespect to the elders if they were to ask reasonable logical questions. Elders decision on most occasions are binding even if it is not reasonable or logical.

Our Society needs to move into a lesser hierarchical and more egalitarian culture of having to answer those logical questions posed by the younger generation. The respect for elders should not mean blind following of orders without questioning. The act of questioning would lead to Renaissance in Indian culture, promote scientific thought and create an lesser hierarchical and more rational society.