Brand Platforms -In the Era of Social Media

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One of the greatest challenges for a Brand, is to be able to connect with its desired Target Group (TG); more so today, with the explosion of online and social media marketing clamouring for mind share. So how can your brand rise above the noise and be heard, given various time, money and resource constraints? This blog aims to explore one potential answer – Brand Platforms! Platforms that can be created and nurtured to help brands and businesses stand out from the clutter and establish a “hotline” connection with their prospects and customers.

Traditionally, Brand Platform was simply a phrase that was used to denote all the attributes– advertising, brand communication, collateral, etc – of the brand that a prospect or customer interacts with. It referred to the associations that go with the brand in the minds of the customer. The entry of social and digital media have created an opportunity for smaller, newer brands and businesses, to establish and use Brand Platforms in their communication strategy. We have in fact seen some very fine examples of this in our line of work.

Our experience shows that on social media, people are looking for engaging content that is non-transactional. (Even the new Facebook news feed norms for Business/Brand pages reiterate this behavior). They consume content that interests or informs them more than content that is directly aimed to sell. This is a happy fact for those willing to invest in a brand platform, as that is exactly the purpose it serves.

Here is a quick look at why and how Brand Platforms work so well on Social Media:

1. Content Engine: Your Brand Platform is a fountainhead for all things content. From the core idea of the brand, you map allied associations to derive the Brand Platform. When you want content that is not aimed at selling your product but letting people know what your brand is about or stands for, you can ‘go-to’your Brand Platform to ideate on content. For example: Volvo completely owns the Brand Platform of safety (they got a head start on this when they actually invented first-use of car seat belt!). This gives them great fuel for content that talks about what they continue to do about Safety on roads. See then, this Volvo post sharing a video on their Facebook page. The post uses this brand platform of safety in a very credible way making the content sound not so much like a product pitch.
2. Community Building: Social media allows high levels of individual, customized content consumption. At the same time, it also allows for fantastic community building as it is able to connect people with similar interests or views across geographical boundaries, age and other divisive demographics. Your Brand Platform is a very useful tool to build a community of people who have a genuine interest in what you have to say. Invest in this community, feed them with content that matters and you will find in them loyal customers and even more loyal brand advocates. In one of our earlier projects, our client wanted to build a community of people who appreciated classical performing arts. Their main product being silk saris, they wanted to be associated as patrons for the art forms and hence genuinely invested time, money and ideas (through IBS of course) in building a community of such people drawn from around the world. The positive mileage for the brand from this community reinforced our idea on how community building can be a great tool for your brand. Of course it is important to stay away from transactional / direct promotional activity with the community and instead cultivate and nurture long-term relationship.

Surrogate Advertising and Brand Platforms: in a traditional sense, Surrogate Advertising denotes extending your brand name into a new product as a quasi-advertising strategy. Typically used for contra items such as liquor or tobacco, surrogate advertising has been questioned in ethical terms. What we are talking about here is completely different from this kind of surrogate marketing. In Brand platform development, it is possible to apply the same principles of surrogate marketing to an idea that is bigger or larger than your product or service.

pandg3. Social Virality / Word of Mouth: People love stories. Humour or Human interest stories – both equally get their attention. While the best brands have great stories to tell, your brand platform may give you better ammunition for story telling. Whether it is a visual, video or thought leadership article, content that is based on your Brand Platform may have a better chance of going viral. Some may call it just clever advertising, but the fact is great value can be tapped from social media, by projecting your Brand Platform forward. People share content that they love or that they laugh at. If you can generate such content using your Brand Platform, you will find the best way to attain social word of mouth – which can have huge reach implications for your brand. A while ago, P&G put a wonderful video as an ode to moms – potentially their biggest target group, by integrating the sentiment beautifully with the public mood during the Olympics. This video is a great example of social media virality that great content can give your brand.
4. Brand Property: Your brand platform may extend into an area that is parallel to your brand / product or in abstract terms, larger or bigger than your specific product range. In this case, it makes sense to create a Brand Property that is a tight fit with your Brand Platform. (There is a separate blog coming up, in which we will share our thoughts on building a Brand Property). We have great belief in the long-term brand value that a brand property can deliver and your Brand Platform is a great place to start the quest for a best-fit brand property. For example, one of our IBS clients has achieved tremendous reach through their Brand Platform on health and healthy living. Spun off into a separate Facebook page, a micro site and twitter handle, this property has its own radio show and content engine. It also gave the brand a great platform to amplify their recent TV commercial.

“The brand is a strategic platform for interplay with the target group and thus is not limited to being an unconditional response to what at any moment is demanded by customers”(Urde 1999, p. 130).

Deriving a Brand Platform for your business or brand is a thought provoking, intense yet fulfilling exercise. Applying it into content and social media fodder that you can use for your brand is what a good marketing team can do with your brand platform. And be sure, this concept applies just as well to B2B businesses as it does to consumer or B2C businesses. In fact, the idea of creating a thought leadership position which is much talked about today in B2B marketing forums, is rooted in this very idea of Brand Platform.

We at Team IBS love this aspect of marketing and nothing excites us more than an exercise in tapping this for brands and businesses we work with. Once we come up with all the possibilities, what works well is to set some criteria and select a brand platform that is sustainable, credible and maintains differentiation of some kind. We do know that mostly clients with a long-term view of their brand are the ones who will find value in investing in this exercise. Just as Rome was not built in a day, a brand platform also takes time, thinking, effort and execution. If you want to embark on this journey, do call us and we will be happy to share more insights and inputs based on our own work and learning.

About the Author:  
Pavithra is Founder & Partner at Inception Business Services. A Marketing & Management professional with a keen interest in people and passion for ideas, Pavithra moved from being a Banker & Wealth Management professional to entrepreneur. Working with start ups, Brand management, Customer engagement, Content creation and Coaching/Training are areas of work that most excite her. She is a multi-tasking entrepreneur, mother of a 5 year old and wife of a businessman. Mail her at pavithra at inception.net.in. 

Five things a newsletter can do for your B2B business

As a marketer in a business-to-business (B2B) company, have you been wondering if a newsletter is necessary for your organisation? Or have you launched a newsletter but you are not really sure of what to expect from it?
Even in this era of social media, email newsletters are one of the most effective and cost-efficient marketing strategies, particularly in B2B scenarios. A newsletter that is relevant and engaging can complement your other marketing initiatives and have a positive effect on your business.

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Typically in B2C (Business to Customer) email newsletters, the focus is predominantly to drive sales. However, in a B2B context, an email newsletter should not be viewed as merely a communication medium to drive sales, but as a strategic tool for the business itself. The needs of businesses are different; the audiences within an organisation are varied, consisting of different individuals at various levels with constantly changing priorities. In such dynamic business scenarios email newsletters that have relevant content, that target the right people within the organisation, can generate multiple benefits. They can help create brand awareness, a positive perception about the brand, drive sales and build long-lasting relationships with your customers and partners.

Here we share the five things we believe that newsletter can do for your B2B business:blog icon final 2
1. Positions You as a Thought Leader: Newsletters provide an excellent platform to establish or reinforce your company as a thought leader to your customers and key stakeholders by sharing information that adds value to their business. This could typically include market news and updates, your viewpoint on the latest trends in the industry, links to white papers and videos, articles written by your senior management etc. When you provide high-quality content which is well-researched and curated without directly promoting your products, customers will look up to your newsletter as a valuable resource, positioning you as an expert in the field.

2. Builds Trust &Relationships: Email newsletters help stay in touch with your customers and prospects by creating an ongoing opportunity to “connect” and build a relationship with them. By regularly sharing information that is of relevance to them, such as tips, technical information, industry insights, testimonials etc., the newsletter gradually helps build trust in your organisation and drive a positive perception about your brand.Blog icon final 3 (1)

3. Increase Sales: Typically B2B sales processes tend to be longer as opposed to B2C transactions. Email newsletters can be of great support to the sales cycle by helping connect with potential buyers at various stages of their buying cycle. For example, if you have just participated in a trade fair and have a list of prospects who have shown interest in your product, as a follow-up mechanism you could send an email newsletter showcasing how your product can add value to their business to nudge them towards making the purchase. Or you could share content that educates early-stage buyers on a specific product, to guide them towards making the purchase decision.

4. Creates Top of Mind Recall:By consistently communicating relevant and timely information that resonates with what your customers or prospects are looking for, newsletters help build and retain top of mind recall with them. This will particularly help when prospects are researching and building their consideration set of potential products / brands to purchase from.

Blog icon final 4 (1)5. Expands Network & Opportunities
Email newsletters can help generate new business opportunities when valuable information you share, is forwarded by your subscribers to their contacts. This could result in new business opportunities and constantly expands your network of prospects.

While email newsletters are essential for businesses today, it is important for you to spend time to understand why your organisation needs it, whom you want to send it to, what kind of content would appeal to the readers, and what is the expected outcome of the newsletter.

blog icon final 1Once you have the substance of this communication tool worked out, you need to ensure you use a good email platform as a communication vehicle. There are several good email campaign tools / platforms to choose from, and they make the task of designing and delivering your email newsletter / campaign easier than before. We at IBS have used MailChimp, Benchmark and Sendy (by Amazon) extensively in our email newsletters for clients and there are several more out there you could consider.

By following certain basic rules and best practices, email newsletters will help boost your business and build long-term relationships with your customers, partners and other stakeholders.

If you need some guidance or support to get started on this important aspect of marketing, do reach out to us and we will be able to share more insights based on our work.

About the Author:

Ramya spearheads our marketing communications, putting her own special energy and professionalism to work. As Project Director she has independent charge for several key client accounts. On any given day, you will find her directing other team members, managing vendors, creating content, reviewing internal research, meeting clients and overseeing content plans for her projects. Ramya is an ardent lover of the performing arts, enjoys reading and is a passionate foodie.Mail her at ramya@inception.net.in

WHAT SOMEONE MEANS WHEN THEY SAY, “I WANT A NEW WEBSITE”?

I am sure many of us have woken up one fine morning and felt, I am not looking right! Perhaps a dire change of wardrobe is needed, maybe a new haircut, maybe it’s the glasses that need changing or could be a great tattoo. A need for personality change or improvement applies not just to people, but to businesses too!

Various facets express the face and personality of any business – internally and externally. The culture of the organization, the internal communication, the language and tone of the senior management can help derive what the business stands for internally, but the challenge is to effectively translate it to your external stakeholders i.e. investors, business alliances and partners and most importantly your potential and existing customers.

We live in a time and age where even before the customer comes to your physical store/branch or interacts with a representative of the organisation, he/she has “Googled” you. Your website, your social media pages, any forums that talk about your brand and any of your other online assets become the very first touch point of your brand to your customer. There can be no two ways about it, if you want the conversation to go any further, you HAVE TO LOOK YOUR BEST!

With this in mind, over the last four years, we have had many businesses come to us and tell us – I want a new website! More often than not, these are businesses that have been in existence for a few years or more and already have an online presence in place. It has been tremendously fulfilling for us to help many of these businesses transform the way they look and feel to their customer as it has impacted the efficacy of their communication with their stakeholders. In this blog, we are sharing our key insights gleaned from across the various website projects we at IBS have spearheaded.

The current communication assets no longer truly represent the brand/business

Brands are constantly evolving and it is but natural that there are improvements being made to the product or service offering. Added to it, every year of existence brings in tremendous learning that needs to be captured within the essence of the brand. While many businesses start with a certain vision and proposition, over a period of time, there could be several iterations that refine the value proposition of the business.

The biggest bane however is that – while companies know that they are not correctly represented in their existing collateral, many do not have a clear idea of what exactly is the right representation!

Some of the reasons this non-clarity appears is:

• Change in the complete management and core team of the brand/business
• Growing competitors staking the same claim as you and pushing it more aggressively.
• What the customer once perceived as high-value has become a given and something else now needs more emphasis.
• Way too much noise and clutter in the minds of the customer forces the business to take a place that will breakthrough.

How do we help get the clarity?

At Inception, we believe that you cannot build great communication assets unless you are absolutely clear what place you want to occupy in the minds of the customers. Unless a brand is clear about its own personality and reason of existence, it will become very hard for an external customer to understand it.

Thus, we always begin a “New Website” project with a detailed positioning exercise. We align all the stakeholders, ask the important and sometimes uncomfortable questions, we facilitate conversations – individually and in groups and help derive as well as articulate the brand positioning. Extended derivations of the positioning statement are definitions of the value proposition to the customers, differentiators’ vis-à-vis competitors, personality of the brand and the communication strategy. This exercise forms the core of any communication collateral that gets developed by the brand and is articulated keeping in mind the 3-5 years vision of the business.

The end product of the positioning exercise makes the job of creating a unique website far easier and needless to say, truly representative of the brand.

The look and feel is archaic:

With the pace at which technology and all the aesthetics are changing, it is natural for an online asset to look archaic and redundant in a matter of 9-12 months. Every era has its own look that is considered contemporary. Colours, tab styles, functionality on the home page, inclusion of social media icons, use of visuals – there are many components that contribute to the aesthetics.

Here are a few ways to fix this issue:

• Pick a template, ranging from zero cost to a few hundred dollars and simply customize the imagery and text, to suit your business.
• Pick a template and hire a design team to customize the look and feel to match your business.
• Hire a top-class design firm to re-do your website through and through.

Irrespective of how small or large someone’s budget is, it is fairly simple to move to a website that looks better. At Inception we have worked on all the above methods to help our clients get better-looking sites.

The user journeys have changed:

With easy accessibility and greater reliability, the online space is now the first point of brand interaction. More often than not, customers now spend sometime on a brand/business website before interacting with it in the physical space. The website thus has to do the job of getting the customer excited enough to take the engagement to the next level. The role of your website has hence changed from sharing detailed information about the brand to being an effective sales tool.

Some of the things that the website must have now:
• What will the brand do for the customer
• Why should a customer choose my brand/business vis-à-vis the competitor
• Range of products and services offered by the brand and what needs of the customer each helps solve.
• Access to more content and social media presence allowing for further engagement with the brand.

While some of this is generic, depending on the business, the user journey can be understood in detail and customized to make the website extremely productive. At Inception, we make it a point to conduct some detailed research on customer behavior and competitor strategy before charting out the user journey.

 

The language and interaction is not customer-focused:

With the website changing from being an information repository to a core communication collateral, defining “who you are talking to” becomes so much more important. One of the key requirements becomes to present content from your buyer/customer’s point of view instead of the business point of view. While doing so, we at IBS try and understand or paint your “Buyer’s Persona”. Who is your typical customer- what does he/she do online, when they look for a service/product like yours what is it they want to hear, what kind of content will appeal to them – Data? Proof? Testimonials? Visuals? Stories?

Some of the essentials to think about in this space are:

 • Are you speaking the language of your customer? Whether you are a teenage clothing brand or a high end consulting business to the fortune companies, you will need to use words that your customers are using everyday.
• Answering the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) question at the very beginning – Whether your customer is asking you this question upfront or not, you can bet a million bucks that this is the primary thought. It will be best to articulate the answer to this question and paste it on the landing screen.
• Make the most use of the available technology and enable as much engagement and interaction on the website as possible. From live chats to review widgets, from contact forms to referral offers there is much one can use that can make your customers stay on your website for longer and hence let your brand stick.

If you have found yourself agreeing and nodding in agreement to most of what we have shared in this piece, you are certainly ready to re-do your website. However, despite these insights, website update/re-do is a project by itself and needs dedicated time, energy and focus. Given what you know about your team and the collective bandwidth, do evaluate roping in Inception, to help you get the job done. With these elements in place, you will be well on your way to having a website that is not just new but also one that stands true!

PS: If you would like to know more about the work we have done in this space, please write to us at inception@inception.net.in

About the Author:
Mala is a Partner at Inception Business Services. A Management & Marketing professional, Mala believes in the power of higher thinking as well as the power of on-ground execution. A voracious reader and a talented dancer, Mala is happiest when she is out there meeting new people, exchanging ideas and helping to make the world a better place. You can reach her at maladhalani@inception.net.in.

Marketing -Fodder for Sales

In a meeting, a wise gentleman once summarized my marketing pitch for the company, made a few calculations, saw the ballpark investment I was asking him to make and exclaimed “I don’t even pay my sales guys that much!” In my personal opinion that is the exact exclamation that determined the destiny of his brand.

So your company has reached a certain benchmark which to your opinion is truly optimistic. A few months down if you are wondering why the stagnation happened and you do not have a marketing team to turn to – you really have a problem! Your sales team needs this vacuum filled and now. For marketing actually is the nurturer here. While an intelligent, diligent sales force will take the company to great heights, it is imperative that you give it its fair share of fodder to grow on.

Marketing is the roadmap with which you start the journey really. A good marketing team/firm throws itself headlong into a lot of study and research before it starts penning down a strategy. Various aspect of the industry in question must be taken into consideration even before factors such as pricing, streamlining and distribution are ascertained. The research will have to span understanding at length the competition, the requirements of the target audience, their geographical presence, the communication that they will respond to and many such things. The plan thus made, may still under go iterative changes to adjust for reality-checks, external circumstances and more factors in your business landscape. Nonetheless, without a good marketing plan in place, any organization will find it difficult to sustain consistent growth.

I am sure my reader here has already read some of the above in different words numerous times. But I am really trying to speak to the brand that might have made calculations in effort, time, money etc. and concluded “nah”. Yes it is a whole lot and you may have summarized that if you do not have the bandwidth to do this correctly you might as well not do it at all. I agree with you there but you may give it another thought by asking yourself the questions below:

Q. Am I ready to look back in 10 years and regret skipping this step?
The answer here is, in the long term, you will have saved a lot by having a marketing plan in place now. And yes you might have to invest in re-positioning yourself at a later stage if you skipped incorporating a marketing strategy to define your brand at the initial stage.

Q. But I suck at it and do not have the budget to hire a team!
You could do one of the following at a much lower cost than hiring a team and investing in the infrastructure they will need to perform:

a. Rope in an external marketing consultant to help you out.
b. Attend workshops on marketing strategies, become a member of marketing groups, study all the trends, know your competition and then try and plunge into it yourself. Chances are once you see what Marketing can do to enable your Sales process and sales team, you will not hesitate to invest in Marketing.
c. Explore outsourced marketing as an option. (Find out more about such services by Inception Business Services)

There are a myriad other questions. Marketing really is a mammoth sky under which crucial small factors take shelter. Every company needs a clever mix of marketing tools to succeed. And this is a dynamic challenge as the world is constantly changing and with it the possibilities for your marketing toolkit.

Chat with us to see what difference a marketing mindset can bring about for you and your business. It may be the most important conversation you have about building a sustainable future for your business.

About the Author:

Kriti Mukherjee is Project Director at Inception Business Services. Kriti is a solutions-focused Marketing & Communications Professional with proven success in not only revenue performance, but also in customer service, satisfaction and retention. As a marketer, her work has traversed concept, strategy, tactical implementation and ROI management. When she isn’t working, Kriti likes to daydream, read, drink martinis and listen to music. Mail her at kriti@inception.net.in

Is your marketing segmenting, listening & responding fast enough to customers’ evolving needs?

Happy to share a Guest blog by Sarajit Jha – on a topic that truly resonates with us. As marketers, we urge businesses to understand their customer segments better. Whether you’re shaping up your value proposition or drawing buyer personas or chalking out communication / messaging strategies – the very foundation of all that is what segmenting is about. We loved this blog and wanted to share it with you here, with the permission of its author – Sarajit Jha.

Is your marketing segmenting, listening & responding fast enough to customers’ evolving needs?

Change: Else run the risk of your organisation becoming another Dinosaur! 


Every organisation’s marketing is being whip lashed in today’s choppy waters with five key trends – Social, Mobile, Analytics, Automation and Cloud (SMAAC)

These headwinds feed off each other & continue to further evolve both the complexity & opportunity:

  • Social media has become ubiquitous, thanks to mobile devices & engagement forums like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, e-commerce, etc.
  • Smart mobile phones are mushrooming due to connectivity & social media
  • Big data and analytics (using structured and unstructured data) are enabled by social & mobile
  • Computing power & automation is allowing huge data volumes to be handled at insignificant & dropping cost points, in turn increasing value and demand for analytics
  • Cloud services have flourished in the social and mobile world thanks to accelerating computer power & automation

Are you getting caught into letting the Technology (Tail) wag the Dog (business)?

Interestingly, the technology budget is being led, funded, questioned & even managed by marketing. As per Gartner, 38% of the IT budgets are now controlled outside the CIO organization. New designations like CMTO (Chief Marketing Technology Officer) have arrived in organisations. If your mind is swirling with all this stormy new stuff, technology, platforms, sites -then take comfort that you are not alone.

But let’s pause to catch our breath, shall we – because amongst all these squally currents – we have so far not once mentioned the customer, his needs, his wants and his value? This is the beauty and challenge of harnessing of some of today’s head winds, as once you allow them to wind your sails, you can run the risk of getting bogged completely down by some of these new world management trends.

Not to worry – as this is also an opportunity. Core essentials of marketing are eternal despite some of these trade winds tossing and turning your ship. You need to segment a need family, choose a segment, target your customers, create a differentiated message, broadcast it in an interesting and efficient fashion, fulfil the enquiries so generated, seek & get customer feedback, and then improve the entire cycle.

Fig 1: Core essentials of marketing

Ok, so where’s the problem?

Well the problem is three fold:

  1. Rapidly evolving & maturing shifts between products, markets, and customer ‘need families’ & technologies. The same need family today e.g. communication can be met in multiple forms: connecting – by email, chat, voice, VoIP video, interactive TV, etc.; engagement platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google, Bing); devices (tablets,phablets, laptops, smartphones); modes (over the top, Viber, WhatsApp, Skype) etc. These digital eco-systems are evolving, and interacting with each another, as well as the brick and mortar world, in different ways & metamorphosing continuously.
  2. Evolution of markets, which are metamorphosing rapidly from the geographic, product, segment, behaviour and attitudinal cycle. This is driven from the Enterprise side where different successful companies exploring adjacencies have arrived at the same destination through multiple routes. YouTube today is the world’s second largest search engine. YouTube is also the world’s largest Movie & TV channel.
  3. Even though companies are run by smart people, they are often struggling today! Customer feedback loops are heard, analysed understood & implemented at a much slower pace than what the customer market needs today. Product lifecycles have shrunk rapidly and are further shrinking because of the squally eco-system, in which we are all sailing. The organisation’s ability to react to change is often significantly slower than the shifts in customer expectations & value shifts. Organisations, alas, continue to be siloed in their construct & functioning, driven by processes, people and technology built for a bygone era.

What should I do?

Listening closely to customers and segmentation holds the key. If you do this right, at the right pace and follow the rules below, you may survive to fight another day.

Rule 1: Provide value

The proverbial 80:20 rule still works. You must continue to estimate quickly where value resides in your chosen market. You have to be able to answer:

  • How is value migrating/shifting/evolving with all these shifts, in respect to your product, space (channels, locations), time (day, week, months, year), individuals (attitudes, needs, behaviour), culture and knowledge (customer evolution, their information base, awareness)?
  • Do I have differentiated mechanisms for ensuring delivery of what customer’s value & really need? Do I have the mechanisms to rapidly evolve when customers expect a change?

Rule 2: Think solution

Customers don’t buy a product; they only buy solutions for problems real or imagined, temporary or recurring, serious or minor, physical or emotional, spiritual or material, local or global, present or future. Clarity on what problem you solve, serves as your compass to stay relevant. Listening closely to customers in real times helps to find these answers faster, in today’s shrinking product/solution cycle- and is the smartest and most agile way to improve your product & processes.

Rule 3: Evolve channels

Customers essentially buy the same or similar solutions but increasingly today the form/channels/methods/packaging/pace may change. The channels by which they want to be contacted (e.g. email vs. telephone), want to wooed (e.g. discounts vs. upgrades), want to be served (home delivery vs. store experience) etc. are a function of habit, situations, social milieu, culture, etc. which itself are continuously evolving & metamorphosing. Here again, listening closely to customers & adapting rapidly helps.

Rule 4: Enable Relationships

Many marketers try to dictate the nature of the relationship with a customer and the default relationship seems to be one of expecting loyalty. The customer may want to engage with you in an adult child relationship, or a secret romance or a one night stand. Let them select the same. Just ensure that you have facilitating and detecting mechanisms to not intrude. Yes you’re right, listening closely to customers, helps to determine this too.

Rule 5: Deliver promises

This never seems to occur to us. Every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to make or break a promise. All the above 4 rules are designed to help define that promise in an appropriate manner and measure it from a customer’s perspective. Finally, you need to deliver to your customer segment’s promise. As an example, for today’s “I want it now” generation “X” or “Y” or “Z” segments, it’s got to be executed and delivered by organisations at a pace and by channels relevant to them today, not like the older slow & lumbering Dinosaur. And thus the heightened need today to integrate the marketing, sales, manufacturing, delivery, service and technology silos completely around the customer – to enable such evolving needs/pace of change to be responded to.

Conclusion:

Do you have a segment promise? Are you listening to customers? Is it measured properly? Is it captured? Is it being analysed & understood carefully? And is the organisation reacting fast enough to the changed & evolving expectations?

(The Author is a believer in the Power of Insights and Implementation. In his view Insights X Implementation = Impact). You can follow him at @sarajitjha

About the Author:
Sarajit is COO at Tata Business Support Services. Featured as 25 Hottest Executives under 40 in Business Today 2014, Sarajit is a speaker in significant industry forums like Confederation of Indian Industry(CII),Nasscom,FICCI & Assocham events on Digital Enterprise, Impact sourcing and Employability.

Sarajit is on LinkedIn

 

 

 

 

How to do “more” Marketing with fewer people

“I wish I had more time and more money” – this is something we eternally hear entrepreneurs and business heads saying a lot! If you are one of these people, be assured that help is at hand. Read on to know how to get more hands and brains to work for your business, allowing you to do and get more done.

With reference to marketing initiatives, many businesses still shy away from taking the first step. Some of the successful businesses say they have got thus far on the engine of great sales, so why waste precious time on Marketing. Some others definitely want to get their marketing function working better but are intimidated by the idea of hiring, managing and directing a team of marketers. Some others still are simply daunted by the thought of increased investment in marketing, without knowing when or how it will start paying back some ROI.

We have numerous instances of clients who have held back from rolling out even basic, cost-effective marketing initiatives  – such as email newsletters or social media presence. Why? Simply because they don’t know how to get started or how to sustain the effort, when it completely depends on their own time/availability.

We, at Inception, do understand this hesitation. We understand that when you build a brand and business with painstaking effort, you don’t want sporadic attempts at your marketing effort to confuse your target audience. If one had unlimited resources and expandable managerial bandwidth, perhaps it is possible to hire the best marketing talent and also put in required time to get things moving the way one wants. But buckling under resources constraints, we see businesses that let the status quo remain.

Hear it from us here – why you don’t have to let it go at that!

The comforting truth is that today, given the spurt in new ways of collaboration and interesting ways to outsource work, you don’t need huge budgets or a fancy marketing team to get your marketing initiatives see the light of day.

Freelancer, ODesk and Elance are some places where you can find efficient and effective freelancers to take over many parts of your marketing execution. Just be mindful and  pick someone who has a credible track record of completed work on the portal and also who understands/belongs to a similar diaspora as your business or target market.

Another relatively recent trend is to hire an entire marketing team on an outsourced basis. At IBS, we offer growing businesses an option to hire us as their marketing teams. We take on multiple marketing projects or even very specific marketing activities to help diffuse the bandwidth clogging faced by business owners. We bring not just specific individuals who will think, plan and execute a client’s marketing function but a team of enthusiastic marketers to back them up and handle the every day nuts and bolts work that goes into marketing.

Talking to us at Inception will get you not just an “agency” but a Marketing Ally – who works with you to set your marketing goals, helps you figure out what kind of email marketing would work for you, how your social media pages could be used better and not just that – what is your overall budget for getting everything done. Early on, we figured that growing businesses have a limited pocket and whether they are paying our fees, the email marketing software cost or FB ads  – the money all needs to come from the same place. Which is why, we come to every client with a CMO mindset. Our first job is to translate what you say you need from Marketing into specific areas of work that are best likely to deliver those results. And then see what are the best ways to do so within your overall budget.

Are you still finding excuses to not spend time on your marketing? Start somewhere simple – like email marketing or blog & content or social media. Now you know, where to find the right kind of help 🙂
           

About the Author:  
Pavithra is Founder & Partner at Inception Business Services. A Marketing & Management professional with a keen interest in people and passion for ideas, Pavithra moved from being a Banker & Wealth Management professional to entrepreneur. Working with start ups, Brand management, Customer engagement, Content creation and Coaching/Training are areas of work that most excite her. She is a multi-tasking entrepreneur, mother of a 4 year old and wife of a businessman. Mail her at pavithra at inception.net.in. 

Who needs a CMO

Being a Consulting & Outsourced Marketing firm, we at IBS get to meet business owners with varying sizes and types of businesses – from bootstrapped start-ups to profit-making mid-sized companies and even the large companies. One of our key observations is that, no matter what the scale of the business, marketing as a function and area does not always get the required attention.

This is not just the case for new age/digital marketing areas like social media or inbound marketing, but this issue spans across time spent in basic marketing thinking like brand positioning, value proposition to creation and deployment of marketing collaterals and communication.

The comforting truth is that today, given the spurt in new ways of working and collaboration, interesting ways to outsource work and available options, one does not always need huge budgets or a fancy marketing team to make all of this happen. To flip the question of this very blog’s title – perhaps we should really ask “Who doesn’t need a CMO?”

A CMO typically supports the Business Owner/ CEO by thinking, planning, strategising, executing and recalibrating the various aspects of the organisation’s marketing. She would help prioritise spends, research and understand the customer needs and help translate the business vision into an actionable marketing plan. She would add the tools needed in the organization’s marketing arsenal, choose the best vendors to work with and manage the results one wants from Marketing for the business.

So why don’t many organisations have a CMO yet? High hiring costs, requirement to spend time in on-boarding the CMO, lack of a basic team to support the CMO in her execution, or maybe it is not a full time requirement right now, the reasons could be many.

For such organisations, working with a shared or outsourced CMO-on-hire is a great solution at the current life stage. By doing so, they can:

  1. Get access to this kind of talent at a portion of the cost
  2. Get access to a full-fledged team of marketers without having to invest in the people or infrastructure
  3. Begin with the end in mind – get a sense of metrics, what to measure and so on for what gets spent on marketing
  4. Invest little to reasonable time from the CEO / Owner level to make this happen

At IBS, this is one of the core ideas with which our journey began. By offering this very service – of an outsourced CMO or outsourced marketing team to growing organisations, we are able to ease a significant part of the business owner / CEO’s bandwidth. This in turn, allows them to do more with their time and resources. It is also a very fulfilling proposition as it gives us a sense of tremendous ownership and satisfaction, when our work directly impacts the intensity and quality of an organisation’s marketing efforts. Needless to say, there are challenges and constraints in the model, that need to be addressed right from the start. Nonetheless, given the benefits, we increasingly find, quite a few business owners, who are ready to embrace the idea of an outsourced CMO.

If you would like to understand how this works, give us a call or mail in to inception@inception.net.in, We have some interesting examples of how CMOs-on-hire work. Besides, we love nothing more than talking to different businesses and understanding their approach or expectation from marketing as a function.

About the Author:  
Pavithra is Founder & Partner at Inception Business Services. A Marketing & Management professional with a keen interest in people and passion for ideas, Pavithra moved from being a Banker & Wealth Management professional to entrepreneur. Working with start ups, Brand management, Customer engagement, Content creation and Coaching/Training are areas of work that most excite her. She is a multi-tasking entrepreneur, mother of a 4 year old and wife of a businessman. Mail her at pavithra at inception.net.in. 

WORKFORCE DIVERSITY CAN HELP YOUR BUSINESS

At Inception Day, the People Panel saw a lot of interesting aspects of attracting, managing and retaining talent for start-ups and growing organisations being discussed. Moving on from gender diversity, the discussion also looked at diversity of other kinds – religion, language and origin. This prompted this blog on what workforce diversity really does for your business.
Organisations today, are supposedly more aware of the need for gender diversity. (At IBS, we are guilty of maintaining a rather skewed one which not surprisingly is currenty in favour of women!) Are women more suitable for working in start-ups or early growth companies because of their inherent instinct and emotional make-up? Perhaps more women are at liberty to opt for alternate careers or perhaps they rate smaller companies and start ups higher because of flexibility options? Whatever the reasons, there was no doubt that a healthy gender balance is a very good standard to work with. As our Keynote speaker K Pandia Rajan shared, at Ma Foi, they had always strived, from Day one, to keep the gender ratio at 48-52% at all times. This he felt had been an important rule while building a world class HR services organization.
But diversity of the workforce is not only split two ways by gender. Especially in India, diversity by means of religion, language or mother tongue, origin state – the list is quite interesting.
Here is a quick cheat sheet of sorts for you to know what Workforce diversity can or should be doing for your business.
·         As are your customers, so be your employees:
      One of the key learnings at my earlier organization (HSBC) was that customers are a diverse lot. And in any direct to customer business, a similar diversity in the workforce is often a useful tool to help your employees connect better with different sub-groups in your customer or target audience.  This was reiterated during the People Panel discussion at Inception Day. A couple of participants felt that their retail business was better oriented to service customers from different backgrounds because they had store staff from similar backgrounds.
·        Balanced needs:
      When it comes to workplace expectations, a diverse workforce may force you to create a more holistic workplace. Having a diverse team can also aid you in running your business at top gear right through the year since different groups would need time off at varying periods, particularly in the context of the wide array of festivals celebrated by different communities.
·        Better Insight:
More perspectives culled from employees of varying background can be very useful in gleaning customer or other business insight. A workforce drawn across a wider spectrum of communities can be the simplest way to get access to varying outlooks with reference to your business.
·        Global ready:
      If your business has anything remotely international about it, a diverse workforce is a great stepping-stone to ensuring you have a culture with the basic ingredients for being global. Global or multinational organization building begins right here!
·         A Neutral Culture:
      A diverse workforce is a very good way to ensure that the organization’s culture is not dominated by any one group or community, or even completely flavored by your own ideas (if you are the main owner/promoter). While we all tend to impose our conditioning upon the businesses we build, a team that is drawn from across multiple communities and backgrounds can help temper this and push towards a more neutral culture. This is probably healthier for the organization in the long run.
     
      (And oh well, here’s one more reason that is on the lighter side and definitely one for the foodies. Imagine the sheer range of culinary delights that you could sample in the office just by ensuring you have people from differently communities and sub-cultures J)
You don’t need a whole bunch of reasons, as long as even one of these appeals to you strongly. It may seem easier to work with people who are just like us. But the benefits of pushing ourselves beyond this comfort zone and ensuring workforce diversity are far too many to ignore.
We are going to be thinking a lot about this even for our own firm. How about you?

About the Author:  
Pavithra is Founder & Partner at Inception Business Services. A Marketing & Management professional with a keen interest in people and passion for ideas, Pavithra moved from being a Banker & Wealth Management professional to entrepreneur. Working with start ups, Brand management, Customer engagement, Content creation and Coaching/Training are areas of work that most excite her. Multi-tasking entrepreneur, mother of a 3 year old and wife of a businessman, Pavithra confesses that her 2013 resolutions include being regular with her blog writing and any encouragement in that direction is welcome. Mail her at pavithra at inception.net.in. 

People for Start-ups

CAPITAL P
While doing my research for this article, I was amazed! When you type ‘resources for start-ups’ the most common and top of the line entries focus on financial resourcing, idea resourcing, design resourcing and so on. So little has been said about ‘people resourcing’. Getting the right people is half the battle won, for after all, they are the ones who will take the company forward.
Here are some important things to keep in mind while hiring for your organization.
Sharing the vision:
In this day and age of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Job sites etc. it is easy enough to get applicants to see and apply for a job at your company. However, irrespective of which level you are looking to hire for, an important criteria in the process should be to ensure that the candidate shares your company’s vision and truly believes in your proposition. The candidate should understand the values on which you have established your start-up, the path you chose to expand the business and be able to identify and contribute to these through his or her own skills. Fantastic growth and hence immediate increase in pay, on-the-job perks etc. are things that many candidates look for when they join start-ups. While growth in Start-ups is definitely faster, the expectation of immediate rewards can lead to disillusionment and disappointment in newly hired candidates. So while recruiting for your start up, remember to give a balanced picture and focus on the vision rather than on the compensation.
The Law of Averages:
When recruiting for your start-up you will find a lot of young talent applying for the positions. While it is tempting to hire fresh young candidates to keep the enthusiasm and energy going, it is equally important to have a few seasoned employees on board. Senior team members tend to bring in a practical angle and are great at handling relationships given their years of experience. They discern the possible and the probable and add tremendous value with their insights. The cost of such resources may be higher but well worth the investment. The ultimate goal is to have a good mix of young talent that is enthusiastic and buzzing with ideas and having experienced hands giving direction and shape to the organizations development. Once the balance is achieved, you have a winning workforce!
Equity- A start-up’s best tool!
What happens when you start a company with minimal capital and are keen on hiring talent? Today, the trends are shifting towards offering a part salary and a part equity stake. Many start-ups are extremely successful in attracting the right talent by offering compensation through equity- wholly or partly. The advantage of this set up is that often you will end up attracting those who are genuinely interested in the company’s business model and want to be part of it. “The people you want to attract to your business are the people who want equity”- Bill Harris, founder of Paypal (See what else Harris says here). People come on board for the challenges that the start-up offers and are happy to be compensated for their work through equity. As an owner, you are also sure that your liability is limited to the performance of the business and are not taking on the burden of fully salaried employees.  The flipside to this though, maybe that your relinquish decision making to some extent. However, if you can find a perfect trade-off, this approach may serve you very well in the long run. You can read up on how to calculate equity here.
Keep looking- even if you are not hiring right away
Almost every guide on hiring for start-ups has this point. And yet I believe it is not emphasized enough! From personal experience, I have seen that keeping your mind and doors open can land you resources you would have missed out on had you believed otherwise. So many hires happen without it being part of the plan. If you meet a like-minded person who you think will fit into your business scheme (maybe not today but sometime in the future), express your desire to have them on board. Even if they do not consider it immediately, they know that there is an opportunity open to them to consider. And even if they will never consider it, they may know others who will form a good fit for your organization. So stay open to networking, not just for business but also to procure the right talent for your organization.
People contribute directly to the organizations performance, and hence getting the right people and offering them adequate reason to stay will put your company’s growth on the right trajectory!
If you’d like to read up some more on hiring for your start-up, here are some reference links:
For more interesting perspectives on People and Talent for start ups and young organisations, join us for Inception Day on 1st June 2013. Our People Panel promises to be a great forum for talking about this. To confirm your participation at the event, click here: http://event.ayojak.com/event/inception-day-2013

About the Author: 
Madhumita Ganapathy  – Associate Consultant at Inception Business Services
Madhumita is a brand marketer known for her exuberance and zeal for getting things done. An MBA grad, Madhu started her marketing career at ITC and has been with IBS since mid-2012. She has contributed immensely to shaping  some of our young client brands. She now supports us in her new role as Associate Consultant based in Connecticut, USA. Apart from her passion for brands & marketing, Madhu loves classical Indian dance, travel and writing.
Connect Madhu on LinkedIn.
or
Connect with her via email at madhumita@inception.net.in

LOOKING IN AT CULTURE – MY YARDSTICKS

Most organizations boast of having a culture. And no one is wrong when they do so, because every organization does have a unique identity and a way its employees perceive that identity. Organizational Culture, as defined on businessdictionary.com, is “the values and behaviors that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization”.

Removing all the jargon from this definition, what it really boils down to are some basic questions. What does the organization believe in? How does it react to employees who may not share the same beliefs? Do the employees feel proud and happy to work for the organization? Or is it one long dreary engagement between two unlikely entities?
So much has been written on organizational culture and matching the employee and the organization and so on and so forth, yet we find a high number of dissatisfied, disgruntled and positively unhappy employees around us in this corporate world. So here are some of my yardsticks to evaluate or understand an organization’s culture – looking in from the outside. Starting from the first job these yardsticks are valid and have value in every transition made.

1.      The Start
There was once an interview I attended where the interviewer questioned me for about 45 minutes. When I stepped out I felt like I had just committed a felony and had been interrogated instead of being tested for my knowledge on the relevant subjects.
Many companies approach the interviewee with the idea of stressing them out, purportedly to understand the individual’s capability. However, my view on this has always been that jobs in the corporate are not ‘life-endangering’ and ‘constantly under stress’. Compare a job in marketing or finance to one in a hospital- as a surgeon or a nurse. People quite literally perform under stressful conditions there! However in business you have time to evaluate your options to approach a problem in the best way possible, especially jobs at entry and mid-level. So the concept of stress interviews never has made sense to me.
2.      The People
When you walk in through the door, you notice a lot of small little things- the décor of the office, the arrangement of cubicles, a professional air around the place and so on. Yet, to me, the most important and palpable vibe comes from the people. When you sit down and the interviewer asks you if you’d like a glass of water, you know they think a little beyond themselves. Trivial and obvious as it may sound, there are many places where the interviewer may dispense with this or other cursory politeness. This for me is a no-go. The demonstration of care begins from minute one. Because culture is not something that begins when you join or stop when you leave – it is the cumulative effect of many such small behaviors.
3.      Scope to Learn
Unless you are at the point of retirement, every job will have a learning curve. The biggest challenge for most organizations is to keep this curve steep for as long as possible. When evaluating a job, I believe, figuring out the organization’s attitude towards encouraging learning is critical.
If you choose to pursue a course to improve yourself, would the organization support the move? Would the job give you enough time at work to read up and research the latest in your field of work? Would it be viewed as something one should do on one’s own time? Answers to these questions would help in assessing the organization’s attitude towards enhancing your learning experience. And this is for me an integral part of the work culture.
4.      Your Peers
Our experiences at our workspace are largely defined by our peers. How your colleague responds to you will essentially make up how you are going to behave in the organization. When your peers guide you, encourage you, and help you learn the ropes you know you have the right support system. Additionally if you can use them as sounding boards for great ideas and they respond to you, you know you have struck gold! What is important here is the fact that the organization is an eco-system comprising of you as well as others. The better you vibe, the better your experiences in the organization.
5.      Your Boss(es)
This seems like a no-brainer in the organizational culture context. Statistics say that amongst the most common reasons people are looking to quit their jobs is the fact that they are dissatisfied with their bosses. They associate a plethora of problems linked to poor leadership. You can read some instances here. So what is seemingly obvious is for some reason not so obvious. When you join a organization you look for leadership and direction but on a more personal level, you look for challenging tasks, fulfilling work allocations and appreciation- all of which the boss will hand out. So often, organizations invest in building a culture and then fail in maintaining it because of a few bosses who believe otherwise! Culture is as great or weak as it is in the hands of your managers.
To some the above points may seem like the makings of an ideal and perhaps unrealistic work culture. But truly, culture-wise, there are many organizations today that are consciously investing in giving their employees the best they have to offer. Some offer work-life balance, while others offer a great work atmosphere, while still others offer great learning opportunities. When you see the right mix of some of these aspects; you can be sure that the organization has taken efforts to build its culture with great care.  
If you lead an organization, you may want to relook at some of these points to take a reality check on what prospective colleagues read about your culture when they meet you.
Write in to us with your thoughts on building or evaluating culture, especially in start-ups and growing businesses. We think it is a very important aspect of building a sustainable organization. Which is why some of this will be discussed in our People panel on Inception Day on 1st June 2013. Read more about that here. For Event details click here: http://tinyurl.com/adktfmz and for Registration click here: event.ayojak.com/event/inception-day-2013
About the Author: 
Madhumita Ganapathy  – Associate Consultant at Inception Business Services
Madhumita is a brand marketer known for her exuberance and zeal for getting things done. An MBA grad, Madhu started her marketing career at ITC and has been with IBS since mid-2012. She has contributed immensely to shaping  some of our young client brands. She now supports us in her new role as Associate Consultant based in Connecticut, USA. Apart from her passion for brands & marketing, Madhu loves classical Indian dance, travel and writing.
Connect Madhu on LinkedIn.
or
Connect with her via email at madhumita@inception.net.in