THE Y-AXIS by Rajesh Kumar

This article of mine is available on the Hindu Businessline. Click here to access it.

Of late I have found myself very obsessed with Alex Osterwalder's business model canvas. It seems to be all over the place - in workshops, training sessions, CEO talks in B-Schools and in generally every intellectually sounding talk! Having heard this turn business model at the turn of the century when all sort of logic-defying business ideas were bandied about as unique business models, I had become programmed to turn an instant sceptic whenever this term was used in presentations. Thanks to this refreshing new approach, which appears as smooth as Swiss Chocolate, I found myself forced to look at the 9 blocks of Osterwalder's business model which seem to present a more complete picture. Of late, I have been part of few envisioning exercises myself and found this model very handy, though I do add my own spice to it, such as using colour code in that box which reflects significant innovation and is critical for the value proposition.

I clicked this picture in the parking outside my office -I found it simple and crisp. I am not talking more, let the ad talk for itself - see below.   The medium of communication - copy on a tyre - provides an instant connect with the service being promoted, which is tyre puncture (or flat tire) repair service with a mobility. The placement of the ad in the parking area is just apt.The ad is not loaded with unnecessary detail. I was amazed by this intelligent ad! Do we really need to outsource creativity or necessarily expect only gurus to come up with brilliant advertising?!!

Okay, I agree I have been giving too much of this blog's prime real estate to the Times of India upcoming launch in Chennai. Not that I have a great love for current day TOI, but as a graduate of marketing, I feel competition in this media would make the readers great benefits. And yes, I would get to see my childhood newspaper, in my city. To be fair, others have tried to challenge the Hindu in Chennai , the Deccan Chronicle and the New Indian Express are there too, but have not been able to come up anywhere near the market leader.   As I suspected, the outdoor action has started. I noticed this advertising hoarding yesterday on my way to office. The traffic at the Turnbulls Road curve was standstill, giving ample time to click this snap.  While it does not say about what product it is advertising, the hints are that it is a Times of India ad, which is seeking attention and acting as the teaser for something to follow. The artwork is a collage of some newspaper, pres...

While International Media Group IDG has brought one of its most popular IT publications for managers CIO , subscribing to it is a pain. The first issue of CIO India was published in Nov 2005 and according to IDG , currently distributes 6000 copies across India. I wonder who gets them. Having followed US edition of CIO (It is absolutely first rate) for a while now, I was quite delighted to know there is an Indian edition too. However, try to subscribe to a paper copy. First, there is no concept of paid subscription. One need to register a request for a print subscription, and that begins an endless wait to hear whether your subscription was approved or not. (I registered in May 2007 and am still waiting to hear back from them!). And no, CIO does not sell off the shelf, it only comes into your letter box. I wish this subscription request and acceptance process is improved significantly if CIO India has to indeed make a mark. I have sent multiple emails over the last three quarte...

Richard Branson may have managed to see his Virgin Mobile being 'launched' in India via an arrangement with telecom operator Tata Indicom, but the ads being used to promote the brand are perhaps crossing the soft line of irreverence. In its quest to reach out to young audience the ads have young characters in the centre but then look at the values being propagated. In one ad a teenaged girl is seen trying to get her parents encourage her to go to Goa with a boy. Nothing wrong with the intent perhaps, but whole effort is around misleading the parents. The second ad is far more questionable. It shows a teenager hauled by a policeman for a traffic violation setting up his friend as his father and then using his friend to get away from the police. Actually between them they con the Policeman. Certainly not something to really encourage. See the below video on YouTube. (Copyright as applicable) Ethics Anyone? Related video: Richard Branson's launch stunt for V...

Of course this post is speculative in nature but then isn't that the case with lot of things :) The question is, how will market leader the Hindu react to the Times of India's proposed launch in Chennai: Do nothing, no one can shake me - 0% probability. Do nothing on the surface, work on the distribution control - 10 % probability. Start outdoors before the TOI does, buy hoarding spaces - moderate probability. Go for a drastic price cut and start a price war - almost certain to happen ( Do remember price positioning is not good but then you just lost the chance) Make the paper better - which means not saying a leading star hotel in Nungambakkam but saying Taj Coromandal instead- 10 % probability. Start publishing more color photos- 50 % probability. In all we would be keen to watch whether the Hindu would adopt a defensive strategy and try to save the turf or a very aggressive strategy and try to kill the new edition of the TOI. And how about no strategy as a strategy?

  Newspaper launches are never easy, especially in markets such as Chennai where you have a fully entrenched leader, who, for all practical purposes, has not faced any meaningful competition in a while now, and one who controls the trade with its so significant ability to influence everything connected with it. Nevertheless, having fed on Dainik Bhaskar's now legendary launch in Jaipur to challenge Rajasthan Patrika while at IMT, I am certainly keen to watch this round. We stopped taking a daily newspaper at our house few months back. Plain and simple, web appeared a good alternative option. And personally speaking, the left leaning thoughts of the Hindu did not resonate with me. Last six months have been without a newspaper for me. Cut to 1988. I was in Delhi and a school student, and Times of India was the morning breakfast with R.K. Laxman's cartoon being the opening bite. It was lobbed with clinical precision into the balcony of our 4th floor apartment by the deliver...

Comparisons can be odious I agree, but sometimes necessary too, as they happen without any effort and results are starkly different. Last week I had to visit two bank branches, one of State Bank of India and another of ICICI Bank and the experiences were so different. At ICICI Bank, I encountered a queuing machine with very confusing options, and as I stood trying to figure out how to get a token to the correct service desk, a smart looking lad appears, asks me what service I require, quickly punches a few buttons on the machine and hands me a token. Before I say thanks, he asks me whether I need a credit card. I say no, thanks. Lifetime free, he says (What a positioning!). I reach the counter, finish the address update business and head out. On my way out, again confronted by a girl, do I need a credit card.So, ergo, I declare I have one issued by ICICI and hope I would be able to peacefully, she snaps back, "which one is that- Gold?, we can give you Platinum, Titanium". I s...

So the truth is finally out- world's largest software company has accepted defeat by almost saying - their index is better than mine . Microsoft wants the search and advertising capabilities of Yahoo, which essentially means an excellent products company is seeking to integrate the capabilities of a wonderful services company. Saul Hansell of NYT wonders likens it to taking two aircraft carriers and making a new one out of the spare parts. And mind you, two aircraft carriers of different make and flags. Will this work indeed. The sad truth is that Yahoo is not just search or banner advertising. Its portfolio of services is amazingly diverse. In slightly curt business language, it is not a one trick pony. Microsoft's letter to Yahoo's board is perhaps the politest communication one has heard from MSFT in last decade. Give me your crown jewels, I need them and I know you guys need money, else.. is a one line summary. So instead of frightening Google which is going beyong j...

Sabeer Bhatia, often identified as the guy who sold Hotmail to Microsoft to make his millions, is a serial entrepreneur. Quite a few of his post-Hotmail ventures have not quite been half as successful. Arzoo became a travel agency from what it initially was, and there is nothing to say that it has really been greatly successful either. Live Documents has been a mild ripple in an unproven market of online office productivity suites, which already has Zoho and Google Docs, both getting good reviews, but seeing poor corporate adoption, which is where the money is. Now Sabeer has launched SabSeBolo , which is a teleconferencing service, where you get a sort of ten party 24X7 permanent bridge(Like MML).And yes, unlike other service providers in India such as Webex and DSNL , it is a simple sign on. Will he succeed? Is it idea , timing , execution or business model , that would make SabSeBolo be a winner? Idea : Idea is not new, but India is an exploding telecom market and conference calls f...

Ever since I read Wikinomics and Naked Conversations , weird ideas come visiting my head sometimes. When I was waiting for a train at Ernakulam Railway Station, I was watching a fellow passenger looking at his ticket. Came an idea, how cool it would be, if all train tickets stationary have a dynamic ad printing logic like Adsense, which would analyse the to and fro location and the demographic information already available on the ticket. For instance, a train ticket for Ooty purchased by two students in Chennai would print ads of suggested locations of tourist interest in Ooty. A train ticket of a couple heading for Varanasi, would print ads of Saree Shops in Varanasi, and for a very old couple carry ads of easy to locate Hotels near Sankatmochan temple. This, rather than the standard ads that come on the ticket stationary. And depending on the class of ticket purchased, an a hint of the passengers buying power can be gleaned too - all operable marketing information. Imagine how coo...

Not too long ago, I was listening to a captivating talk by Rajeev Karwal , CEO of Milagrow and one of India's most prominent names in Retail. Rajeev was talking at IIT Madras, and his argument was why and how the small retailer will continue to thrive in India. Well, my wife and I were at a shopping complex here in Chennai and we stopped at a footwear shop. My wife picked up something that caught her attention, which was fancy looking footwear on display. She wanted to try it out, and so she asked for the second piece of the pair ( not a different pair but the left foot one, while the right one was in her hand). The shopkeeper cum salesman stepped out, walked out to a shop across the lane and then appeared back with the left foot fancy chappal and gave it to her. "It was on display in my brother's shop" , he said matter-of-factly. Think about that. He did not even have one pair of chappal but half a pair. We heard about back-to-back ordering etc but no one ever boas...

Companies using sports to promote their brands is not new, not even in the field of IT. CSC has a Cycling team, SAP has been associated with Formula One car racing and Tennis , Accenture uses Tiger Woods very effectively to drive home the point and so on. However, it may be noted that most of these sports are niche in nature and none matches the reach and spread of Fifa Soccer World Cup , save for the Olympics. While Indian companies have never shied away from sponsoring sports, the spend has mostly been around cricket, and the target audience being India and Indians. This time, we notice that this barrier stands broken, with Satyam (NYSE: SAY) having signed up as a sponsor of Fifa World Cup 2010 , to be played in South Africa. Perhaps it is true in line with Indian IT companies, which have spread themselves across the world, when it comes to serving customers, hunting talent and setting up bases. It is also very proud to see an Indian company logo standing next to the usual bigtime s...

Before The Washington Post suffered it. Amit Agarwal talks about it. Rishi Raj laments it. Mani Karthik says he does not care. A zillion posts are already up on Google's recent PageRank update. After While the web is full of commentary on Google's recent PageRank update, here's some food for thought. We compared the PageRank of some of the leading IT Companies corporate websites in June and October. It is quite puzzling that Infosys.com and Accenture.com suffered a PR drop by one notch from 8 & 9 respectively to 7 & 8 now. In the same timeframe, TCS.com has gone up one level from 7 to 8 level. It is also notable that in the same period the Google reported inbound link to Infosys.com has dropped, which is quite mystifying. When one compares the Google reported backlink figures among the top names in IT industry, IBM has seen its backlink numbers jump from a high figure of 62,100 to astounding 1,11,000 which perhaps explains its PR 9, before and after. Most people...

In the last ten days or so, we have seen a spate of ads, on TV, Billboards etc announcing the rebranding of Indian Telecom operator Hutch to Vodafone. Newspapers have been talking about the huge sums that has been marked for this transformation. This NDTV report event mentions about a sum of 300 crore being earmarked for this brand makeover.The entire campaign, including creative is very tasteful and simple.The blitz appears so pervasive. However, there is branding in nooks and crannies, which is still to be done. Look at the network signature of a visitor who visited this space last night from a handheld device on Hutch network.The network is still identified as Hutch. Don't blame the brand managers though, this is one space that they may not think much about(or know about). Don't blame the network guys either, they are not incharge of the brand. It just goes onto show that such mammoth brand makeovers have more dimensions than a brand manager can possibly think about.

Few months back, a friend of mine sought to transfer some money from his ICICI Bank account to to my ICICI Bank account. We choose the most convenient route, which was an online transfer. Was it that that convenient indeed?. Read on. It so appeared that the account number I sent by mail to my friend was wrong by exactly one digit. A real costly mistake indeed. My unsuspecting friend promptly executed two transfers and the money, a sum of few thousand rupees, landed in a third account, which wasn't his intention. As soon as we learnt of the error, we reported to ICICI Bank, and surprising enough, this completely wired bank decided that this cannot be reported to the call center. One has to visit the branch. So be it we said, and dutifully filed a written report at the ICICI Branch where my friend has his account. We were advised, that the Bank would seek to reach out the third account holder, and after his/her permission , reverse the transaction. Not so simple. For months, my frien...

In response to my previous pos t on Conversational Marketing as discussed by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel in their book, I received a counterpoint from my friend Rajeev John, who is a marketing professional with one of India's truly home grown and respected consumer goods company. "Its like the Star Wars program. Extremely relevant for 2020 but irrelevant now with internet penetration still in single digits in our India.There are still (& sadly so) a lot of marketeers who think marketing is a tool to attract SEC A + consumers only. They forget (or are simply not aware) that 75% OF POPULATION STILL LIVES IN VILLAGES. Now reaching out to them & bringing into the branded fold is the real challenge." John, many thanks for the reminding us of the brutal truth. I am sure that there are others who might want to side your argument, like me. Now stepping aside this argument for a minute, let's see that there are several companies that are selling their products or se...

Subroto Bagchi was at Madras Management Association Forum yesterday and gave a captivating talk on High Performance Entrepreneurship . I would have expected a usual stuff on Entrepreneurship laced with lofty terms such as passion, idea etc only if I hadn't been following his a-spade-is-a-spade columns in magazines. Perhaps others too had, since it was a housefull. And Subroto did not disappoint them at all. With true elan, he began by asking the audience what is the foremost quality needed in an entrepreneur. Lots of hands went up, and audience provided predictable answers such as passion, idea, marketable IP such as an invention. Subrato dismissed these at once and stated that that one quality was the love for money! He ran a thirty minute film that featured three modern day entrepreneurs of very diverse type - V G Siddartha of Cafe Coffee Day , Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw of Biocon and Capt G R Gopinath of Deccan Aviation . The background and the triggers for these three to take to the...

Wikipedia defines Open Source as follows: "Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the production and design process for various goods, products, resources and technical conclusions or advice." Note the broad definition.However, in common terms, Open Source is widely perceived to be something related to software, worse still, Microsoft vs Redhat. So, when I read about a car being made ' Open Source ', I halted to read about it. At the Dutch auto-fair Auto RAI 2007, The Netherlands Society for Nature and Environment and the three technical universities of Delft, Eindhoven and Twente launched what was termed as their stimulating vision on mobility. In plain language, three universities have come together to design a car on the collaborative movement called Open Source. The car of the future is called c,mm,n (pronounced ' Common '). Essentially, that would mean, collaborative, shared designing of a car(' a car ' -isn...