This is one of those moments in life which you've been waiting for since a long long time. After being a hard-core fan of Linkin Park for about 5 years, I finally got to see them… Live! I wouldn't attempt to write about how I felt and what was I feeling. But all I can say is after waiting in the line for about 4 hours, when they came on stage, sang 21 songs back to back, they blew my wits out for those 1.5 hours. You guys are awesome.!
Information is a word that really has been a major driver towards creating history as we know it. Because of precise information, people have won wars, events, scaled ahead in life. Basically if you look at it your entire life revolves around information. You need to know things. Think back for a moment and you'll realize that there must have been a gazillion times that you might have told yourself, "I wish I knew this"! And it's true for everyone. People who possess real information have the power to rule the world. Take a very brash example at this statement. The US government is currently offering US$ 25 million for information leading directly to the conviction of Osama Bin Laden. People have been killed and people would kill for information that is sensitive.
And in this world where information can fetch such a high price, there's an entire movement that doesn't charge a penny for the information it provides, which yes might not be as sensitive as the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden, but surely enough to give competition to the regular books and magazines. I'm talking about the contributors to the wealth of collaborative knowledge.
Wikis, Blogs, Stumblers, Diggs are the new 'information service providers' at virtually no cost at all…!
Wikis – Perhaps the ultimate example of collaborative knowledge. Wikis are places where users can easily create, edit and link web-pages. These web pages are constantly fed information from various users that have the rights to edit the information available on the wiki sites. Wikipedia is the most popular wiki on earth. Just imagine, this website provides a person information which is updated, which is far more exhaustive than a Britannica Encyclopedia and is provided for free while a single set of an encyclopedia costs around $3,000…! A 300 year old brand, revered throughout the globe for its exhaustive information, ransacked and screwed royally by a start-up which is less than 10 years old. This is the power of collaborative knowledge.
And if someone thought that Wikipedia is the only wiki on the net, you're so mistaken! Private companies are now using the wiki platform for knowledge sharing within the organization!
Blogs – Another source of collaborative knowledge. This might not be on a single source site. People usually blog and post information on their own sites. But the fun starts when you start 'tagging' other blogs and add information, or comment on blogs written by others. When you 'tag' others, when you comment on other's blogs, when other blogs add a link to your blog saying that 'I read these blogs' what is happening is that you're creating virtual communities, or better still there are online columnists that are being created which debate, reason upon issues and topics. There's tremendous amount of knowledge that's being shared online which everyone can access for free! The 'editor's page' of Times of India has now a new enemy… Blogs!
Stumblers – There are like a gazillion websites on the internet, some which are full of information useful to us, and some which are just plain fun to visit. And sadly we don't know a lot of the ones that may really matter to us. Again, collaborative knowledge comes to the rescue. When half a million people come together to give you the best of the web content on the internet, you're bound to get some exotic web pages that you might have never heard of, and that's what StumbleUpon really does. It gives the user the right to tag websites under various headers (like philosophy, art, business etc.) and creates a repository of the same. Now all you have to do is install a small toolbar in your browser and you start getting the best of the websites tagged by users like you. This is something even Google can't beat. Again, power of collaborative knowledge.
There are innumerable examples like these that only prove, that two heads are better than one!
This is perhaps one of the lousiest cases in branding that I've come across. There was this aged prof who came to talk about marketing plans. The fellow seems to have worked with a lot of Pharma companies and consumer durables of which one is Videocon. Interestingly he seemed to brag about this example while I found it a complete nut-case. In fact its an eye opener to the fact that using brand ambassadors is perhaps the easiest route to supposedly 'enhancing' a brand's image, but does that really work well is a matter of question.
Anyways, the case was about the why's and how's of Videocon roping in Shah Rukh Khan as a brand ambassador for itself. According to the professor, Videocon was perceived to be as a 'middle-class' brand and was looking at upgrading its image to an 'upper middle-class' brand. And the best way to deal with this situation was to rope in Shah Rukh Khan!
There weren't many drastic changes in the product line, there wasn't a change much in the pricing patterns either. Just plug in a celebrity and you're done! How sick can you get?!
Also a brand ambassador works on the rationale that there's some connect between the brand and the endorser. Here there's none! Also the rationale for taking SRK is a funny one. Videocon wanted to project itself as a 'truly multinational' brand or something. Bottom-line it wanted to project itself as a multinational, and to prove that it took SRK. Why SRK? That has an interesting answer.
Now according to the professor, SRK is very popular amongst Indians outside India (repeat… 'Indians' outside India). Thus, if the company wanted to project itself as a multinational SRK was the best choice.
Hmmm. One question… no… make that two… Do 'Indians', or for that matter anyone outside India buy Videocon? Nope.
And do Indians in India really care about the fact that SRK is famous globally as well? Nope.
Then where's the connect? Indians in India don't care a damn about what SRK means to the foreign world and the foreign people don't care a damn about what Videocon is selling to the Indians.
Then why SRK? Or an even more fundamental question, why project to be a multinational?
The answer is simple. This is the easier way out.
P.S. In reality Videocon is much larger than what its image really is. It is the world's 3rd largest picture tube manufacturer, and has a huge stake in Oil and Gas exploration with one of the lowest operating costs in the Oil and Gas exploration field. And SRK just doesn't do the job really well.
A few posts back I had written about how value is eroded at all levels in the agriculture industry for the simple reason that nobody's aware how much crop production's gonna happen in the country in any given season. The value chain of ITC e-choupal occurs after the crop is harvested and sold in the market. But the point still remains who will tell how much production has actually happened in the country? Be it for a particular crop or for all the crops taken together, no one has the faintest idea about this. An interesting thing that CII does is that it holds national level conferences and calls all big traders in the agricultural business and asks their expert opinion about the crop production. Though it might seem cocky but it works to an extent.
HLL however, goes through a completely different channel. It does its own crop forecasting. Basically, HLL's many FMCG products especially soap are also dependent upon agriculture. For the simple reason that soap manufacturing requires oil, and oil comes from oil seeds. About 40% of the revenue of soaps is spent in buying oil and oil seeds. So when HLL spends 40% of its revenue on a single line of agricultural produce, one can imagine that it's no small deal. Also, crop forecasting gives HLL better insights into what should be its purchasing pattern, when should it buy, when would the stock arrive, how much would it be necessary to stock, will there be a shortage or excess supply of oil seeds etc etc.
So during harvest time, a team of HLL's investigators go around the country in a car, talking to the farmers who's got farms along the roadside, and take first hand info about the crops in that vicinity. They stop by every 5-10 miles and ask the farmer which crop is he growing and what his expected output per hectare is.
In fact the entire crop forecasting by HLL happens in 3 phases. Phase one occurs in July, during the start of the sowing season. The main objective is to gain an idea about the type of crops being grown in the region. Phase two happens in September during the middle of the crop season to ascertain how the crop is growing and also to know about the adequacy of rainfall and the effects of insects/pests if any. And finally when the harvesting has just started, the Phase three of investigation happens and that's when HLL can forecast with enough clarity the total crop production in the country.
The entire process takes about 65 man days to complete one round of investigation, and usually 4-5 investigators are given a route to survey which makes it possible to complete one entire round within a fortnight.
This is how India's largest FMCG manufacturer is ahead of the game, from the very start!
This is one story that I heard, and which perhaps summarizes how one is supposed to build a brand. It's not just about the product, but everything around it as well. Alright, here's the story…
Once upon a time, there was this primary school teacher, who used to teach a batch of students. Out of those students there was one kid, whose irreverence was quite rampant. The fellow never listened to what the teacher said in class. He was intelligent, didn't make a ruckus in class, but he never wanted to listen to the teacher as well. She never beat him for the reason that the kid wasn't a commotion maker. He was just indifferent. One day, it so happened that the teacher had to leave the town for good since her husband got a transfer. So, as a farewell, she organized a small party at her place, and invited all the students at her party. All but that kid turned up at the party. She was pretty sad on not seeing that kid for the last time. Sure, he wasn't one of the better ones in the class, but she didn't want to leave the relationship on such a sad note.
Just when she was thinking about this, she saw a faint image of a bicycle, and a small boy peddling like crazy approaching towards her. It was that kid. The fellow jumped from the cycle, ran towards her, and while he was still panting, he took out something from his pocket and gave it to the teacher. It was a sea-shell.
The teacher knew that such kind of sea-shells were only available at a sea-shore which was pretty far away from where they lived. She was touched after knowing the trouble the kid had gone through to get her the gift. A little overwhelmed by the kid's gesture she asked, "you got this for me?"
The kid snapped back… "trip also part of gift…"
A batch mate of mine went through a revelation about Linux yesterday. He had come to get some codec installed on his lappy since he couldn't view video files.
And while we were downloading a codec pack off the internet, he's like, "How come these guys can give all these things for free?!" It came as a shock to me at first though; considering the fact that I've been a freelance page designer since long enough, and most of my projects have been done for free (yes free), I couldn't understand how to make him understand the concept of open source.
So I began with Linux, and said that a codec pack is virtually nothing, and that there are OS's that are also available for free. Initially he was quite surprised and like most people who've been using Microsoft product since ages, also thought that the OS must be substandard in its working. First of all I had to make him understand what actually the concept of 'free' meant as far as Linux was concerned. Free didn't mean that the software didn't cost a thing. More than that, a free OS meant freedom; freedom to modify it, change it, label the changes under your name, and even re-distribute it to the masses so that others too can benefit from it.
Come to think of it, Linux, is more like knowledge, which grows when shared. While windows is like an online tutorial, where you pay to get something, Linux is like a forum, where one just needs to register and the knowledge is shared freely on message boards.
The fellow still had the persistent question as to, "How do these guys make money?"
I stopped trying to make the fellow understand that it wasn't about money, but it was more about the passion and the irreverence towards the concept of 'closed source'.
Instead I just told him that Linux is a brand, and the fellow didn't ask for more. Sometimes when you try to derive syllogisms for a phenomenon people just don't get it, but when one uses jargons, they just seem to understand the whole thing in a split second. Weird I tell you!
It has been 3 days since I've been trying to install a Mac OS X on my PC (yes you read it right… I'm trying to do it the other way around)
And sadly I've gone no farther than the setup main page. I've borrowed flash based hard disks, formatted, wipe cleaned my HP DV6000 thrice in 3 days, and the poor thing didn't even squeak; shifted between vista, windows xp and a dash of ubuntu, but no luck!
15 days before the placements begin and I thought this endeavor (which I thought I'll surely scrape through) would cheer me up. Seems its adding to the anxiety. But I'll get a Mac running on my PC before I leave this place… that's a promise…
What's interesting to see is how the Mac OS simply refuses to succumb to our wish and will. Technically it should be detecting a FAT32 partition. But it's not for some weird reason. We used a flash based 8GB hard disk formatted in Mac Journal (the format type which is meant for a Mac) using someone else's MacBook… No luck~!
We used an emulator to run the thing. No luck~!
We used a virtual machine (similar to Parallels on the MacBook to run Windows) called VMWare… No luck~!
And the best part of all, it behaves differently on different machines. We have 2 HP laptops up for this Vista-to-Mac-on-PC experiment, both with same specs, except for the fact that one is an Intel, the other is an AMD. And the darn thing behaves different every time we try to load it up.
Usually computers have a pattern for showing up errors. Once u find that out, you know where the problem lies. Here there's no freakin' pattern! At all!
Its getting on my nerves. Will update if things improve!
Alright! Now for starters, despite the IT boom (and bust) and the retail boom and stock market boom and other booms that you may think of, the fact still remains that India is an agrarian economy, that is a large part of its income (still) comes from agricultural produce.
So logically farmers should perhaps form the richest cluster in the Indian 'wealth' pyramid no? Well logically yes, but factually that's not the case. One farmer commits suicide in India every 8 hours. Gruesome as it may sound, but a large part of the fault can be attributed to the farmers, who out of sheer lack of information sow anything that are either safe bets like cash crops, or sow something that gave them the highest revenue the last year.
Now when every farmer starts thinking in the same direction, the law of demand & supply comes into the picture. The supply of a particular crop goes up and the prices comes down. The farmers as it is are exploited at the mandi's even during boom time, so when the market is running low, one can hardly expect anything good for the farmer in terms of his returns for his produce. So low prices, low income, and inability to pay off debt puts the farmer in a stressful situation.
Now, let's take the other side of the spectrum; that is the companies who buy the produce. Let's take the example of a 'ready to eat' vegetable mix. Now for a 'ready to eat' packet, the MRP is fixed, the margins to the wholesaler, the retailer, the distribution costs are more or less fixed. So there's little leeway that the manufacturer can work upon as far as the entire chain is concerned. What he can do is he can get the best input price to maximise his margins.
To get the best price for his inputs he needs to know well in advance as to what the output of that crop would be nationwide. Now estimates of any crop production can be either got from the official estimates that the government is supposed to give, or the trade estimates that the traders give over a period of time. Trade estimates work like stock markets do; based on the aggregation of trader's opinions who might be bullish or bearish as per their whims and fancies. Official estimates have a drawback as far as time is concerned. The Central Statistical Organisation, a government body releases the final estimate of the total crop production after 6 months of the harvest and when 70% of the crop produce has already passed the farmer's hands. Such type of data is hardly useful in purchase decisions for any organisation. So if we come back to our 'ready to eat' mix, the crop production estimates from CSO are of no use, and we'll have to do the purchasing without any proper data. In short, we'll never come to know what would be the best price we can get for any produce, and it all would depend on the mandi that a company would go to.
So essentially in crop forecasting, time is of the essence, rather than accuracy or depth of coverage. Sadly people just don't seem to be getting it! There's loss of value at every stage; the farmer loses because he was dumb enough to sow what every other farmer did, the government loses because it releases an estimate value which anyone would hardly use, the companies lose because they don't get to have the best possible price for the raw materials.
Sad isn't it?
Another superb example of branding:
Most people from US, when they go to visit Vietnam, bring back metal coffee tumblers as a souvenir. Think... why would anyone bring metal coffee tumblers? Quite simply because during the Vietnam war, a lot of American planes were shot down. The Vietnamese used to extract the metal from these planes to make tumblers and other stuff.
True as on today the metal from those planes must have already been used up and today’s tumblers must be manufactured from some other metal obviously, yet the sentiment of the same still remains. And the Americans buy the tumblers since they feel they bought back something that rightfully belonged to them in the first place.
In Service Marketing there’s something called ‘a line of interaction’. If we take the example of a restaurant let’s say, there can be numerous lines of interaction. A line of interaction basically means point where a part of the service comes into direct contact with the customer, or in plain motherhood statement it’s the ‘moment of truth’. The waiter is one, the menu is another, the food is the next, and the bill that comes towards the end is also a line of interaction.
Now most people say and I’m sure even you’ll agree that lines of interaction are extremely essential to the service organisation’s success.
Now let’s turn the tables on this statement and look at it from the other way around. There’s this hotel in Korea, the name of which I forgot, has defied this whole idea of line of interaction. The hotel has virtually scrapped all the lines of interaction which one might call essential.
If you want to book a room, you call the number, and the voice on the other side is an AVR (automated voice response system). This means there’s a computer on the other end to take your call rather than a real person, so the first line of interaction is compromised. The AVR gives you an automatically generated code, which you note down and is a reference for the room you booked in the hotel. You drive your way down to the hotel, go to the basement where again there’s no security guard at the gates, since the gates are automatic. You key in the code given at the gate, and this is where you officially check into the hotel. You go ahead and park your car specifically at the slot allotted to you, and to make sure you find it, the lights of that slot start blinking. So line of interaction (security guards) compromised again.
Then you go up the lift, into your room, and done! Not a single human line of interaction in the entire process. You finish all your naughty business and get out. The payment is made by an escrow so the hotel never comes to know the real identity of the person. Dainty no? Now who told a line of interaction is essential?
If there's one thing a marketer needs to learn, is to tell really good stories. Great brands are not made out of just the product; but everything around it, and people like Melkoum and Mouchegh Petrossian can really tell you how great brands are made. They are made out of sheer perseverance, and preserving that story, that legacy through generations.
Caviar, a phenomenon that arose out of the devastation that World War I had wrecked upon the European countries and Russia. It was a product that the Russian government sold to the French and German traders for cash since they wanted some foreign exchange to rebuild their economy which was in shambles after the Russian revolution. From here begins the caviar story.
Caviar, essentially is nothing but salted fish eggs! But then like French food, the French traders took this slimy black miniature beans, added all the fancy stuff like myths, exoticism and legends and completely converted the product into an exotic food item.
Caviar is not just salted fish eggs today. It's a testament to the Petrossian brothers who fled lands during the Russian revolution and then finally sold Caviar to the French. It is a mouthpiece that talks about the adversaries of war and how people got out of it. If you strip off Cavair from its brand, you can't tell one brand from the other. Most connoisseurs loath to admit it, but the fact is you can't tell one caviar from the other. Everything is just the same!
There was this simple thought that came up at a Services Marketing Class, as to the kind of seats that we sat in. Typically if you look at an MBA classroom it is a horse-shoe-type setting, where there's a professor who teaches by standing at something called a melting-pot. Keeping the jargons aside, he basically facilitates the shooting of ideas from one corner of the class to the other. In fact b-schools like HBS and Wharton take pride in having horse-shoe classes! I really don't find it to be a big deal. Some arguments in an MBA are really without reason at times. It reminds me of the saying; All fart and no shit.!
Anyways, so that was one setting. But what I'm trying to say is that these settings were meticulously 'made' and were given proper thought when being constructed. But a setting that so intuitively got into our system was something that was never meant to be a seat in the first place. I'm talking about the stairs.
Stairs is perhaps one of those places where you just go and sit. In a classroom, you decide which end to sit, whereas when it comes to stairs, you never really decide do you? You just go there and sit.
Steps/stairs give you all the benefits that a normal chair does not. You can alter height, decide how much you wanna stretch yourself, use other stairs as table-tops, sit at different levels on the steps and surprisingly, you can see everyone even though you sit at different levels.
Stairs don't have cushions, they don't have a back rest, they don't have pneumatic bars to increase/decrease height, yet most students find them the best places to sit and chat. And believe me, they are excellent places to work on your laptops as well.
Now the question is what has all this got to do with the whole MBA setting? Think about it like this… Having swanky classrooms isn't just the only way to make a b-school experience great. Or having great dormitories isn't the only way a hostel life can be improved.
Think… Why can't people put power points near staircases so that we can use our laptops on AC power? Why can't you have vending machines at staircases and not near the canteen? There've been a million times when my batch mates would want a can of Coke while smoking at the staircases. But they were too lazy to go and get one from the vending machine which was 4 floors below.
It's quite surprising that neither the architects, nor the civil engineers nor the deans or directors of educational institutes got this bonding between stairs and students.
Did you ever realize how paranoid banks are when sending out money? And also on the other hand, we as customers too are lousy enough not to care about how the banks treat us.
Take the example of a cheque vs. a pay-in slip. Banks use extensive methods to make sure that when money goes out of the bank, it goes to whom it’s meant for. But when the cash comes in, it really doesn’t matter to them who’s depositing the cash and into whose account.
The instruments banks use are pretty much evidence to that effect. A typical cheque from any bank is printed on thick paper, which is printed using special ink, and also contains watermarks to ensure that the cheque is genuine. Then we have the MICR letters, or the letters that you find towards the bottom of the cheque. These weird looking numbers with dots and dashes are called the MICR fonts, which are printed using magnetic ink, and are directly machine read, and not human read to prevent error. And the entire printing is done by a 4 color Heidelberg Printing Machine applying a 2-ton weight on each paper to ensure that the paper completely absorbs all the ink and there’s no washout.
And above and beyond that, all the cheques are properly arranged, are gum and thread bound, are perfectly perforated so that they don’t tear improperly, have enough space to write the ‘amount’ and have the account number and the account holder’s name printed.
Now take another instrument, which sits towards the other side of the spectrum; the pay-in slip. This lousy little piece of paper is printed on a paper that’s probably recycled for the nth time, which has pathetic printing, which has virtually no perforation to tear away the slip, which has no thread or gum binding, and have very little space to type in the amount that you want to deposit.
You run a complete financial check on the person who writes the cheque. Why doesn’t a bank ever verify whether the right person is depositing the money or not? Yeah I know it’s a cranky thought (who would ever deposit their hard earned money in your account just like that?!). But think of it like this: I’m a businessman who doesn’t want to give a contract to company X. Now a guy from that company, who’s hell bent on taking revenge, goes to my bank, deposits Rs.100000 and then sues me on grounds of bribery! I’m finished!
Over and above that, in a cheque, you need to write the amount in words and numbers only once, while in a pay-in slip you need to do that twice, plus also specify the combinations of the denominations used at the back of the pay-in slip!
Why do I need to go through all that torture? Why have MICR letters and nicely printed paper for yourselves and a lousy ‘tissue-paper’ish paper with no space to write anything for me?!
A cheque is a symbol of how a bank treats itself, and a pay-in slip is a symbol of how a bank treats its customer.
If you want a cheque cleared today, you need to give it to the bank before 11 a.m. But the bank will most certainly take 1 day to deposit your amount into the bank, regardless of whether you give it in the morning or evening.
If I lose a debit/credit card, I really have no way to tell the bank that I lost my debit/credit card, except to call up my friends or relative to either give me the phone number to the bank’s hotline or ask them to do the needful. But if I ever call them up to ask about a few services, they’ll run a full check to make sure that it’s me!
While withdrawing money from an ATM I need to enter a pin number and there’s also a miniature camera on the front if you’ve noticed for security sake. But if I use a debit/credit card at a Visa POS, nobody ever verifies the signature, nobody ever asks whether I’m Bhushir Mankad or some Mr.Chagan Ghelphadiya.
Where’s the security? Where’s the assurance? There’s no consistency in any of the instruments used; be it cheques, pay-in slips, debit cards, credit cards, anything.
This is what happens when the Citi never sleeps – this was what my professor said to the whole debacle. (For the ones who didn’t get the joke… forget it…)
(inspired from the Service Marketing class which I took as an extra credit course, but wasn't granted one eventually!)
It has been like half a month in this city-state-country, and there are many things that I miss about Dubai.
I miss the mini-kitchen of my hostel room, I miss the refrigerator where I used to stock a crate full of coke or cartons of low-fat milk using which I made coffee everyday to fill my Starbucks sipper! J
I miss my ipod which was hooked to my ears for almost all the time except for when I was in class.
I miss Al Ain Centre and Jumbo which were like my gateway to the electronics world.
I miss the DragonMart (which was normally called as ChinkiMart) which virtually stored nothing of our use.
I miss the wide ocean near the Burj Al Arab, or even the crystal blue beach of Abu Dhabi.
I miss the mid-night birthday parties where the entire floor used to ransack one room to give a hell of a birthday bash, so much that even macho dudes used to end up crying like sissies.
I so very much miss Carrefour! It was like the citadel of hypermarkets for me.
I miss all the places that I couldn't visit simply because I was underage! (I'm referring to discotheques. The minimum age barrier was 21. And I am 20! L )
I miss Music Room, where I did get a chance to get in, and where they played perhaps the best Live Rock I've ever heard.
I miss WLAN, which was popularly known as 'chori ka net' before we got our own net connection in place.
I miss QDs which was like a slick lounge bar near the ocean shore and where I perhaps had the best sheesha till now!
I miss www.dubizzle.com which is like the best place to get used goods in Dubai at freaking low prices.
I miss the 3Dhs puff at the Chill Out Zone which had mayonnaise and coriander leaves on both the ends.
I miss the unlimited coke at the Internet City Subway outlet
I miss the mallu cab guy! Well, kinda.!
I miss the Shiekh Zayed where I hitch hiked for like 6 hours.
I miss many other things! Its just not easy to describe a nation where you barged in and left within a span of 6 months. There was too much of influx. And it takes time to settle in.
Anyways, so I was talking about pointers. And one such piece of advice that I learned, is that business is not about doing business in a business-like way! People from venture capital derive newer business practices from the way a mother divides a cake between her 2 siblings! It sounds funny but it’s true. So to do your business in a better way, it’s necessary to understand how someone else does business and then borrow ideas from other fields as well.
One such syllogism which I felt would be really cool is the barcode reader at a Carrefour aisle. To give you a bit of a background, Carrefour is the second largest retail chain in the world, with a very large presence in Dubai, where I was for like 6 months. Now, at any of the Carrefour hypermarkets you find a simple barcode reader at the end of every aisle. Dubai surprisingly has no MRP system in place (so they can charge anywhere from 1dhs to 5dhs for a can of coke). Thus, the price tags at Carrefour for each product are printed at the edge of the shelf where a product is placed. Now if you can’t find the price tag for whatever reasons, you can just go to the barcode reader, point the barcode of the product towards the scanner, the scanner immediately scans the barcode, consults the main system and displays the ‘Carrefour price’ for the product (since there’s no MRP). The entire process takes less than 5 seconds to complete (if you exclude the time taken to walk to one of the barcode readers that is).
Typically what you are doing is asking the customer to do the job instead some attendant assisting him/her.
Now let’s keep Carrefour away for a while and talk about Dena Bank. Like any nationalised bank, Dena Bank too has its own set of drawbacks when it comes to service. Its true many nationalised banks are now providing services that are at par or even better than what the private banks do, but sadly Dena Bank isn’t one of them. Now my home town is a shanty old place which virtually hasn’t changed at all since a long...long time. And that town has a Dena Bank where I have an account.
One fine day I was standing in the queue for cheque deposits. More than half of the people in the queue were there to get their account balance checked. The people who were with me in the queue were somewhere in the bottom of the pyramid segment. These people earn not more than $3 a day. Their account balances would never cross the Rs.10,000 threshold. For these people, owning an ATM card that has a yearly fee of Rs.299, and carries a penalty cost for having a lower balance is out of question. And that’s the reason why they keep pestering the teller guy by giving him their pass books and asking for the account balance. That’s the reason why more than half the people in my queue were not there to deposit a cheque. What I also saw while I was waiting for my turn were the ‘Target 2000 cr’ tags dangling from the ceilings. Apparently Dena Bank seems to have initiated a target to achieve a pan-India bank deposit of Rs.2000 crores by 2008 I think.
Now get a load of this: The teller guy, who’s one small entity in this ‘target’ of achieving Rs.2000 crores of deposits by 2008 wastes more than half of his time in just checking account balances! And there must be innumerable such teller guys throughout India who must be wasting some part of their time just checking balances only! If that guy is too busy checking balances when will he accept cheques that directly help him in his objective of getting more deposits?
Can’t the ‘balance checking’ activity be deskilled? So that even the customer can check the balance without the need of having an ATM card?
Can’t we help the teller guy by allowing him to do what he’s really supposed to do?
Can’t we bring the barcode readers from Carrefour and install them in Dena Bank?
That gadget will occupy less than 12 square inch on the wall but will do a lot of things. It will de-skill the job of balance checking. You are co-creating value along with the customer without having to invest in large ATM machines and plastic cards. All you need is a normal passbook with an embedded unique barcode. If the bank doesn’t have a centralised banking system it’s ok to implement this system even on a local scale. You are removing all the unproductive work done by the teller guy. The barcode reader empowers the customer, it gives more productive time to the teller guy and it decreases clutter.
The system is scalable (since it can be implemented on a large-scale basis if required. All you need is to hook up all the barcode readers with the mainframe)
The system is robust and can work under harsh environments (since a barcode reader doesn’t involve any moving parts. It just has a laser scanner and an LCD display screen)
The system is fool-proof (obviously you don’t expect someone to hack into the mainframe using a barcode reader do you?)
The system does deliver a better price-performance relationship (because by charging somewhere around Rs.20 from the customer as a onetime payment for getting an embedded barcode, I’m giving the customer an opportunity to check his balance as many times as he wants till the time he no longer remains the bank’s customer)
This is how Dena Bank can derive learning from Carrefour.
This is how the teller guy can do what he’s actually meant to do (i.e. to deposit cheques)
This is how Dena Bank can achieve its pan-India ‘Rs.2000 crore by 2008’ target.
What say?
The final few days in Dubai are like the first few days in Dubai. There's a renewed spirit in the air and all that aura crap! You tend to look at things quite differently. Suddenly you start looking at people as if they are not 'just there', but 'why' they are 'there'? Which brings us to the point of the discussion: the two cab drivers.
Apparently, we were on our way to a little bit of outing late in the evening. It had been a long time since we could call ourselves as 'free' in real sense, and we wanted to freak out sort of. So we called for Sudhir – the guy who transports people to their destinations at half of what it would cost in a normal cab. We waited for 2 hours for that dimwit to arrive, and he didn't as luck would have it.
So finally we decided to get into a legal cab. We got hold of some guy, who was last in the line of cabs, but somehow got to us first and we sat in without realising that its ethically wrong to do that, and realised only after there was a barrage of words (abusive quite naturally) hurling back and forth between the cab driver and the rest of the cab drivers.
Of course, nobody can sue him or something, since there's no written rule, but whatever! The point is he broke an understanding in the community (ever seen how the rickshaw drivers at a rickshaw stand collectively decide who goes first and all? So this was like one of those times when a rickshaw driver broke the norm.)
And to clarify, we live in International City (though there's nothing so international about it; except the fact that you've got buildings named after countries and flags of different colours fluttering on the road dividers) and International City is quite far from the main city (i.e. Dubai). And even cab drivers do have this tendency to get lost in the pursuit of getting to the main land given the fact that there are so many 'round-abouts'. (round-abouts are pesky little places and are the 'only' places where you can take a U-turn on the road or move into some other direction; else the road runs straight as long as it can)
So this guy messed up in taking round-abouts (which means we travelled more distance since the road runs straight) and the bill was shot up by 100%.! And the fact that he had messed up was quite apparent on his face, since he had stopped blabbering something about we being 'sharif' people which he had begun right from the moment we got into the cab.
So what do we do? It said 90 on the cab meter while ideally it shouldn't have gone more than 45 dhs (dirhams – UAE currency)! So we zonked that guy's brain out regarding the road signs and the fact that the bill doubled. We eventually only paid 45 dhs, since that's what it ideally costs. Somehow I was happy about what happened to the cab driver since the way he bypassed those dutiful and ethical cab drivers and got to us first, this was what he rightfully deserved in the end.
Now the fun part starts when we are to go back to International City. For the ride back home, we found a cab dude from Pakistan. Very soft spoken, polite, but as most cab drivers, he too was quite a jabberwocky. And he talked about his experience when some white men hopped into his cab, all drunk, started abusing his nation and the people, and then declined even to pay for the transport. The complete opposite of what we had experienced while leaving International City.
And now starts the mindless introspection and comparison of the two drivers (when you're into something called an MBA, you become so increasingly analytical, that even cab drivers become a case study for you!) Right, so back to the cab drivers! Now firstly, both the cab drivers did what they had to, to earn money. Some use more aggressive and unaccepted ways (aka Cab driver 1) while some use the rightful path (aka Cab driver 2). And yet both get screwed in the end (Cab driver 1 got only 45 dhs instead of 90 cause he screwed up in the round-abouts, and cab driver 2 didn't get the pay from those 'white men' cause they were all drunk)
So who stands to gain in this whole 'ethical' and 'non-ethical' debate? I think none of them!
Now if you put the philosophical jargons aside and come to economics, there too, this behaviour has a lot to offer. Both of the drivers have come here to earn a living. If I am right, they fly back to their nations maybe once in a year, and drive cabs almost throughout the year. They must be living in a 1 room apartment or a 2 room apartment that must be shared by 6-7 people, since there's no chance that they can afford to rent an apartment alone.
Just think, they meet their families only 15 times or so during their lifetime, they have a living space of less than 7 cubic feet for the whole year, and their work space is again less than 7 cubic feet. With virtually no emotional outlet, the passengers are quite naturally a preferred source of venting their feelings.
Isn't it ironic? They give out their feelings to the people whom they might never see again in life! The only thing that holds them back from settling back in their country along with their family is the exchange rate of 1dhs = Rs.12.33
Such is the power the money wields on them. They hate the whites for being too discriminative when it comes to skin; they hate the fellow workers because they add competition and make them earn lesser; they hate their life since they can't be nearer to their families.
Yet, they deliver value at sustained levels; yet they are always soft spoken; yet they are always at the service of the customers, and yet they eventually stand to lose, whether they use ethical or unethical norms!
Sometimes, I feel we are really stupid people. Our heritage and culture system has taught a lot about respecting the elders, and giving due reverence. But as the days progress in this myriad of classes and field visits and case studies and all that's so very MBAish, there comes a realisation that most of the people who have succeeded are the ones who challenge the norm. We as duds accept what the elders have to say. The very thought of questioning what they say has never occurred to us. Perhaps that's why we never questioned the source of the data on the internet; perhaps that's why we never questioned what the eldest CEO sucker of any company suggested to do in a case study. Maybe that's why we even blindly listen to the professors as to what they say, without having an opinion of our own. And maybe, just maybe that's also the reason why we are so very confident of what the MNC's and other big companies are doing to our country. Maybe even more confident than the MNC's themselves!
There was this realisation that dawned upon me while shopping in Carrefour (the world's second largest chain of retail outlets after Wal-Mart), that while I was back home, every morning there used to be 2 bags of milk laid at my doorstep, freeing me from the trouble of buying milk; that at precisely 9 a.m. everyday a hawker selling vegetables used to pass through my house with fresh vegetables; that the local Kirana guy used to stock a few pieces of that special brand just because I used to buy from him; that the laundry guy used to come every alternate day on his skinny Kinetic Luna with BIG bundles of ironed clothes, and charging only Rs.1.5 per garment including the cost of the home delivery… and all of them, used to do this same mundane task, everyday with sustained delivery standards throughout the year. 24/7, 365 days a year.
And the lives of all these people are getting challenged because the MNCs suddenly realise that organised retail adds up to only 3% of the whole retail pie chart. And thus, they start setting up back end services, start having talks with Indian companies and everyone is all gaga over the influx of hypermarkets and all that stuff. The 'stuff' that's eventually going to get me a job once I get out of this value addition phase! And what upsets me even more is the fact that I'm going to be one of the catalysts in the process of the demise of these minions; these everyday people who have delivered value with such precision, on a regular basis for a long…long time. So much so that it has become like a well-oiled system, the absence of which puts you off entirely. Just recollect a day when the doodhwala didn't arrive, or the laundry guy didn't come making you to wear the previous day's shirt again or something. It puts you off to such a great extent.
And on the other side, when MNCs put up hypermarkets you go to those glittering places in your car along with the family for shopping! Earlier, the doodhwala used to come to your doorstep to deliver milk at HIS cost. And now, YOU are going to the doodhwala (hypermarkets for those who didn't get the metaphor) at his doorstep to buy milk at YOUR cost (obviously you must have used your car for the transport to the hyper mart you idiot!)
Now tell me who's a dud? The doodhwala, or you??
I think a few pointers were missed in the earlier article regarding Zara, which I'm including here. I still am of the belief that Zara won't be the type that it is in the European region as far as India is concerned. So in short, I'm still not convinced about Zara being able to make a mark like it did at other places.
The reason why I felt that Zara just might not work is not only because of the population not being fashion centric. But in places like Europe, Zara is positioned as a mainstream brand. Something like our Killer Jeans and Spykar Jeans and the likes. Now in their lines, Zara will have to make its way through.
Also, because of its peculiar characteristics of keeping low amount of every SKU, there are no chances that Zara might ever come up with a discount scheme or an end season sale. So that's also a put off for an Indian. Zara's design team as well as the manufacturing facility is somewhere in Spain. Now we all know that the cost of manufacturing in the textile industry is the lowest in India and China. Given this situation Zara yet prefers to stick to Spain as its manufacturing hub. True, the plant is highly capital intensive requiring lesser amounts of labour than most conventional plants do. Yet, the very fact that the plant is in Spain means that the clothes won't be as economical as we have in India.
I agree that Zara could be a niche player, but then there too its entire business model stands of no use. I mean what's the use of changing your inventories every fortnight if the stocks aren't moving? What do you do with your old stock?
My only point here is Zara's business model can't be deployed on an 'as is' basis. And if it doesn't, I don't think there's much to gain in the Indian context, at least as of now.! The topic is laid to rest. (Commenters! Fire at will…!)
Well, its been few days since I've been obsessed with selling gas to the whole nation. And there are a few good surprises and a few bad surprises in the way.
Good ones first. Firstly, I don't see any car or tyre or two wheeler manufacturer talking about nitrogen in tyres and stuff like that. (I'm quite surprised though. I always had a lot of reverence towards the automotive industry) anyways, so that's one. Two, there are machines in place which can convert the normal atmosphere air into nitrogen with 95% purity, which effectively is 93% in trucks and heavy vehicles. Smaller vehicles may have better purity levels of nitrogen. So yes there are I believe better and cost effective ways to get nitrogen to the masses. Oh and by the way, from now on I shall refer to it (it as in nitrogen) as performance air. Sounds better. And besides, that's what it is for the normal dude who owns a Hero Honda Splendor.!
Coming to the bad things. Well first of all Ceat Tires is planning to install these performance air outlets as a part of its brand revamp strategy! And they've paid a whopping INR 20 crores to O&M to figure out how to go about it. So technically I'm putting up a fight against Ceat and O&M…! Sheesh! (Must…not…pee…in my pants…!). But a more pertinent question is why the hell are they setting up nitrogen stations at tyre outlets? From the India I know of, people fill up air at petrol pumps, not some swanky tyre shop! But that's their take and their 20 crores so why should I care?
This is the problem with all MNC type companies. They're so indulged in serving high value customers that they completely forget the 'real' high value customer, and that's the truck drivers. I mean Indian road terrain is so hopeless, that anything that will elongate tyre life, increase mileage and less hassles regarding air pressures is welcome. I've commuted via buses for nearly a quarter of my life and there have been umpteen times when there are issues with bus tyres. There's a lot to be expected that remains unfulfilled. Performance air can change that.! J
And as for machinery, well yes there's this company called Parker Hannifin something something, which produces nitrogen compressors. These babies produce 95% pure nitrogen like I said earlier, and are stand alone units like normal air compressors. Just formulating a proper strategy to contact those dudes.
And yes, I showed a dummy presentation to the class on Performance Air in a Strategic Brand Management class, using a fake brand called Air2. The people liked the concept until they found out that what I showed was a hoax. But it was fun doing a small trial run on the response of people. And I also fancy the brand name Air2. I like it for a Performance Air brand. What do you say?
More in the next run.
Talking about Performance Air, there are many vectors based on which you can perceive the whole thing. But before that let me give you a little bit of background.
Normally the air that we pump in a tire (be it 2 wheeler or 4 wheeler) is called compressed air. Composition-wise the compressed air is made up of nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%) and other related gases (1%). The figures may vary a little bit, but the point here is that this is the ratio of the gases we have in our tires. Also, in worst case scenarios you also get moisture as a part of the composition which worsens the tire wear and induces rust (that is if you are not running on alloy wheels).
Now get a load of this. Had we filled the tires with pure nitrogen (that’s 100% nitrogen filled tires) instead of the usual compressed air, you would have no moisture (which means your frames don’t rust) and slower air gas diffusion (since nitrogen is heavier than oxygen, it won’t diffuse out of the porous tire walls that easily). Plus, nitrogen is lighter than air, so you save on weight and increased performance. Nitrogen is not a catalyst to combustion, while oxygen (which is present in compressed air) is a catalyst to combustion. So if your car’s on fire, make sure your tires aren’t leaking, unless you want the car to go up in flames! Also, filling up your tires with nitrogen will ensure better and uniform tire wear, and better performance.
I just talked about 5 advantages of nitrogen filled tires as compared to the normal compressed air. The only drawback perhaps is the fact that I might have to pay 10 Dhs or INR 10 to get my tires filled with nitrogen.
Now lets look at this from various vectors. If you are a high value customer who owns a sports car with Pirelli tires or something like that, quite naturally Performance Air makes quite a lot of sense. I mean you spend a ball buying a Porsche lets say, you squeeze your credit cards to the limits to get Pirelli tires and set of Brembo break systems and the likes. Finally what do you fill your tires with? Compressed air. That’s what the whole world uses. Its kinda low class ain’t it? For a performance vehicle, you definitely need Performance Air.
Now let’s take another vector. A normal dude with a Bajaj Discover or a Hero Honda Splendor might not have many performance tweak options available to him. One, because the engineering limitations doesn’t permit him to do so. Two, there is no 'do-it-yourself' kind of stuff available for the rider to tweak. But with the same given set of equipment he surely can have Performance Air in his bike. Dandy ain't it?
Another vector for the Performance Air can be women. Since women are regarded to be lithe and nimble, the sight of a woman dragging a flat two wheeler seems quite pitiful. Mind you, I’m not a male chauvinist, but let’s not get into all that.
The point is two areas where women and vehicles are at a cross is when there’s a flat tire, or when it comes to vehicle handling, especially in the case of two-wheelers. Both are areas which Performance Air can address.
Flat tire probabilities can be reduced since Performance Air has lesser gas diffusion since it has larger molecules than air, plus, handling is improved since tire print on the road is better.
There might be other vectors yet unexplored like children and the safety aspects or something like it. The point is, I’m trying to sell air, at a premium and yet make consumers believe that it’s worth every penny you are paying for. How do I do that, or whether this blog remains only on paper is still a question mark.
(note: it’s been just 2 days since this idea has been haunting my mind, and given a chance I’d put all my money into this idea; for sure. There are very few brainwaves that really make sense to me. Rural stuff is one, this is another. If any venture capitalist is reading this blog, do drop me a line. I’m game. Just one condition. Please let me complete my MBA! Or else my dad will kill me.! :-)
In fact I wish to do quite a bit of research into this one. But however, this thought has been boiling in my belly since quite some time, so I’m putting it on the blog. Now for those who don’t know what Zara is; well as a primer, you can say that ZARA is one of the very prominent fashion brands especially in the European countries. One hundred and thirty five days, twenty hours, and fifty two minutes: The amount of time I spend in this fantasy land.
This jamboree that’s filled with white draped men, names that invariably begin with ‘Al’, malls built literally out of granite, air-conditioned environments, coffee made with condensed milk, roti that could be a very good substitute to a table mat, a place where luxury is cheap and service is costly, a place which people believe sells gold at dirt cheap prices (which in fact is not at all the case), where Mercedes and BMWs roam like the Maruti 800s do in India, where there are more expatriates than the nationals, where people ride SUVs with their legs propped up as if they are riding camels, where the rates for a 5 star hotel suite on a Valentine’s Day night starts from INR 6,00,000, where vegetarians find it particularly difficult to survive, a place which truly is a Mecca of retail, though surprisingly it still remains unorganized in many ways, a place about which you can have no statistical data available whatsoever, a place which is in the process of constructing the world’s longest tower and haven’t declared its actual height for the fear that someone else might build a tower longer than theirs, a place which is truly an oasis made out of sand, the jamboree that’s called Dubai.
Phew.! That was nice.! Maybe I’ll get a few more the next time.
Yeah, I know there’s no prelude to the last statement on this blog. All the data that was relevant to my stint in Dubai has been a little too vague I thought; and thus this blog. This chapter would hopefully encompass the first month spent here in Dubai, as a First Semester student (I can’t call myself a First Year student since the entire course is only for one year…). So here it goes…
It’s been exactly 1 month and 5 days since I left my motherland, India. I would prefer calling it India instead of Bharat since it sounds too corny (a subtle hint to prove that I’m well on my way to becoming an NRI…!). Anyways, back to the point. Right… so it’s been a month and 5 days, and the experiences in this one month have fairly ranged from amusing to neurotic. Let’s look at them one by one.
Week one was too hectic in terms of grasping things. The situation was similar to the anxiousness a new born baby shows when he enters the world. He wants to know everything. And so did we. 3 days of constant Orientation, and then the visit to a mall, going to some sub-urban areas for shopping using local transit and a party towards the weekend was probably a lot to handle for me emotionally.
True, these events practically speedup the process of making friends and stuff, but the problem was I was still haggling with the fact of me leaving my loved ones back home. Suffice to say that I’m still living with it.
Week 2,3 and 4 were pretty much the same, except for the fact that every weekend we used to go to a different mall. And each and every mall had a different way of running itself. So it was pretty exciting to compare different malls with one another (the MBA mind in action..!). But frankly, these people certainly do know how to take care of such a huge and I mean huge colossus.
There are basically 3 major malls in Dubai. Diera City Centre Mall (for economy conscious buyers like us), The Emirates Mall (as the name suggests, it’s a little more on the premium side) and BurjUman (also a premium segement targeted mall). The best part about all the malls is that although they have been positioned to cater to a different crowd, each of the mall houses a hypermarket (as good as a Big Bazar) which is its key anchor point (a Mall Management jargon..!). thus regardless of how the mall is positioned one will always find people from all the classes of the society shopping there.
Next, nightlife. The nightlife is awesome here, provided you are above 21 and have enough cash to spare. Its not costly per se. But definitely you can have a better time if you’ve got more green paper. I guess more money holds constant for anything in Dubai. The more the better. There’s no limit to it.
The best part I think about living in Dubai is visiting the suburban areas. They are small towns on the outskirts of Dubai, which also house their own shopping malls, big enough to be compared to any Big Bazaar in India. The mode of transport is either the bus (which has a low transit frequency) or getting illegal cabs. Yes, there are illegal cabs as well here. You get to know how does the majority of the country live. I think the best way to know what the country is all about, is by beginning from the bottom of the pyramid. And that is what we do by going to shopping centers in the sub-urban areas.
The country seems weird in many aspects if you ask me. One, the local residents of UAE or Dubai themselves are not very socializing amongst themselves even, forget the expatriates. Two, they are heavily deprived of education, and that is one major reason why such Academic Cities are coming up. I hear London Business School has also set up and EMBA program here in Dubai.
Basically I think the economy and the social fabric here is running on steroids. Why? Consider this. The Sheikh one day realized that Dubai is a very important hub for trading and that there are very few oil reserves in Dubai. He also realized that tourism could help the economy, and that there’s a dire need for manpower (skilled and unskilled) which the local residents alone would not be able to provide.
So he said, Liberalize..! and voila.! Dubai became liberal. So how did Dubai become liberal? They abolished Burkha for women (OMG.. what a giant leap towards a liberal society). Expatriates could own homes now! They are being given greater powers (and why not.! 80% of the worker class in Dubai are expatriates. If one day they decide to leave, Dubai will be doomed.!!)
Bottomline, all that they had was the money. The brains are being provided by Europeans and the manpower by the Indians (South Indians in majority). So technically they ain’t doing nothing..!
Maybe I’m intimidating the Arabs a lot. But whats a fact is that according to me, the social fabric hasn’t evolved at all. For the development of the country there has to be a sea-change in the outlook of everyone; from the king to the local resident with regards to culture.
But all that they have done is giving the reins into the hands of the Europeans and Asians and said, “Go.! Run my country while I screw my wives..!”
More in the next run…
To say that we live in a 3 star hotel based in Ahmedabad city would not be entirely false. I mean, where else do you get rooms with customized thermostats for your ACs, small refrigerators, a toaster, a microwave, a study desk, a chair, a bed (very… very cozy), quilt, pillow, a small bedside table, and a 24 hr hot water running bathroom?
Sounds awesome isn’t it? Well, as a matter of fact it is all hunky-dory from the outside. But what lies inside is a little disheartening. Firstly the lighting inside the room is quite low, typically like a hotel. There are 2 chandeliers with 3 bulbs in each but are facing upwards instead of facing downwards.
You certainly can enjoy all the serenity and low lighting around you for a day or two at the max. Afterwards you need some light. Some real light for that matter. And the room remains closed all day so natural air circulation is out of question as well.
I believe, we Indians, at least I for that matter are not accustomed to closed and controlled environments. The weather in
It has been a long time since I walked in real sunlight. The rooms are temperature controlled, buses are air tight and again temperature controlled. The entire SPJCM campus is… again temperature controlled.
You have no feeling of what the whether outside is. Your fingers are not accustomed to the flowers in the garden. Your feet don’t touch the dry sand outside the building at all. True, your feet remain clean; true, you wont ever catch cold despite the cold weather outside; true, you wont ever need to bear the grime and the smell of the sewage under you. There wont be any potholes, no power cuts, nothing that would disturb your mind even the slightest.
But what’s also true is that by removing all the things that would make life uncomfortable, life itself has become quite uncomfortable, quite numb.
There are however few things that almost blows away all the deadened feeling. One, your laptop; it becomes your constant companion. Believe me, if there’s one that you need to buy cautiously is your laptop. Make sure you’ve got the right specifications. It’ll be with you for an entire year.
An iPod is an added advantage.
But the activity that beats them all is multiplayer gaming…! You’ve got more than 20 laptops on one floor, you’ve got wireless network. What else do you need? Just load up Counter Strike and you’re on shooting the lives out of your room-mates.
And yes, it’s also seriously addictive. Just within a week of discovering multiplayer gaming we over played one day only to realize that we hardly had 4 hours left to sleep…! It happens. But I guess that’s the fun of an MBA life. And it has just begun.
I guess that’s it. It’s really nice to have facilities in a hostel. It helps you concentrate on more important stuff, namely studies. Only, with all the controlled environments around you, you’ll have to make an effort so that you’re in touch with nature and your surroundings. I guess that’s the most important thing to have a sound mind and body.
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