billboards, iphone and business sense.

billboards have always been able to catch my attention, this time i have a lot to say about the ‘Idea cellular’ billboard which proudly flaunts their new marketing tag line  “one school, all present” (or something like that). the underlying idea that is that Idea cellular is so cheap and has such a wide network that teachers will be able to teach number of students across the villages of india (through phones!!) thereby spreading literacy and developing the nation. sweet. very sweet indeed. BUT, what is this billboard doing in the middle of a city?, infact at every other corner in the city? Reliance communications made the same mistake (you cannot call it a mistake in the fullest sense) when they promoted their network as the common man’s network. they lost many of the customers in the cities to other networks. the mindset of the people metamorphosed in such a way that even those who were a bit affluent abhorred reliance.  idea is doing the same thing now. people from the cities do not want to associate themselves with those in the villages, not at least in india. even those who come from the villages do not want to associate themselves with the villages. funny, i know. (this is typically similar to the NRIs who come back to India and insist on mineral water forgetting totally the fact that a few decades ago they used to run around drinking water from borewells in short nickers, or even without.)

what i want to say is that the advertising should be consumer centric. the people in the villages would be able to connect to the idea cellular’s education campaign, not just in a small way, but in a big way. the ads strikes a perfect ten there. however, the city crowd has a different way of thinking.

if you take the KFC himayatnagar road, you are likely to find another billboard which shows the picture of an iphone labeled ’smart’ and then the picture of a maruti suzuki car labeled ’smarter’. now this is definitely crazy, my first instinct was may be they give you a free iphone when you buy the car or something like that, but no ! i have absolutely no idea why maruti suzuki is gone nuts. please come and have a look at the billboard for yourselves.

speaking about the iphone, all i want to say is that – it wont work. now, i know i am a total apple ‘loyalist’ and would love to see apple products everywhere, but logically thinking, we end up elsewhere.

1. the iphone costs a whooping 31,000.

2. there are two types of people who have this kind of money for phones.

a) people belonging to the age group 40 to 60. one thing we need to remember here is that india has this generation of people who have worked ‘their way up’. very few of this age group population would have inherited their fortunes. (FYI, india is still a developing nation and we didnt have proper roads in cities until a few years ago.) these people are definitely unlikely to shell out 30k on a phone.

b) the heirs of this 40 to 60 age group, this market sector would be in their teens or twenties and they’d love to have the iphone if only it had ‘forwarding messages’ and ‘video recording’ in it. there goes your youth market.

the iphone was designed keeping the needs of an average european or american businessman in mind, who, as per our research should be atleast a second generation rich. that will take another 20 years in india, until then people will still use phones which are good enough to talk and talk alone.

good night and yes, dont forget to excercise tomorrow morning, you look weird these days.

the punctured parachute

its two am in the night and i am strolling through random blogs trying to kill time, i have a feeling i am suffering from internet addiction disorder; wikipedia has a lengthy description of it, have a look at it. i personally feel addiction to the internet is not a bad thing, the ‘kind’ of internet addiction is what matters here. 

a lot of strange things have been happening lately to me and i am kinda ok with all of them. my root canal treatment failed and i have a swollen jaw, i have terrible cough for two weeks now, i tripped down the stairs and got a hairline fracture and from the time i gave up swimming, i have a feeling i am growing fatter,that apart, i am perfect. 

bill gates left microsoft last month to devote his time full time for charity. this man, despite what people have to tell about him has lived a remarkable life and continues to do so. bill gates was definitely not the pioneer in software industry, he was the pioneer when it came to making money through software, the man was responsible in a major way why you are reading this blog now and why i wrote it, it’s definitely not about the great software, there are better OSs and better computers around but they somehow never reached our homes. microsoft did. and that’s where gates the businessman comes in. gates was definitely not a stringent innovator, he was a businessman, a blunt businessman. he knew what to do where and was emotionally secure and cool almost always, very much unlike the monkey boy steve ballmer who is known to have vowed to ‘kill google’ and not let his children use an ipod. (yes, you can smile here ). 

this week had yet another news item as the blogosphere buzzed with verizon ceo commenting on steve jobs getting old and wanting him to die. even though he didn’t explicitly state it, the meaning was obvious. people might see it any way they like, but as far as i am concerned, this is some sort of honor, your competitors are so pissed off and jealous of you, they’ve given up all hopes of any competition and are wanting you to die. what can be cooler than that ? given the elegance, style and the awesomeness of the iphone, i am pretty sure that there is no one in the whole market who can even come half way of what apple did. and with the costs coming down, it wouldn’t be surprising if you end up seeing iphones with just about everyone in an year or two. 

two days from now and india will have it’s first sci-fi movie. i am normally a persons who abhors movies but i just had this feeling that i should be commenting about this movie. love story 2050 reminds you of star wars, minority report, xmen and so many others just by the look of its trailers . the point i would want to make here is that the target market which the makers of this movie might have speculated have already a lot of sci-fi in hollywood flicks and its unlikely that they’ll boo boo at it. also, you can’t expect the basic indian crowd to come out and enjoy sci-fi movies. for those who are going to see it, there’s nothing new in it, the others don’t quite bother about it. i am no astrologer but i have a feeling that all those projects which people take up just because they are ‘cool’ and have ‘worked before’ never quite work out. 

by the way, i saw schindler’s list yesterday and i think its an amazing movie.  we’re all so lucky we weren’t born at the time of the war. 

ps: the punctured parachute was blue in color. and contrary to what you might have imagined, it was discarded, no one ever used it.

make them want you

predictability, my friend is a bigger virtue than patience. 

no one is, was and ever will be  in the same space-time coordinates as you are now, so the same rules, tips and tricks which work for you now may not work for others or even for you at another time(or even vice versa).  

every disease has its cure, and you cant swap ones medicine for the other. 

the same logic applies to both life and business, what might ‘totally rock’ today might be dull and drab tomorrow. 

the 1980s saw the sony walkman coming into the music market, it was the right time and the right attempt, it ‘totally rocked’. 

the ipod came somewhere around 2001, once again they hit the right shot at the right time, business bloomed.

then came the zune player(did you hear about it ), bad timing, bad hitting. 

the thing about the market is you have to give them what they want, no matter how meaningless or foolish it is. and often the market only asks for a ’sequel’ to what already existed. the desktop market asked for laptops, the laptop market asked for better laptops and so on so forth. the task of the company is to give them that. plain and simple(so, it may seem! )

people will always want more and better stuff(human nature, my friend , human nature) , its the job of the company to give them that and when you cant meet up their expectations, you are simply wiped out unless there is nothing in the market which is as good as yours. perhaps one big reason why zune didn’t work is because people had already seen the ipod. perhaps one big reason why windows works is people haven’t yet seen a mac.

this can best be explained by the automobile market, all cars have four wheels and a steering, until you see a better car, you are going to be very happy with your old one, the moment you see a better one, you are going to want it.

 say you didn’t know about ice creams, then you wouldn’t have bothered about them, but now that you know what an ice cream tastes like, you are going to want it.

‘wants’ might be said are subject to viewability. (business is more to be ‘want based’ than ‘need based’).

your product should shout at the customer: ” dude, this is what you have been looking for all your life”.

 the challenge here is to rightly anticipate what people want and i tell you this is not at all easy, there will always be error, the trick is to minimize the error. six sigma helps here, but you know, being humans, you can never predict anything to an entirety, how much ever you try, there will still be loads more that could have been done. 

beauty, my friend  is when you look a little less uglier.