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Showing posts from 2021

Performance Marketing Exercise - Watching Fishes that Can Swim!

The joke goes back to when we were engineering students. A highly respected professor, who inspired awe in Mechanical Engineering students had just finished teaching concepts of IC Engine and left for home in his car. The car unfortunately broke down near the hostel, and the professor had to arrange a mechanic. It was a strange sight of two types of experts - one who probably know all about the mechanics of a car engine but could not figure out what was wrong with his own car, and the second(mechanic) - who knew how to get the car started, but probably knew little about the calculations of valve timing or the firing sequence of cylinders. Paradox, isn't it? Digital Marketing today has exactly these two types of 'experts'. Unfortunately, the industry needs practitioners one can interweave conceptual understanding backed by hands on expertise on tools and techniques - knowing one of the two is not enough.  It is with this intent that we subjected students of Martech career tr

Traditional Retail is the Next Big Business Transformation Story, and Oops! We almost Missed it!!

For way too long, observers in business transformation space have kept their telescope intently focused on large, billion-dollar enterprises. The unintended consequence of this telescope vision is that small enterprises, that are all around us, have been missed. We can contend that maybe something akin of a ‘periscopic view’ that allows for a 360 scan of the neighbourhood is required to observe something remarkable that is taking place next to us. However, to understand this in proper context, we must step back and look at the waves of technology adoption and its impact on the businesses. In the initial years of IT adoption, or computerization as it was called then, was primarily a functional level adoption in large organisations in the West, be it Banks (transactional data of customers), Hospitals (patient records management), Manufacturing (production planning or inventory) or Insurance companies (claims processing). It was all about efficiency. In the next wave, organisations took

Customer Experience is Deceptively Simple and Deviously Complex, but, Unavoidable Part of the Deal

 Cornflakes are not very preferred breakfast in my house so very often we don't even have it in stock. So this morning when I told my daughter I am going out to get a pack, she insisted I get the plain flavour. She reminded me specifically not to get the honey flavour. I assumed this is because she did not like the honey flavour which I seem to have bought the previous time.  What happened next is quite intriguing. Not only did she pour cornflakes and milk in the bowl, she also poured a large spoon of honey on top. I asked her the reason - "that's the  right way  to eat cornflakes", she insisted.  The brand would read this act of pouring honey in cornflakes as potential demand for honey flavoured cornflakes - the agency would helpfully bring in the supporting data probably - but only one problem -  this customer cluster does not want it, they want to  experience  adding the honey to it! Many brands still sell by deconstructing their physical product - CPU, RAM, Screen