Author: animeshjmathur

Marketing and use of education

education, Marketing

I have written a few posts on this subject earlier also. What is different in this post is that I have been seeing which industries do more of this and which not so much.

What I have observed is that in India, its the financial industry – specifically Portfolio Management Companies and Equity investment houses and to a certain extent Mutual fund companies that do a lot of work towards educating their customers, in their own different ways.

So you could have representatives of fund houses come on business channels and on internet properties and talk about their view of where the market is going. Generally the underlying point of the discussion is related to the kind of fund they are launching.

I have already written earlier also about the enormous amount of knowledge that Raamdeo Aggarwal of Motilal Oswal spreads free of cost with his Wealth Creation studies. Its an enormous amount of effort these people would be going through to create these wealth creation studies. The amount of knowledge I have got through reading these free reports, of the Indian stock markets, is more than all the knowledge I have gained over the years by buying and reading books from international authors. to be fair to the international authors, there are certain nuances about the Indian stock market that are different than the more matured US stock markets.

An author whom I have written about earlier also is Saurabh Mukherjea. He weaves interesting stories in his books and includes a lot of background information about the Indian stock markets. He runs a company by the name of Marcellus Investments. You could read the books to gain the knowledge that he is giving or you could also understand the philosophy of their investment process. If you like it, you could actually also park your money with them. He has recently come out with a book Diamonds in the Dust:Consistent Compounding for Extraordinary Wealth Creation, again with a lot of in-depth examples and case studies.

All this education , in all the three examples, is given on absolute neutral basis, but all of them do inform about their philosophy and how their funds work, in passing. So if you like their philosophy you could decide to use them for your financial goals.

So as an example, since I had gained so much free education from Motilal Oswal, I felt obliged to open my demat account with them , when I wanted to enter into the stock market. Indirectly that investment in freely educating me, by Motilal Oswal, has resulted in consistent business for them.

See how you can utilise education to indirectly influence your prospects.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Amazing lesson in marketing – Part 2

expectations, service quality

This is a continuation of the post I wrote yesterday.

This is special service related businesses. Since I mostly work with service related businesses this is a critical aspect which I want to highlight.

If you read yesterday’s post, I had written about how this hotel’s hostess and the F&B manager served us so well or rather delighted us,and then nudged us onto sharing our experiences on TripAdvisor.

In any service business, the front end staff are your brand ambassadors. You may stay in the best brand of a hotel, but if your experience with the staff is not good, you don’t go back to that brand. I have personally had this experience with one of the largest hotel brands. It was an aspirational brand for me and my family at one point because it was an American brand.

Indian hospitality is well known, so when I entered this hotel in one of their hotels in India and I was asked to wait in line by an uninterested person, I chose to no longer stay in that brand in the future. Now even when I travel to the US and Canada, I don’t stay with them

In the service business there’s one equation which has got imprinted in my mind. I don’t remember where I read this equation but its a good way to depict what happens in a customer scenario. The equation is

S (Satisfaction) = P (performance)- E (expectations)

In a service business its always critical that you manage the expectations of the customers rather than the performance. The higher the expectations, like I had with the US hotel brand in India, the bigger is the challenge for the personnel to satisfy me.

If you’re in the services business, its important that you remember this equation to ensure that you are clearly managing expectations, otherwise you will have disgruntled customers like I had become.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Amazing lesson in marketing

Customer Delight, Marketing, service quality

I am always on the lookout for amazing execution of marketing activities especially when they are at the ground level. If you’re frontline employees can be brilliant at execution,  there’s no stopping your growth.

It’s one thing to say you are good, its another when your customers go public showing their appreciation.

In India, only now has there been some opening up of the tourism sector over the last 2 months. A lot of families have got their 2 doses of vaccination and are therefore a little less scared of travelling. So now people are slowly starting to travel with their families and visit holiday destinations.

My family and I also decided to have a change of scenery.  So when we were booking our hotels and had shortlisted on two brands of five star hotels, my wife decided to look at TripAdvisor to search for unbiased views.

Among the 2 hotels, one of them had such rave reviews by guests that it was a no-brainer to choose this one.

Boy when we reached, were we delighted to have chosen this hotel.

Incidentally if you have to see what hospitality is, you have to visit India. You can’t get better hospitality anywhere else.

However we stay in India, so our expectations and benchmarks for hospitality are different.  So when I say this hotel was way above on the hospitality scale you can imagine the quality.  But the best is yet to come.

We had booked our room with dinner and breakfast included. So we go down to the restaurant for our first meal in the restaurant.  And the hostess seats us and asks about our stay etc. Then mentions if there’s anything special that we would want, we just need to mention.

The food was very tasty and the staff was extremely helpful.  On the second day at dinner we liked 2 dishes which were exceptional so we called the floor manager to give the chef our compliments for the dishes. He mentioned he would, but would we be kind enough to give our comments on TripAdvisor  because then his whole team would be enthused. Note the first nudge to go and comment on TripAdvisor.

In our next day breakfast our hostess again asked if there’s something special which we would like to have. My wife asked her for suggestions on local dishes. She suggested a dish and asked the chef to get it ready for that night’s dinner.

The dish was amazing and the fact that they had specifically got it made for us, made us feel very special. Again the hostess and the floor manager asked us if we had liked the food. When we said we loved it, they again asked us to post our review on TripAdvisor. Note the second nudge.

The hostess then came to leave us till the elevator and told us how we can quickly find where to put our comments on TripAdvisor so we don’t have to waste time. Note the third nudge along with a helpful piece of advice. Most of us are lethargic and we tend to delay doing these kind of things and eventually forget about it. By nudging us this way, they ensured that we put our glowing comments there.

The story does not end here. That’s the reason I found it so interesting and I am writing about it.

These guys were monitoring TripAdvisor. So when we put our comments they noticed it. So immediately in the next meal, the hostess came to thank us for the comments and again asked if there was anything special that they could prepare for us. Again we took her advice for the dish and that night we again had a fabulous meal. When we again complimented the team, the hostess again asked if we can give another comment on TripAdvisor and my son this time said why not and went and put a comment there.

Now this special treatment was not only for us. It was for all the guests which I observed with the number of comments on TripAdvisor for this hotel.

Its not only important to give great service, its also critical to get happy customers to spread the word by writing a recommendation. These guys have mastered this art.

Even though we are in the B2B business I have been thinking on how we can incorporate this kind of a system into our business.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Single Target Market- once again

B2B, differentiation, Marketing, messaging, Product Management, route to market, segmentation, single target market

This is such a major piece in any market plan that I  cannot lay enough emphasis on the topic. I have already written a lot of posts on just this one topic , but there’s so much at stake in your plan with just this one concept that its critical that you get this right.

Some would call this segmentation,  some would call it finding a niche.  Call it by whatever name,  the idea is to start in a minimum viable piece of the market, learn everything and then expand. Never ever try to address all segments at once.

You can segment by geography- so choose only one location to start, or you could look at a vertical industry to start with if you are in the B2B market.

One useful way to find the Single Target market is also by usage. Suppose you have a service and as an example say you decide to focus on New York City. But NYC has 9 million people. So you could then either break it down by identifying the neighborhood because different parts of NYC have different buyers in terms of paying capacity.

You could then go further down to see if your service is for first time users, or for emergency usage, or a a replacement service etc.

Once break it down to such granularity each interaction with a prospect becomes a learning and you can quickly understand and test different messaging, different media etc. so that you can quickly dominate the market.

If you are in anyway responsible for product management and going to launch a new product or service or in marketing in a similar situation first get clarity on this aspect.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!