Courage in Uncertainty – Mr Rajiv Bajaj, Managing Director, Bajaj Auto Ltd

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Mr Rajiv Bajaj, Managing Director, Bajaj Auto Ltd

Good morning everyone. This is perhaps the third or fourth time AIMA has invited me to speak and I don’t know why they have called me up again but I’ll tell you why I like coming here. Well, first of all, because Rekha is wonderful and also, Shiv, Gautam and Sanjiv and the others, you all are very nice and very warm and welcoming. But most of all and I say this from my heart, I find that this is the best audience to be with. I mean, there is always so much energy in this room.

The theme of the conference is ‘courage in uncertainty’ and when I was given the executive summary, this is what it said: facing the future and uncertainty with courage is not a way, but the only way. This is what I received from AIMA. Well, this in itself is not new. Aristotle said centuries ago, that courage is the first of all virtues because without it we cannot act on any other virtue. So, that has been acknowledged a long time back. But let me also share with you what a very well known doctor said, a very long time back, Dr. Michael Boyd. He said, “All that which is powerful for good is potent for evil”. It’s good to diet, but it’s not good to diet too much. It is good to exercise, but it’s not good to exercise too much. It’s good to work, but it’s not good to work too much. Therefore, all that is powerful for good is powerful for evil as well. So, courage, I think, is powerful for good but courage can also be very potent for evil, and that is why my presentation starts with a question- “courage is uncertainty?” What I mean to convey is that there is a lot of uncertainty that we find ourselves in, self inflicted, brought upon us by ourselves because we’re being too courageous, perhaps full hardy. So, what I’m going to do for the next few minutes is as Shahrukh said to all of us yesterday, he’s here less to talk about success and more about failure in the context of success. Continue reading →

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Role of Courage in Success – Shahrukh Khan, Actor, producer & television presenter

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I am going to say good evening again, because that’s how I started the speech. First of all, it’s really scary here. Some of the biggest managers of the biggest corporations in the biggest convention for management – AIMA.

It’s very sad that in such an august company of people, big business houses and managers, all you could manage was to get a speaker from Bollywood to speak at the convention. The economy must be really bad.

Well, who am I to speak about the economic downtrend across the globe etc, or anything, for that matter? Just reading the topics being discussed before I came on stage, I was frightened. And if I’m allowed to say so, shit scared. I couldn’t understand a word. Let me tell you one of the discussions they had earlier on in the day – ‘Could financialisation of commodities be used to incentivise supply growth without inflating prices?’  Continue reading →

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Focus on customers rather than on Product – Mr. Gyan Gupta CEO, Dainik Bhaskar Digital Business

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Mr. Gyan Gupta CEO, Dainik Bhaskar Digital Business

Henry Ford has been known for producing the mass production system in the American history. He is known as the most senseless and the most brilliant marketer at the same time. Senseless because all he gave to the customers was one black car and brilliant because he could create the production system that could create a car for 500 dollars, and he could sell millions of them. Henry Ford was a real marketer; he did not produce a 500 dollar to produce an assembly line. He actually figured out if he can produce a 500 dollar car, he would be able to sell million of those to the customers. So he kept the customers in mind and focused on a low cost production system. So, there’s a fine line between the customer & the product.
Not the strongest, not the most intelligent but the most flexible species will survive in today’s world. People from big publications think that they are in the business of newspaper; in fact they should focus on the news rather than the newspaper. Newspaper was a medium that was convenient some time back. The consumer today still wants news, they still want credible news from the trusted sources but the medium has changed due to advanced technology. Consumers are changing & they are adapting themselves to the current changes in the environment. Continue reading →

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How to attain Sustainable Competitive Advantage – Mr. Arunabh Das Sharma – President, Bennett Coleman

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Mr. Arunabh Das Sharma – President, Bennett Coleman

The concept of competitive advantage is slightly outvoted concept today.  What it means today and what it meant in 90’s is vastly different. In this age of dramatic & disruptive technology how can we manage the product life cycle is the main question. I have been fortunate to be associated with brands which have managed it successfully.  I have been fortunate to be a part of the journey of brands like Coke, Whirlpool & Times of India which are more that 100 yr old brands .According to me, the concept of product life cycle is dead. I think more and more people are trying to manage the brand life cycle as oppose to the product life cycle today. Because products that constitute the brand can come & go but the brand value will stay forever.

Product life cycle is an inverse s shaped curve, where you would start slow and then there’s rapid growth and then you start slowing down and at the end it would decline. Let’s take an example of Colgate dental cream. It is probably a 65 – 70 year old brand and yet it continues to be the leader primarily in same form & fashion. It is a very successful brand & product. I would however argue that the reason why Colgate dental cream is so successful is because the company has managed to figure out that there is a core set of consumers & there is a peripheral set of consumers & Colgate has been successful in focusing on both these categories by launching different products under same mother brand of Colgate, for e.g.:  Colgate total, Colgate sensitive & Colgate whitening. Continue reading →

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Linking Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy to Business – Mr. R Mukundan, Managing Director,Tata Chemicals

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Mr. R Mukundan, Managing Director,Tata Chemicals

Marketing is an art as well as science and to make it successful you should have a soft side to understand the emotions of customers. Mahatma Gandhi was a great man who literally made people to understand the concept of freedom. That’s a far more difficult thing to do. That’s the brilliance of him and we can learn many lessons from him. We operate in 3 businesses and we call ourselves life. We have a good team and we have constantly increased our market share in key categories over the time. When I joined Tata Salt we had the market share of around 19%, today it stands at around 60 -65%. The number 1 & number 2 brands are with us. Because we could not grow the first brand fully, we launched the second brand to attack it & we have two brands from the same family in one product category and we are thinking to launch another brand.

We also sell water purifiers and we have just started to sell pulses, which is a growing business area that is compounded every year at 16000+. When we create a brand the amount of power we have in market place is tremendous. The second piece of our business is industrial chemicals. This is truly a global business; we are present in 4 continents: Europe, Asia, Africa & United States. We are the 2nd largest glass making company. When you drink a glass of water or when you wash clothes there a bit of TATA in it. We are the key supplier to Procter & Gamble & Unilever for same. Our 3rd piece of business is focused on farm essentials. We have the largest foot-print in rural India. Tata rural retail has been profitable from past 20 years. We have 700 stores spread over UP, Haryana, Punjab & in West Bengal. Through our company Ralus we are running one of the finest & profitable rural businesses. When you look at top 10 farm brands, top 7 belong to us. We are about a 15000 crore company and we have an innovation centre too, one of our product Swacch came out of that innovation centre. You cannot address bottom of pyramid without focusing on innovation. Continue reading →

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Role of Analytics in CRM – Clifford Patrao Director/Partner, Global Business Services IBM India Pvt Ltd

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Clifford Patrao Director/Partner, Global Business Services IBM India Pvt Ltd

CRM & Analytics have been across different type of industries for long time. Analytics has always been meant for enriching customer experience and to maintain good customer relationship. In 2012 we did a global CEO study, where we interacted with close to 70 CEOs from 64 countries. We asked them which is the best information which can give you the most correct insight about business, most of them answered that would like to know about information related to customers to get business insights.

What has really changed in analytics and CRM recently is the emerging empowered customers. Consumers are now dictating the relationship that they have with the business. Business is no longer focusing on the push marketing where push the message across the customers. Now, it’s the other way around and customers are telling us what they want and what promises and kept and not kept in a particular product/service provided.   Continue reading →

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Tips to be followed in Digital Marketing

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Koichiro Shima – Co-Chief Executive Officer, Creative Director, Editor Hakuhodo Kettle, Japan & Yasuharu Sasaki – Executive Creative Director – Dentsu New York

In this new era Japanese agencies have created many successful digital advertising campaigns along with some campaigns which should not have been launched as they followed the policy of copy & paste from the successful campaigns. These unsuccessful campaigns were myopic and only focused on results and damaged the digital advertising field. So, here are some of our tips for a successful digital marketing campaign.

Digital is not a medium to express but it is the tool that we should use to integrate the diverse marketing media of business.

Here are two examples:

  • We launched a successful digital campaign on internet where we asked people to join this campaign on internet and we shot a TVC for same featuring actual people.
  • Just after tsunami in Japan we launched a campaign in collaboration with Honda where we provided information about road condition of areas affected by tsunami to people free of charge to make rescue and reconstruction much quicker. Continue reading →
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Myopic principles which marketers still follow – Mr. D Shivakumar, President AIMA & Sr. Vice President ““ IMEA, Nokia

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Mr. D Shivakumar, President AIMA & Sr. Vice President – IMEA, Nokia

Principally while defining your business you have to take into consideration the needs of your business. That’s the fundamental point of Marketing Myopia. I believe marketing has changed fundamentally.

Here are some changes:

  1. It is not the era of product brands anymore; it is the era of experience. Consumers now want a certain aura of experience now.
  2. The concept of place has changed, place today is any site which a consumer can access to know about your product, it could be internet or a physical store.
  3. We have moved significantly from price to value.  It is not about just promotion, we have classically run brand on the basis of promotion in our country. Advertising affect attitude to change the consumer behavior.
  4. When you are doing promotion like 20% off & 30% free, you are changing behavior. By offering this promotion we are changing the consumer behavior and we are hoping that their attitude will change.  We are planning to educate the consumer today rather than just promoting our product.

Advertising has changed dramatically, In 1980s for adverstising we had just two programmes in our mind: Hindi feature films & Chitrahar, with these two we could cover 80% of our target consumers in any category. Today it is a difficult task. The fragmentation of media now is dramatic. Continue reading →

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Brand Mnemonics – Mr. D Shivakumar, President AIMA & Sr. Vice President – IMEA, Nokia

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Mr. D Shivakumar, President AIMA & Sr. Vice President – IMEA, Nokia

Brands have different types of mnemonics. Some have audio or sound mnemonics, some have color mnemonics, some have logos and some have a combination of audio, color, and logo.

An example of a mnemonic is the Amul  Girl, is the Mercedes and BMW symbols, and is the red color of Coca cola and the blue shade of IBM.

Mnemonics have been around for years and were useful in differentiating and adding an experience layer to brands. The origin of branding was in marking a product/commodity and then adding a symbol or picture to it. The symbol or picture was very important in the early days of branding because the vast population was illiterate and there was little media except posters. So the ability to put up a symbol on a poster led to the early mnemonics. Continue reading →

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Internet principles to build a brand online – Neeraj Gupta, Director, Sales and Operations, Google India

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Mr. Neeraj Gupta – Director, Sales and Operations, Google India

Here are some internet principles that one should keep in mind when one think of business, product & market. When the internet started a few years ago, we could not imagine that there would be around 150 million internet subscribers in India.  That does not mean that the other mediums of marketing are losing their grip. India is one of the few countries where print media still plays an important role unlikely in other countries like US.

The first principle of Internet is: Use the unprecedented scale of internet.  Facebook has over a billion users,  Youtube has over 800 million users.  The reach through this scale is amazing. This medium allows SMEs to reach out to people of different backgrounds. Lady Gaga was a brand that was built on internet in a small period of time. One of the rare and interesting example is Psy & his gangnam style which has hit over a billion views in less than a few months of launch and made his style of dance, which was only available & popular in Korea reach across the world in just few months engaging more that million people and creating a revenue source for the artist & the publisher in very quick period of time. Continue reading →

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