Amazon Reliance & Ikea : Online Retail war in India

Who will rule India in future? A homegrown behemoth Reliance not Flipkart armed with might of Walmart has been projected in media as the probable main competitor to global online retail giant Amazon. When Sumos fight its audience who gets to enjoy the fight without fear of any loss. On the other hand there is rise of another global DIY online retailer IKEA on the horizon in Hyderabad. Don't we know that the share of online sales revenue is as low as 3% of the real brick & mortar version.

Question is who will win the war on online sales in India which has huge population under 35%? I have always maintained that the large population in India provides no dividend to the economy. Moreover a morbidly superstitious Hindu population in India is another drag on the growth of economy to make it attractive to the global investors. Hindu mythologies confuses the kids who grow up becoming parasites rather than net contributor to the economy. In the age of innovation & ideas you have to allow kids become a modern citizen who could challenge the existing cultural rituals and ancient utopias. Indian kids grow up be become unskilled confused and superstitious adults who wait for some gods to solve the everyday life problems.

The hankering for bygone utopias and funny gods make Indian kids completely useless who neither enjoy fruits of their hardwork as their legitimately earned outcome nor take responsibility for their actions. Innovations are the main driver of any economy and innovative minds needs a liberal and progressive culture. Can any Hindu tell how Imran Khan has reduced the fuel prices by 17 rupee while Indians continue to pay brutal prices to the Hindu supremacist govt?

Reliance may be the largest firm on the basis of market cap but does it enjoy the trust of the Indian population? I meet lots of current and old employees of the Reliance industries asking them about their satisfaction about their employer. Ask any Reliance employee to know how much they fear and distrust it. Can any form of retail operation sustain without earning the trust of its customers and employees? No way. Amazon may have several dissatisfied customers but it has won trust of customers as well as employees. IKEA may face cultural barriers as Indians are not known for DIY lifestyle. India being a Hindu caste-infested society which looks down upon those who work with hands by castigating them as low caste its herculean task to inculcate DIY culture. But IKEA can benefit from low cost labor in India offering great potential for sourcing base.

Reliance may have many managerial & strategic challenges compared to the professional approach of its competitors but it has the might of Indian govt on its side that it can deploy to get an unfair advantage in the market. But in the long run as we all know the market competition wins the race. 

Earn a Million Dollar from Blogging?

Strategy is the key to make a pile of money from blogging. But you can't earn a cent unless Google or Facebook makes many times more from your efforts. Those who started blogging in their youth expecting to net a catch someday could be found reading Moby Dick after a decade of rigorous work. well isn't it true that waiting for Godot was written almost a century ago? How could one forget the truth of the Happy Prince or the fiction of Atlas Shrugged? But then who could you blame, the writers of blog posts or the social media dictators who don't bother to promote anything except entertainment?

Reading writing is a serious business that fails to entertain the masses. In a world marked by the Trump-ting USA and Modified India its rare to find somber logical debates and discourses on life and living. Perhaps the masses have lost the faith in existence of God & the goodness. Perhaps the rapidly melting glaciers on the poles have led to an opposite effect on humans leading to freezing of human mind. How could iconic markedly successful people like Kate Spade & Anthony Bourdain refuse to travel the entire mile?

How could successful smart Kate & Tony shatter under the weight of living life every moment of it? Come on pump up some more entertainment that could dampen the glare of arc-lights so that humans could keep their eyes open without strain. Achievements make people stronger worthier but those can't be the only goals of life. Failures are sexy too, failing repeatedly may kill the most of us.People earn money through hard toil so that they could burn it on lazy pursuits. Well this sums up our life in the post truth world.

People are no longer entertained by the serious tales reflective of the realty of banal existence. The laborious reading-writing activity of humans have shrunk by the rise of mass media and instant pleasures of social media revolution. Human heart desires more entertainment to find meaning in the digital life. Anyone can live long if she doesn't differentiate between success & failures. No day can be boring monotonous or wasted if you know how to entertain yourself with words. Pictures can kill, embrace the words to wade through the oceans of life. 

You certainly can make your first million from blogging on the web if  the masters of the digital universe Facebook & Google permit. Mythologies are interesting but can't help in living a win-win life in the post truth world. The hoopla scores over the golden silences. Would you like to know how much money a blogger like me make after 10 years on the blogpost? Hold your breath, take a sip of cold water. I have yet to reach $10 in 10 years. Phew can someone teach me how to make a  million dollars from writing? 

Why the Online Advertising (SEM.PPC) is unable to see a galloping growth in India?

Were you frequently pissed off to read newspapers cluttered with lengthy versions of already known stories dished out by some self-righteous johnny on TV channels? Indian journos have made the social media, particularly Twitter, their core source of news-leads, beyond what they are handed out by their media owners on orders from the above. Media chaos & clutter have become insufferable burden in India. Who could be in mood for looking at advertisements and moved by them? Therefore it can be safely concluded that the remaining 50% of the Advertising budget is also going down the drain along-with the first half.

Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube & Instagram are fast emerging as the new media for targeting the youth but still the online advertising don’t seem to pick up at a scorching speed that it must. The mainstream media of TV, Print & Radio in India continue to garner the lion’s share of the total advertising spend in India. These three could collectively walk away with Rs. 54, 320 crore in 2015 against Rs 47, 490 cr in the previous year.

Did you notice fewer advertising campaigns in the Print media in 2015 India? But you couldn’t blame anyone else for the virtual clampdown on the out of home media (OOH) in the name of clutter & safety. And surely you must have noticed majority of the urban consuming class, including you, diving into a smart phone, tablet or laptop trying to kick up a discussion or catching up with breaking news.  In nutshell, all the advertisers, media moghuls and marketing experts agree that the media consumption scene is undergoing a metamorphic transformation headed towards ascendancy of the online medium over the rest.

Despite mushroom growth of domestic Online Commerce platforms and entry of Amazon in India the online advertising category has not seen the kind of spectacular growth that it deserves & the economy of India needs.  Although overwhelming majority experts & industry agree that digital advertising can target customers more efficiently than the traditional but still vast majority of advertisers have not begin to leverage its potential. Although the industry watchers forecast that this space may grow much beyond anticipated 15-20% in 2015. Let’s hope it happens for the good of India economy.

Could you tell the single major factor responsible for the poor growth of digital advertising in India? Well most would have guessed it right. It’s the Indian advertising agencies that failed to adapt to the changing media environment and create capacities & skills to guide the advertisers to go online. I wonder if you could guess the second factor that is equally responsible for slack growth in this category. Think of the profile of Indian Entrepreneur in MSME and Large & Medium sector. The lack of education and attitude towards technology of Indian Businessmen has stifled the growth of digital advertising in India.

But the single most blameworthy player in the entire saga, I call it the Gabbar in the story, is the advertising agencies that were born to handle traditional print and audio-visual media but lack the knowledge & skills to execute a great digital campaign. In my opinion the digital advertising in India would not grow at the desired pace till a new type of advertising agencies are born that understand the complexities of this exciting & economical medium.

Let’s hope Sundar Pichai & Satya Nadella could step forward and offer customized programs to educate the existing and new advertising agencies in India in the domain of digital advertising. 

Groupon Clones in India

It had to happen, anything that starts working somewhere else must be cloned and tried out in India too. It happened to organised retail, once wall mart topped Forbes list our smart business managers thought it would be easy to replicate it here, the blue collared IIM guys thought that with little deep pockets they could roll it out like a Bihar flood. No, i repeat, no retail company in India has been able to achieve there goals despite several corrections. The simple answer lies in the nature of indian consumer markets, we are not like the USA in any manner therefore how could the hope replicate an american business here?

Once again, whoever you meet these days at seminars and business dinners they would be raring to share there newest passion about groupon clone they have put together for India. Lets wait & see what happens to these indian groupons?

Indian consumer has demonstrated very clearly that except for convenience goods they are averse to buy any other stuff online. We indians buy slowly, very slowly and internet would take little more time to build up among the numbers comparable with the mobile phone. And i don't expect a guy who owns a 2G phone to buy online with mobile interface! How many subscribers have gone for 3G phones?

The most important bottleneck to the online buying through bidding is not the technology or the disposable rupee but the the prevalent trust deficit in India that has been the perpetual nemesis of the marketeers in India.

Online bid based buying would continue to be a like a multiplex film targeted at only 80 years old!