Republic of Animals !

Animals and humans share this universe but humans alone make fun of animals. Scorn, I would say, ridicule too. Have you ever seen any animal laughing at a human? Will that be behaving like us? Humans find it difficult to share things easily with its own species & almost impossible with others depending upon degree of unfamiliarity. Most animal species happily share most of the available bounty with their ilk and others. We humans extensively use animal metaphors to describe our fellow humans. The most common animal metaphor used is perhaps that of dog, cat & lion. Most of us think of themselves as a Lion and others as dogs? Let's see what's popular animal metaphors are there from the animal kingdom. Let me warn you that since its humans who run the show of civilization & creation of languages concepts etc therefore animals are still said to have been living in a kingdom and not in a republic with adult franchise.

Most countries want to become a world power more in military sense than economic. And therefore military has remained a major national asset of the nationalist people. Honey Badger reminds me of the elitist navy seals of USA or other professional killing machines part of military worldwide. Who won’t like the sweet badge of honour for killing in cold blood for enlightened-self-interest? 

Donkey has long been symbol of poor hard working classes who could never get out of the rut of feeding, sleeping, breeding revolving on the axis of relentless back braking hard labor. India is home to world’s largest population of poor people. Large numbers of people are willing to work on assurance of food alone without nay wages. You won’t be surprised that our Hindu nationalist politicians have long discovered that India is shining. The ‘secular’ politicians find India as incredible. Well India surely is an incredible country where vast majority conducts their life according to movement of planets in Sky.

Monkey is generally portrayed as an animal that resemble human race a lot depending upon its various species which is endowed with ability to learn or copy human behavior. You may have herd of folk tale of ‘Monkey & Cap Seller’ in which the trader uses Monkey’s behavior to get back his stolen merchandise from him. Well moral of the story is that those who copy for living would not win the game. A nation that discourages original thinking and promotes conformity by imitating, reengineering, technology, processes and concepts from others cannot become a world leader. It’s illogical to except that a blind follower to become leader, who will he follow?  Regimented society based on group dynamics than individual recognition has no future. It would soon be dead as a dodo.

Dogs are domesticated for their unconditional loyalty. Horse is said to be most loyal among all the animals. Can you recall a famous person who is known as Dog of X-country? Not pejoratively of course. Many people are called Lion of so & so place. Punjab my homeland has a fetish for the sobriquet of Lion of Punjab. CM of Gujarat also is called Lion of Gujarat.  United Kingdom is well known for having cats as pets. Cats are add charm to life by their presence but are not known for their loyalty.

Modern corporate media is like cats, it has no value except to add some color to the business of life & governance in a country. Media no longer resent any editorial control direct or indirect as long as it has healthy bottomline like that of a feline. Gone are the days when a book or story in media could affect amendments to constitution or force parliaments to enact new laws. These days’ cats keep playing around the house without disturbing anyone except those who are looking at them. 

2013 would be a better year than the previous!

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love – John Donne

Well I am no astrologer but New Year has to be better than the previous or India could have its very own Indian Spring. Population growth of India is running far ahead of the GDP numbers. The unprecedented growth phase stretched roughly from 90s to 2010 has ended leaving far more people clueless about their future. The Hindu Right-Wing political groups represented by RSS clones like BJP are fast losing their patience to get another bite into power at Delhi. Never before youthful India fed & brought up on large doses of glamorous dreams through a lifestyle of entertainment want money for acquiring gadgets that it can’t seem to live without. The soup is further spiked by large number of youths from the destitute class struggling to live like their friends in the upper echelons as they too have access to same media as the consuming class.

The Elections in a democracy is like a game season. Politicians would be readying for 2014 which would put the affairs of the country on back burner. Political class disconnected from majority of population seeks to segment people on the basis of caste/religion than economic or regional factors. This results in obfuscation of economic issues and emergence of identity politics to garner the votes.  Political class in India is not media savvy so the fall into trap of Bollywood style image building depicting them as super humans capable of solving ALL problems facing the region and country. Religion in India is very entrenched in everyday life so use of religion in politics is customary in an election year.

Although India has time & again refused to elect leaders who present themselves as strong & powerful but politicians continue to project them as most powerful lords. I am sure no person with basic knowledge of marketing would believe that N. Modi’s victory in Gujarat elections has anything to do with his projection as the only ‘strong & able’ person alive in India. Modi victory is assertion of Hindu pride than his personal appeal. Such phenomena are prevalent in Punjab, J&K & many other states formed on culture identity of the people.

The 2012 could well be called as the year of Media-Manipulations rather than organic civil protests. It’s customary for media to go where the news is but in India media has demonstrated its ugly power of creating news where it wasn’t.  Taking a cue from Cyrus Barocha show 2012 was ‘the- year- that- wasn’t’ from the news media perspective. People would never have known Anna or Ramdev unless media provided them relentless coverage. Media funded by vested interests & need for sensationalism went on to organize many people protests on Dehi roads. The opposition parties also leveraged their right to oppose the govt by distract the ruling coalition from task of economic development. Therefore Indian audience had to face the double whammy of useless news & economic slowdown. The media & politicians played havoc with happiness & economic health of average Indians in 2012. Current year being closer to elections would not be any better though we pray to these monsters to let us leave alone. The UPA government didn’t allow full FDI in Newsmedia and attempted to control it which is not possible due to nature of the beast. So let’s hope that India may have a quieter 2013 so that people could get to live their life away from these monsters.

Is Masala Journalism Bad Business?

“When ice freezes, all the excrement rises to the surface. And so, when the dialectic was frozen, all the sacred excrement of the dialectic came to the surface. When the future is deep-frozen – and, indeed, even the present – we shall see all the excrement come up from the past.” (Baudrillard 1994, p.26)

2012 is sliding into history in the land of Curry Munchers, India. Although the year has been pretty ordinary from economic, political & social angles but it has brought to forefront a sort of journalism which had been confined to sectarian-vernacular ghettoes of the media. I call it Masala [Spices] journalism in TV news-media. Most characteristic feature of masala- journalism style is preeminence of the style over substance. It does not matter how insignificant is the event the anchor would make it point to adulterate the facts with overdose of shrill high pitch voice, background sound effects & graphics of the screen to grab your attention.  Channels honchos believe that since majority of Indian watch Bollywood movies full of unrealism so they would seamlessly connect with shouting screaming anchors.

Mothers do give attention to crying babies but if a baby keeps crying for hours better take it to a doctor. The Masala journalism is not an isolated phenomenon but a prevalent malady afflicting the entire TV News-media in India in 2012. The English language print media for almost fifty years maintained a distinction between national & vernacular press. That boundary has been obliterated now with rise of Hindi journalism. In 80s the largest selling vernacular newspaper was non-Hindi Malaya Manorama which has been replaced by a Cow-belt Hindi language paper. 

So the growth in Cow-belt lead to spilling over of low cost journos into English media. Traditionally media in India was notorious for paying very low wages & field correspondents were supposed to hawk advertising for the publication. This invasion of English language media by Hindi trained journos brought in new way of thought & expression into the profession. Unfortunately the Cow-Belt has remained most underdeveloped part of India with large number of districts caught up in insurgency. Social conditions shape the personality of people. So these new journos adopted an attacking slandering style of interviewing people in public in the way police interrogates criminals in privacy of police stations in India. These Masala journos will keep asking you same question repeatedly & at the same time telling you that you are wrong to hold your view.  The Masala journos pretends to be educated than IAS, Senior Execs, professors & the other educated elite.

Arnab Goswami of Times Group once threatened the principal of India’s premier college St. Stephens Delhi on public television demanding that the principal must give class attendance to a student who had not attended the college. The compliant political class pressured the VC Delhi University to pass the order making an exception in the case. The principal must have lost his motivation to maintain the tradition of excellence in his institute. Masala Goswami subverted the Taj Mahal of education in India & successive generations would pay the price of his stupidity.

There is general agreement in the media czars in India that electronic media is suited for sensationalism to get viewership. So they have let loose the marauding semi-literate armies on TV screens beaming right into homes with kids watching slogans of “Hang them, Castrate the bastards” & other puerile carefully selected jargon.  All this is done to get the attention of the viewer. These blocks think that minuscule viewership of BBC & CNN in India is because they haven’t matched the profile of consumer with the offer service. So it’s profitable to offer highly spiced curries to titillate the masses.

The media managers are rare in India because the owners want complete & total control. There is an established tradition in India to hire managers for growth phase of the business. Once the business has scaled up to an economic level the managers are often ejected & replaced by a lackey or family. This in media has led to a unique challenge that editors have come back into power in a capital intensive business. The editor wants advertising revenue to grow, so a critical level of viewership would be required to gain attention of media planers. Therefore instead of creating a business strategy they get distracted by a content oriented move to lure the masses. Here they spill the curry !  The business cycle for a hindi movie has to be shorter than a 24x7 New-media.

The media czars have fallen into trap of Editorial led strategy for a capital intensive News-Media business.”The Hindu’ commands a brand value much greater & beyond the covered markets. Masala journalism can increase the TRP but it will completely distract & destroy the attention of viewers from advertising.  Why would some business advertise on a channel where the audience is always emotionally charged?  There would very poor recall scores for the advertising message presented to an emotionally charged audience.  Masala journalism is not only bad business its poor journalism also.  Media must soothe the nerves of low-income country like India instead of rabble rousing. Look at the Hindi movies, light action based comedies do more business than others. People want some peace in their life and want to eat homemade food than spicy stuff available at the street corner. 

How the politicians find what people want ?

Political parties in a democracy are answerable to the electorate goes the cliche, but do our parties undertake any scientific research to enumerate the priorities of the masses? Well in India leaders assume that majority of the people do not vote on a rational basis. Those leaders are right as the results of elections indicate.

Majority still vote for caste, religion, regional and ideological orientations. Economic issues do not seem to motivate the masses to vote in large numbers. But how do the parties find out what the people are thinking in their constituency? Politician in India seems to go by judgement approach and expert panel opinion taken from experts from within the party.

I have undertaken a focus group exercise in the youth segment to unravel their mind and the issues that they think are extremely important for the nation. The list in the order of priority is given under;

1. Population: Surprisingly no political party has talked about it in 2009 elections. What can the electorate do? Population growth remains the most critical issue that is slowing down the growth of India.

2. Respect for talent: Most participants feel that there is no room for talent & talented individuals in India. Youth is perturbed that the talented individuals do not stand a fair chance of achievement in our society. People still give too much importance to other factors over the talent of an individual. Students believe that it stifles the growth of talent, consequently growth of country.

3. Corruption: Why we have accepted bribery and corruption as part of life in India?Corruption weakens the country but no party seem to make it as an election issue and has offered no solutions to curb corruption in public life.

4. Economic policy: Major political parties do not present a clear cut industrialisation plan that could create jobs for the educated. All parties make similar noise about their economic policy.

5. Removal of poverty: Youth do not find mention of how much growth in per capita income would the political party would like to achieve in their tenure of five years.

Distribution Strategy for the MSMEs

Several Small & Medium Enterprises [MSME] go through the pain of trying to set up a distribution network and most seem to set it up by trail & error method than in a planned manner.  So you have seen many flourishing & established businesses in north India that have been struggling to strategise their distribution  network to match the sales objectives, financial strategy and the production capacity. Many firms find it impossible to balance sales force’s strengths & weaknesses to the cumbersome traditional system that it has got saddled with. 

For consumer facing business it’s extremely critical to leverage the distribution network in order to stay competitive for a medium to long term. The myth of financial leverage associated with existing trade channels has long been dispelled by many players across India. Just having a good product, an attractive trade policy and transport network is no longer enough. You need to have great packaging, trained sales force, marketing support and strategic & tactical plan to get your share of the market. You need to benchmark  certain percent of repeat sales from your market otherwise you may look like those primary agriculturists who used to burn the jungles and cultivate it once and then move on to the new pastures. 

You must ask yourself how much repeat sales are you getting from your served markets and which direction you are headed? Generally we start thinking about marketing & sales after manufacturing has been taken care of.  Recently I came across a firm from ludhiana, Punjab that faced classical dilemma. The CEO wanted a sales & Marketing network that could handle higher volumes, whereas the Sales & Marketing Head would blame bad production planning for poor sales. The conflict between production & marketing is normal until the organization is not riddled with inventories.

Having no inventories or moving all your production could not be the aim of a good CEO/CMO, you must strive to get the max share of market on a given day & plan for that. If you are happy with moving everything you make then you are complacent about the competition just eating away your share. That in turn would lead to fierce competition in future.

It’s wise to plan marketing well in advance & test the network before you get into real battle. Integrate all nodes of supply chain into one whole with help of readily available solutions. Must look for contract manufacturing and concentrate on brand building and supply chain. There are many suppliers for manufacturing operations available but hardly any for managing the distribution in a manner that amy suit your growth plan.

Start up companies must negotiate the trap of creating a corporate brand in comparison to product brand. A product brand is easier to market than communicate the umbrella brand. I have observed many SMEs trying to do a corporate brand. Most ludhiana based hosiery & apparels companies suffer from this problem they spread their brand too thin. They thought they were emulating a Nike or Adidas without understanding the nature of those companies. Its necessary to have a well oiled distribution network served by a motivated sales & marketing team to match the competition in the growing India.

Political Giants & Media Monsters !

Media and the Political players are like married couple. Both understand each other’s temptations so readily forgive the flings unless it becomes damaging affair for either of the stakeholder.  They fight but make up soon for sake of continuation of the relationship with renewed vow to support each other every time.  Like most marriages this too is an unequal relationship wherein the political player can lose reputation and elections but the media firm can lose its existence. 

Politicians need media to put across their promotional communication to citizens at large and media need them for advertising money and sensational content. News Channels use no holds barred approach to find content that brings highest TRP to their business so that they could charge premium from advertisers. Therefore the so called Breaking News stories have not much to do with journalistic mission or nation building pronouncements for sake of audience benefit but a direct greedy tactic to get better TRP for raking in the moolah.

Let us also resolve the conundrum of politics for nation and people or politics for pure self aggrandizement.  In my considered opinion all Political players work for themselves only and some of them are more open to sharing the windfall gains with some number of people. There is no political party that has worked for all the people of a country. Show me one and I’ll show you people the victimized and marginalized in some clear manner.

Let’s get back to the issue of how political parties should handle media or leverage the communication opportunities presented to them. Firstly in pays to have own dedicated mass media machine that is run professionally. Most parties in democracies have ‘close’ linkages with media houses but since last decade in India many parties own pretty powerful media monsters of their own to unleash at the opponents. The serious weakness in all those strategic assets is lack of professionalism as toadies generally lack competence to get audience interest. Such dedicated media firms must be run by professionals with Editorial policy control with the party. Aligning with an outside media firm is more expensive & less effective.

Political players generally get carried away by the media attention and tend to speak endlessly on any topic under the sun. Have you ever heard a politician say on camera that they need some time to answer the question if the muck racking seems to be working to their advantage? When you target the opponent it’s better to go prepared for your best shot. You must always depend on written prepared communication for better results and always desist from off the cuff shibboleths.

Political parties must plan the media rendezvous and must not exceed a given limit. Please note that more communication may lead to more confusion so in order to have positive impression on masses keep all political communication around few specific points that a binds your politics with your target audience.  A political player must avoid expressing views on topics that strengthen the opponent camp as bad publicity is also welcome publicity in politics.

Finally political parties would benefit if the work of communication management be left to professionals than party managers because the insiders can’t have a 360 degree view of a communication situation. 

Skill Development & India: Challenges !

Would you like to become someone who is looked down upon in society? Say an ambulance chaser? Just imagine that you have a choice to become a doctor or a fashion designer, and the society you live in accords more respect to a doctor, would you prefer the later route? Besides livelihood people work hard to earn respect of society around them. Can you say I bought a Ferrari by selling contraband? People are identified by their profession and skills so skills are important part of what a person is? Isn’t it?

Government of India has realized that no economic development is possible without inculcating critical skills in people of India. Economic growth based on capital has limitations as compared to skills the capital as resource is less impact on sustainable growth. CK Prahalad & Gary Hemel introduced the concept of Core Competencies into Management literature. Michael Porter, another strategy stalwart, advised many governments to persuade them to build a Competitive Advantage for their economy and companies.  Presence of large number people having knowledge of English language available at low cost provided  competitive advantage to India in the BPO sector for couple of decades. China took few years to scale up their assembly & manufacturing on the basis of manual skills present in the Chinese people. Indian people on the other hand don’t seem to have manual skills needed for achieving success in manufacturing space.

Ustad Ahmad Lahouri a Persian is the architect behind India’s iconic Taj Mahal built during Moghul period. Silks in India come from Karnataka as people have traditional skills in silk rearing & weaving Punjab has grey yarn spinning industry as cotton is grown in large quantities here.  Religious men from Hinduism & Islam claim to predict your future on the basis of their knowledge of astrology etc.  But skills in India have been associated with caste classification of society as per the Hindu belief system. And perhaps the caste system is the culprit for vanishing of skills among the people. Another view is that since the British ruled India for couple of centuries wanted to prepare clerical slaves for the Empire, so they manipulated the education system to produce educated people with just average communication skills rather than preparing masses for vocations as the British wanted to flood the made in UK goods into India.

Well past is past! Presently most Indians prefer to work on white collar jobs rather work with their hands. It’s rare to find a great carpenter or blacksmith in India. Why? Because when a carpenter’s child gets a clerical job then he would not be called a carpenter but a clerk. A clerk or babu is considered a more respectable profession in India as per caste system. Therefore thousands of engineers graduating from technical universities can score exceptionally high marks in written exams but hardly anyone can use hands to fix a machine.  Unless the government addresses the social stigma attached to skilled people not many would be prepared to learn the skills required by India for nation building. India can create national level competitions every month in various critical skills and honor the winners with large sum of money. Higher income can diminish the hurt involved in learning new skills in caste ridden medieval society of India.