Will Walmart do to big Indian retailers what Samsung, LG did to BPL, Videocons?

Indian corporate has not understood that mass marketing in India is completely a different ball game as compared to the developed countries. India is unique diverse country therefore mass marketing needs qualified strategic approach different from the west. Our masses are divided by many factors other than economic or color of skin. Therefore despite opening up of the organised retail almost a couple of decades ago and entry of India's largest business houses alongwith unprecedented GDP growth resulting into 300 million middle class no domestic retailer can claim victory. Most companies are operating at scaled down version gasping for breath. In fact the large players in retail industry in India are looking forward to government's nod to FDI in multi-brand so that they could sell their companies to Walmart & Carreffour.  

Indians people lack the social skills to run service industries based on trust. See what is happening in our service sector like telecom, electricity, education & medical services etc. Service sector survives on values like trust, fairplay, equality & honesty. We have many religions, castes, languages, skins colors, eating habits but most uniting feature of our Indian society is overwhelming distrust of other. We put too much currency on smart play over fairplay. One retail company believes that India was a Sone Ki Chiriya ( Gold Sparrow) & they shall once again strive to achieve it. I would prefer India to be a Sone Ka Hathi ( Elephant of Gold).

We must keep in mind that we are not USA or Europe where people generally trust each other. We are a society that’s fractured by insidious mistrust that keeps people from behaving like a cohesive them. First step towards success of retail is to build a trustworthy team that in turn could inspire trust of the buyers, Till such mindset is achieved even Walmart would have to struggle in Indian market. Without inculcation of pride among the team working at the outlets its impossible to run such an operation.

If you examine the reasons for failure of organized retail in India many factors have been cited by various experts but no one has pointed out the most critical issue of absence of trust as the prime culprit. After all there is enough growth in economy leading to healthy demand for goods & services, some players have deepest pockets too, there is reasonably good transport backbone and India has quite a few well established fmcg majors present for long enough periods too.

We witnessed huge customer interest in buying at such outlets in the beginning & any research could reveal that customers could return to buy from organized retail if the players could get their act together. Quantity, prices, packaging, buying convenience, availability, variety and experience are few given factors that are in favor of organized retail.

Though most retail players failed due to absence of managerial competency for such operations particularly in marketing function lacked the understanding & creativity required to maintain a robust interest of customers in the stores. Across the board players focused on product images to lure the customers without strategizing the brand pull in an effective manner.

I have deep conviction that most Indian retail players would happily sell off their unmanageable companies to the new entrant into the market. Without exception Indian companies lack the competencies to take on the competition in b2c space. We are heading into times when Indian corporations would be relegated to b2b space whereas b2c would be dominated by the global giants. World's largest democracy would have global companies operating in b2c arena going into next decade. 

Watch the Stars on your Sales Team

Whenever you want to pump up your sales team, take them to the nearest multiplex to enjoy a hindi potboiler. Hindi cinema has predictable storyline comprising a hero, heroine and the ubiquitous villain. You would wonder how it would help in improving the target achievement. Well let me explain the relationship. The sales guy (hero) has to constantly fight the villain (competition) to wrest the heroine, which is the sales target. And the story is complete with few songs & dances. Therefore lots of rehearsals would be required before the actors face the audience. So training sales team can not be a onetime activity, it must be an ongoing process.

India is land of SMEs and these businesses face unique challenges, particularly in organizing the sales & marketing function. Many a SMEs that have regional & national sales organizations are still straddled with teams that were relevant 20 years ago.  Sales teams are full of people who have minimal education & have never received formal training. Such teams function in a loose bureaucratic manner and lack creativity essential for real success in the market.

Few years ago I got an assignment reengineer a b2b sales team at an enterprise led by an amiable technocrat engaged in manufacturing of capital equipment of high speed packaging machines for FMCG companies. When they decided to scale up their manufacturing operation sales team refused to generate enough orders. Such businesses traditionally depended on agents led sales team to generate orders while they concentrated on manufacturing & finance. Most companies are currently going through this transition of restructuring their sales teams from agent led model to captive & committed sales force. If your company also depends on agent led least control model then chances are that you may have to invest more time in training the sales-force to achieve targets & give a real fight to competition. But shifting from existing traditional sales teams to modern hyperactive sales teams needs careful planning. Agent based teams are hardest to control and scaling them up is extremely difficult.

Another company engaged in manufacturing of bath fitting had similar problems as half of their production was dependent on one agent only over whom they had no control. Such challenges are to me met with robust knowledge management systems. It is time to organize professional sales teams rather than depending upon self taught sales people.

There is an interesting case of one of my client in b2c space where the sales & marketing head refused to achieve the higher targets & kept pointing figures in the direction of poor product quality & commercial issues. It is common for sales team to blame everyone else for non achievement of higher targets except their own limitations. And generally no company would take head on with their stars on the sales team. The way out is periodic training in sales tactics & motivation of the team.

Several SMEs are in awe of the power & hold of their sales people on the market. The company is held hostage to the ways of the existing team that controls the top line. There is need to create & train the sales teams to face the challenges of the contemporary market scenario in India. SMEs need to audit their sales team periodically and organize them based on their objectives such as nature of the competition, product handled, type of market and demand structure in the market. The top management must keep two paces ahead of their sales force to get the desired results. Companies need to have a set calendar of training for sales team to achieve the stretch targets

Its time for Marketing

We assist our clients to grow fast by strategizing their marketing for

Optimal Returns on Marketing Investments

You would agree that in order to continue to thrive, companies must acquire, satisfy and retain customers. It’s the Marketing function that usually does that job for you. Does your marketing team have enough innovative ideas to beat the competition? Are you satisfied with the motivation level of your Sales team? Have you identified your star products needed to convey your branding to customers? Does your marketing communication reflect your vision clearly?

All excellent companies face such situations when they examine their portfolio & identify the stars. This involves review of your Marketing plan? Don’t you think it’s time to revisit the plan to infuse new life in your Marketing & Sales teams? We would be another support to you for communicating your thoughts to you sales & marketing team.  

A Strategic approach to marketing: A comprehensive marketing plan differentiates a great company from just good ones. Anahad MC helps you formulate a marketing strategy that reflects the needs, interests, habits, and behaviors of your customer through research.

Please be assured that while plan for long term objectives we never lose sight of short term targets. We would assist you on cutting the wasteful expenditure so that you won’t have to expand the marketing budgets. We would assist you on significantly improving the quality of marketing communications & boost up morale of the sales team.

AnahadMC assists its clients to have a strategic view of marketing to take on the competition. You would get better return on marketing investment. We specialize in measuring and improving marketing productivity and developing strategies for driving top-line growth through innovative marketing. We serve both B2B & B2C clients across several sectors.

Better Quality Marketing Communications: You must have noticed that some companies do not have a clear plan or strategy to achieve their marketing goals. Several companies follow a trial & error approach. Some try following the competition with the hope to survive & beat them at it someday? Others may invest in advertising such as yellow pages, print, radio, television & internet without setting clear objectives. Isn’t it? You would agree that without research, planning and analysis, the marketing efforts could lead to huge wastage of resources thereby hurting a healthy top line.

Sales Motivation Training: Sales is an exhaustive profession that depends upon psychological motivation of the each member on the team.  Sales teams have often been referred to as Sales Forces. This requires periodic timely interventions on sales tactics to enable them achieve targets.   Do you want your sales team to become a true force?

Differentiation thru Innovations: Innovation is the key to success. We would design marketing innovations as per your demand in any area of product, packaging, promotions, selling, new launches & branding to bolster your positioning & enhanced productivity. Innovations help in cutting lot of costs from the marketing budget.

Your marketing must always convey your message consistently to your customers. Our integrated marketing approach consists of understanding your & customer’s needs, developing a marketing strategy, building and implementing an integrated marketing plan, and tracking the results. Although the process appears to be simple, most companies have a hard time developing a marketing strategy that includes an interactive approach that actually ENGAGES the prospects & customers.

Please feel free to call us anytime as per your convenient timing. Thank you,

Gurinder S. Ahluwalia

E: guriahluwalia@gmail.com

P: 9417723313, 0172 4679791

Political Marketing lessons from SP’s UP victory in 2012 Elections

There have been several political & journalistic explanations flying around in media of the stunning victory of Samajwadi Party in UP 2012 but nothing much has been said from a purely marketing point of view.  How Akhilesh got it right & Rahul could not? Majority opinion blames Congress party’s lack of feet-on –street. Well then by this logic the BJP should have fared better as it always has the advantage in this department. On the contrary it could only perform equal to the Congress party in UP.  

Let me attempt to explain the SP’s victory in UP elections 2012 in the light of marketing theory & practice. Firstly let us examine the benefits of listening more to core voters during election mode. Most journos, political pundits & politicians are lamenting the lack of INC cadres on the ground in UP to get the citizens vote in favor of party despite high recall levels & awareness generated through media & personal campaigning. In my opinion & from marketing perspective it is incorrect to blame lack of troop numbers in such situations. No size of team could push a ‘bad’ product or service that customers do not want.  As I have mentioned above that BJP has always had the benefit of using RSS cadres but it has not been able to get past the pole first.  INC did not got enough votes due to lack of Feet-on-Street in UP but because it could not target differentiated offers to various segments in such huge market.

Secondly most politicians do not have any idea how much publicity they should garner. It has been proven time & again in India and globally that political players must follow classic marketing concepts when using marketing tools. Excessive publicity could harm the advertiser seriously. I have pointing it out this since NDA’s ‘India Shining’ days and recently during Punjab 2012 elections too. SAD-BJP alliance had almost hurt its prospects in the run up to elections with overdose of publicity during pre-campaign phase. Had PPCCI prompted SAD alliance in Punjab to advertise with greater frequency the results would have been different?

Every marketer knows full well that when a new entrant or rank follower try to expand the category by accentuated activity to dislodge the leader then the number two in the market benefits more than the aspirant in the short run. INC led by Rahul Gandhi failed to portray itself as an alternative to the market leader BSP therefore all its efforts went on to benefit SP. Now if INC maintains the same momentum in UP then it could have great results from UP in 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Rahul Gandhi must continue his campaign in UP without any interval to get to numero uno place in UP 2014.

Couple of marketing lessons from UP 2012 elections are that size of cadres did not fatally restrict Rahul Gandhi from controlling UP  and secondly marketing thrives on ‘newness’ of the campaign and Congress failed to differentiate their product from the competition. 

Enlightened Self Interest: Fair or Foul

Technology & knowledge for a long period in human civilization remained an exclusive preserve of the elite. The elite forbade common man to get anywhere close to getting access to knowledge so as to maintain their stranglehold of few vicious people on the entire population with the sole aim of exploiting the people & keeping them poor & sad. There are numerous incidents in Indian mythology & history that points to existence of such abhorrent practices.

Despite being an Indian myself I am appalled by the ‘divide & rule policy’ propounded by a court teacher by the name of Manu in his work Manu-smriti that in my opinion is the main reason for most of the unfortunate happenings in our past. How could you take away self pride of millions of natives in the pretext of high or low caste and then except them to defend themselves against foreign invasion? Such divisions in society resulted in vast majority of Indians losing all self respect and pride in their talents & skills. Thus it led to establishment of hideous social structure based on master & slave relationship. The philosophy got further institutionalized with marching social rituals of folding hands, touching feet of authority & burning the dead.

No wonder that whenever India was attacked by foreign invaders, we lost every time. Why? How so many people brought up on two famous war epics of Mahabharta & Ramayana, could lose on the battlefield?  I wonder how we forget our Chandragupta & Eklavaya and remember Chanakya & Daroncharya? Who is more important achiever or the teacher?  We need to find answers so that our future could be better than our past.

India needs double digit growth for a couple of decades to be able to get noticed & counted among respectable countries in the world. India was never ‘shining’ despite projection by some politicians for sake of getting back into power. Even they agreed privately about the real state of economy. In order to achieve continuous double digit growth, most if not all Indians must agree on basics of progress. Firstly we must guard against those leaders who do not speak truth generally. I mean we could live with those who speak more often than lies. We must reject politician who keep their own enlightened self interest before the national interest of India. Of late we have seen politicians & people alike who would not mind hurting India for their own sake. Enlightened self interest must be aligned with social objectives of our India.  

Desi elections in 2012

Desi elections in Digital Age

Punjab recorded the highest turnout of voters (77%) during an election year that allowed no blaring speakers, road shows, high decibel advertising campaigns and minimal social media promotions. Even so, a significant number of youth and female voters came out to state their choice.  

What can we infer from this positive response to a dismal lack of the politics of persuasion?  

The great India divide between the think-global; act-local and Bharat segment of the Indian electorate was bridged to an extent by mobile media penetration but (Alas!) the internet does not network them seamlessly. This despite the fact that India has one of the biggest presence on social networking sites. At the last count, it was 38 million active Facebook users, 13 million Twitter, 12 million LinkedIn and 4 million Google + users.   

Political marketing strategists in India have been using internet-based solutions since National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA’s) India Shining campaign in 1990s.  Micro blogging, voice over internet protocol (VOIP) and social media platforms were used extensively during the subsequent elections. But surprisingly, modern technology has not found wide-scale use during the political campaigning in the five states of Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa, Manipur and Uttar Pardesh.  

We did not see any YouTube videos going viral in Punjab or Uttrakhand. Jassi Khangura, the Congress candidate from Halka Dakha constituency in Punjab although kept a very sticky profile on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/Jassikhanguramla) and had an equally impressive website (http://www.jassikhangura.com/) his poll managers failed to make the most of it during the campaign period.

To some extent the Election Commission’s model code of conduct can be blamed for it. It bars all political parties from putting out outdoor hoardings, posters and banners, or making public proclamations and promises ahead of the polls, a media vacuum that astute poll managers could have easily filled with a clever use of the digital medium. Sadly, this was nowhere in evidence.  

Indeed, when Akhilesh Yadav came out with a full-page print campaign in a leading daily in December inviting his constituents to “voice their thoughts and questions” through email, Facebook or Twitter accounts, one expected that his minions would at least update his account but save for a few videos this more less frequently than expected.      

   

Repetitive forms of campaigning can make politicians net savvy, cynical or desperate, but in Samajvadi Party’s case the use of "guerilla marketing" through Facebook and Twitter was completely lack-lustre. Ditto for Congress Party, while Behen Mayavati’s Bahujan Samaj Party has yet to make its debut on Facebook.   

In neighbouring Punjab, Shiromani Akali Dal’s (SAD) campaign hinged precariously on their success in the 2007 elections and comprised of nothing more than a string of unimaginative, achievement- listing claims, that sounded hollow, to say the least. This time round however, the game plan may not really pay off, as voter profile has changed significantly during the interim.

Individually, both SAD and Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) felt comfortable using conventional media to persuade voters to bring them back to power. Each took a 360 degree approach, evident in the use of integrated marketing communication to connect with voter segments, across territories, with very little, if any, use of the social media websites.

In contrast, Punjab Pardesh Congress Committee tried injecting humor to leverage anti-incumbency with a viral campaign, released in both online and offline format, albeit with disastrous consequences. They chose a unique political advertising strategy featuring two male caricatures, Jeeta & Jaggi, to carry forth their messages to the denizens, forgetting that the happy-go-lucky Punjabis are also overly sensitive and take affront easily. They forgot, to their detriment that the stereotypical portrayal may not work in a scenario where Manmohan Singh’s (MMS) suave image has already cut through the boisterous hyperbolic persona of BJP MP from Amritsar, Navjot Singh Sidhu. Reports are that in three days of its debut, MMS’s Facebook profile managed to garner 23,968 followers.  

Voters were quick to take umbrage at the turbaned, lathi-wielding Punjabi mascot who posed dumber-than-dumb questions. The campaign lost steam mid-way and had to be eventually abandoned. Humour sells only when it’s saleable humour. PPCC advertising campaign instead raised a sad spectre that no one appearing willing to buy into. To also lacked an identifiable core strategy and coherence. 

This is an important lesson for the users of digital medium. It’s not just cost-effective, it’s also highly interactive. All offending piece can quickly be taken off the medium. Digital also yield accurate data – more accurate than any other conventional medium – that can be used to engage different segments different and the results of all these efforts are also immediately observable and measurable.

Twitter is a more reactive platform, which is one reason why it’s more effectively used by Indian politicians. The old joke doing the round of political circles is that Shashi Tharoor’s career ended the day he started tweeting. But of course there can be other more effective ways of using social media - to collect links of events and news stories; air personal opinions; to post video links of pad yatras and door-to-door campaigning; and invite reactions and comments to have a two-way communication with one’s constituents and stay in the reckoning. Other imaginative uses could be gathering e-petitions and endorsers digitally, or for recruiting youth volunteers.

Political advertising came into its own from the days Rajiv Gandhi hired Lintas Bombay to handle the Party’s public image. Thereafter, others took cue and Samajwadi Party came out with a print campaign featuring Amitabh Bachchan, followed by National Democratic Alliance’s ‘India Shining’ campaign by Grey Worldwide that did create a buzz but, did not deliver the goods and NDA lost the 2004 elections. And therein, hangs a tale; a different tale.

Ground rules of political campaigning 

Rule No#1. One size does not fit all. Don’t have ‘one message’ for all voters. Craft different messages for different voter segments.

Rule No#2. Good work doesn’t always lead to good results. Don’t make the mistake of blowing your own trumpet.  The voters are very well-informed these days. They will see through the smokescreen and reject your efforts, outright.

Rule No#3. Start second to finish first. Wait for the challenger campaign to kick-off and study its impact. A psychographic profile of Indian voters should tell you that we harbor a huge trust deficit. If you are in the opposition, you can use that to your advantage. Greater share of voice, without equivalent share of mind and heart does not lead to positive outcomes.

Fixed vs. floating. In your message, try to woo the fence-sitters. They are the game changers. 

Don’t just do it for a lark. Everybody is not Navjot Singh Sidhu or Shekhar Suman. Don’t go overboard with your humour dose.