More Telecom Lessons
Business Strategy

More Telecom Lessons

The last time I wrote in this column about the telecom business, a senior person from within the business called saying he wanted to salute my courage – the ‘fools rush in where telecom experts fear to tread’ sort of courage. I probably have a death wish, so here I am again, venturing an opinion on the ‘hot topic’ of Reliance Infocom’s proposition to consumers, and what works and does not work with Indian consumers. In my line of work, there is a lot of agonizing about whether enough alternate ways of playing in any market have been explored. Yet there is a significant gap that exists between the aspiration of ‘changing the rules of the game’ and the actual development of a revolutionary business strategy to achieve it. The same old way of looking at consumers – same old segmenting variables, same old pricing paradigms, same old obsession with […]

April 21, 2003 0 Comments
“Mass or Class”?
Business Strategy

“Mass or Class”?

Before CK Prahalad described the ‘poor’, as an opportunity in the Harvard Business Review, and coined the elegant phrase ” the bottom of the pyramid” to describe the large mass of poor people in the world, companies and their consultants used to spend lots of time and effort trying to define the size of the Indian market – is it 400 million people? Or a mere150 million? Consulting firms used say that international experience shows that markets “take off’ when per capita income of about 2000 USD PPP is achieved. Today, the line seems to be “there is a lot of pent up demand in the lower income, and if you find the right strategy to tap the bottom of the pyramid, then the market in India could explode”.  Is this new untested wisdom? As far as I remember, back in the1980s, Nirma was the first to recognize it. They […]

March 24, 2003 0 Comments
Here’s to Co-Opetition
Business Strategy

Here’s to Co-Opetition

It is with surprise that I read a recent spate of articles in the business press about one of the jewels in our crown – the dairy co-operative sector, of which Amul is the most celebrated offspring of the illustrious parent NDDB. “NDDB: A dream gone sour for Dr Kurien”, says one headline. It contains an interview with Dr Kurien, the founding father of the dairy co-operative sector, criticising the National Dairy Development Board’s decision to float a subsidiary marketing company, which would partner with state level dairy co-operative federations in the form of joint ventures. According to NDDB, this is a move designed to strengthen the marketing capability of the co-operative sector. Dr Kurien agrees that “most federations, unlike Amul, were not professionally managed”, but feels that NDDB should not step beyond its role as a funding agency. I am a bit puzzled. If the marketing arms of the […]

December 14, 2002 0 Comments
Walking the Talk on Service
Business Strategy

Walking the Talk on Service

Services are in. I am told that the only part of our economy that is thriving is services. And that even if you are marketing ‘hard goods’ like consumer durables or office automation equipment, in this new world of product parity, the service package that comes along with it is a bigger driver of market share and margins. However in practice, it appears that the actual design of services is quite disconnected from what the consumer actually wants. A lot of service initiatives seem designed to address the frills but not deal with the fundamentals. And even the frills are not perfectly frilly, if the highly personalised letters I get from hotels and airlines and travel agents and banks are any indication. They press the flesh in print very well, with the almost hand written signature which I am sure costs a lot to print, but they don’t bother to […]

November 14, 2002 0 Comments
Waiting for Kalki – I
Business Strategy

Waiting for Kalki – I

But then India has always been about mixed verdicts. Talk to a lot of business people, and the cynical will tell you “this is the end, send your children out of the country there is no future here”. The more pragmatic will draw attention to examples of pockets of peace and prosperity defined either by business segments or geographic pockets or select companies. As always, everything you say of India, the opposite is also true. Economic and political diversity is increasing between states, and there is every combination of economic performance, political ideology, and business friendliness existing. Even within states there are oases and deserts. Ask any sales manager in any business to analyse the business and he will confirm it. So that’s the first clue to surviving the short term. Waiting for Kalki in the form of 8% or more high quality growth which will bring universal salvation is […]

April 22, 2002 0 Comments
The China Market Opportunity
Business Strategy

The China Market Opportunity

Dominique Turcq, a McKinsey consultant, described India and China as “Asia’s Non Identical Twins” – many similarities, and yet starkly different too. This phrase leapt to my mind on a recent visit to China. While today, the economic differences between India and China are very stark (all we need to do is drive through Shanghai or look at the economic indices), the similarity in the structure and culture of these markets is very real too. This makes for a genuine opportunity (not one that is defined by hype and hope) for Indian companies to leverage their business experience and skills to create businesses in China which can be at least as large as what they have in India. Like India, China is a complex multi tiered market in various simultaneous stages of evolution – the bullock cart to car continuum, and the Government to MNC continuum co-existing, be it healthcare […]

March 18, 2002 0 Comments
The Quality of Market Performance
Business Strategy

The Quality of Market Performance

It is corporate results time again, and stock market analysts are busy analysing the state of the markets – the markets that they spend their time worrying about and the markets that I spend my time worrying about. I used to wonder if there really was a connect between the two, a thought that was wonderfully captured in an Economic Times headline of a few years ago: “The Sensex is driven by neither sense nor sex”! However this is a new age, and I can’t but help notice how much more involved and aware stock market analysts and fund managers are about what is happening in consumer markets. They know their retail audit data very well and have more up to date analyses of segment and category wise aggregate demand than I do; they track market shares with the same tenacity as brand managers, and they ask a gamut of […]

January 14, 2002 0 Comments
The Customer Religion
Business Strategy

The Customer Religion

A business leader with a wry sense of humour recently observed that since the main reason being given by almost all businesses for slow consumer sales was the delay in the festival season and the fewer auspicious dates for marriages, the Hindu calendar should figure as a key variable for annual sales forecasting. I guess a corollary to that is that one of the key routes to stimulating market growth would be to lobby with the Hindu high priests and persuade them to be a wee bit more market friendly in their interpretation of the stars! Having determined that astrology and sentimentality (of the consumer confidence kind) can’t be cured in the short term at least, corporate speak is now about surviving and emerging stronger from this continuing slowdown, through “better customer understanding” and “innovation”. I would have felt a lot better if the connection between the two were made […]

November 14, 2001 0 Comments
The Business of Branding
Business Strategy

The Business of Branding

The last time I wrote in this column about the telecom business, a senior person from within the business called saying he wanted to salute my courage – the ‘fools rush in where telecom experts fear to tread’ sort of courage. I probably have a death wish, so here I am again, venturing an opinion on the ‘hot topic’ of Reliance Infocom’s proposition to consumers, and what works and does not work with Indian consumers. In my line of work, there is a lot of agonizing about whether enough alternate ways of playing in any market have been explored. Yet there is a significant gap that exists between the aspiration of ‘changing the rules of the game’ and the actual development of a revolutionary business strategy to achieve it. The same old way of looking at consumers – same old segmenting variables, same old pricing paradigms, same old obsession with […]

June 14, 2001 0 Comments
When The Going Gets Tough
Business Strategy

When The Going Gets Tough

It is the winter of our discontent again, as the pendulum of consumer demand journeys from the ‘there’s lots more where this came from’ end to the ‘Wonder where it disappeared’ end. For many of the A league companies, even the game of maintaining bottom line growth, despite flagging top line growth, has been played out. There is a limit to which the costs or operational efficiencies can be extracted from a given business system. For many less agile companies, the red ink is happening, as the overall growth of their market slows down, and their more aggressive competitors gobble up market share. There is bad news affecting all our four consumption sectors. Negligible agricultural growth affecting rural consumption, stock market crash and slow industrial growth affecting urban consumption, the US slowdown affecting the infotech dependent consumption sector, the belt tightening that the Government is doing affecting government job dependent […]

April 14, 2001 0 Comments
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