Suddenly young man again shouted, “Papa see the pond and animals. Clouds are moving with train”. Couple was watching the young man “ what’s wrong with him”.

Now it started raining and some of water drops touched the young man’s hand. He filled with joy and he closed the eyes. He shouted again, Papa it’s raining, water is touching me, see papa”. Couple couldn’t help themselves and said to old man,” Why don’t you visit the Doctor and get treated your son.” Old man said,” Yes, We were coming from hospital only. Today only my son got the eyes first time in life”.

Moral of story: “Let us not come to any conclusion until we know all facts”.. how true is that ?

Let me take this opportunity to thank every member of Networkplay family who have helped us reach here and
no doubts they will continue supporting us to reach new highs.

My special thanks to our investors, Capital 18 for always believing in us. Thanks again..

Cheers

Sales pitches have become very similar, you go into the market and you get to see same slides, similar one rather and it does not deliver any value to the purpose you have gotten into a meeting. Most of the times it has to do with showcasing or should I say show offing their organisation capabilities to grab the dollar that is there on the table.

While I respect the talent and the sales pressures most of our sales teams are in, in today’s world where at-least in India there is the growing story of the internet with little green attached to it keeping in mind the number of sales people on the digital business vis-a-vis the size of the market. Some of these have a head start in meeting simply because of the sheer share of the market in terms of size but there is this other lot, which is die hard in nature and works very hard to meet the company objectives. Now there is also this lot that is highly paid, so much so that with just a couple of years of experience in their hands they command a premium to their salary and most of us give in keeping in mind the dearth of talent. However what appalls me is the quality in this dearth as well. I remember times when I used to make a paltry 10K PM with the same experience 12yrs back though that is no comparison to this situation.

So coming back to the power point presentations that these sales people do, most of them get their business through their relationships so that they protect their so called high paying salaries keeping in mind the target numbers they need to achieve. But to think about it, the quality of time that is spent on these presentations are nothing short of being disastrous and I have been propagating to our team to build more substance through story telling than just wasted data points, which sometimes is not even worth listening to for a marketeer.

I have in recent times skipped several meetings for the first 20mins simply because these first 20mins are a waste of time for me to sit through, why? Because its the same shit that I get to hear, doesn’t interest me one bit. So to a person like me what would be of interest is when a sales person tells me how he or she has managed to turn around some aspect of a customer with whom they have worked. I dont need to go through case studies but an animated discussion that entices my time in a fashion that is stimulating is what I personally would want to indulge in.

So my advice to all sales forces in the digital business, lets put the presentation in such a fashion that will keep the meeting interesting, even if the business does not come through now, you would have left an impact in such a fashion that you would be thought of whenever the client is about to engage in the digital medium.

So lets tell stories than do a dumb PPT. Because story telling is more powerful than data points for god sake!!!

It shows how a non-descript and virtually bankrupt but maverick kind of a person, who had lost most of his money in a still photography business still continued to believe in what he did. This was in 1911, when even still photography was a new concept and people were very superstitious. Apparently, the still photography business also didn’t do well because of a rumour that the camera sucks out the soul of the person being photographed.

Despite living in such a time where mindsets were so primitive, he chanced upon a motion picture that was playing in his city under the British Raj and decided to make India’s first movie. He peddled away most of his belongings in spite of having a pregnant wife and two sons to feed, and in the face of ridicule persevered relelntlessly to research the art of film making, went temporarily blind, got taken to the Thane Mental Hospital, etc., just to chase his dream.

Since he was ahead of his times, most people he spoke to were aghast at the thought of making a film. Nothing or no one could deter the man from doing what he wished to. In all this, he was supported whole heartedly by his wife, who was an epitome of adjustment and co-operation and his two children.

He borrowed money, went to London to learn the art and buy the camera required for his endeavour. He came back and enlisted a bunch of people to act in his film, provide music, sing, direct, etc. Taught his wife how to operate the camera and develop the film. Tried to hire women to act in the film but failed, even with prostitutes, who considered movie making lower than their own profession. He ultimately hired men to enact women and made the film. On the first day of release, no one came to watch his movie and in order to attract people, he got two people to conduct roadshows on various streets, distributing pamphlets and creating drama around the movie.

Soon people started queuing up to watch the movie. His movie was very successful and he was invited by the English to settle down in London and make movies there luring him with more money. All that the man said was, ‘That will deprive my country of another industry’.

He then went on to make about 100 films and thus came into existence, the Indian Film Industry, which is the largest in the world.

Moral of the story: Believe in yourself and keep following your dream. If your dream is not foolhardy, which is also a judgement that you need to have, success will follow.

The bigger challenge of such a widespread market dominated by regional players is the measurement of the consumer satisfaction i.e. there is no single Customer Satisfaction index in the industry describing the golden standards of service for the people trading , talking about accuracy of tips that are suggested by the brokers , etc.

The Biggest competitive advantage of the product is that it will provide the consumers to interact and share their experiences with the people whom they are interacting and on the business front would provide an opportunity for the broker to showcase and make itself visible on bigger platform. The bigger issue that the product addresses is the possibility of making the unorganized market more organized and consumer driven. It can ensure parity in information flow and also set benchmarks on the performance that is delivered by each broker, thus what is the additional penny u have earned on money invested would be comparable.
But one of the biggest challenge here is the marketability of such a product.

The product needs time to lot of resource to be fully functional and perform what is expected of it . This is entirely dependent on the outlook of its promoters where do they see this product in next 2 , 5 and 10 years.

I would not hesitate to state how Dr. Bhatia has relentlessly worked towards the betterment of this community through a lot of innovative efforts and bring the community under one roof. We saw that at the launch of the chapter in Delhi where Alok Bharadwaj of Canon India took the initiative. It was an awesome evening 4weeks back and that is where recognition to the individuals and the industry was discussed.

5th week post that meeting we were in Singapore at Suntec and I was amazed to see the participation levels of everyone CXO level people from various categories of industries participate, it was awesome to see over 52countries participate and what an evening it was in Singapore on 23rd July 2010.

From Bhaskar Das to Amit Burman to heads of organisations of Nokia, Etisalat, Etihad, Oman Air, RIM, Maruti and over another 200 companies participated ranging from Honk Kong to Far East. It was awesome and hats off to this organisation for having built such credibility and participation in such a short time period.

To know more log on to www.cmoasia.org.

To me the moment of glory was when NetworkPlay was chosen for “Award in Brand Excellence - Internet Business” where 3 more large organisations with the likes of Canon India, ICICIDirect.com and Home Shop 18 were chosen.

Yahoo India was awarded for brand leadership and CEO of the year was Shiv Kumar Shiv of Nokia. There were over 200 awards and I cant put all of those in here, log onto the CMO Asia site and read on.

For me it is the single largest achievement till date for a 22 month organisation to be part of some of the world’s largest brands in an award ceremony rubbing shoulder to shoulder. Imagine the might of the organisations in our category and NetworkPlay was part of the same. Simply shows the wonderful work that my team has been doing over the last 20months.

Superb Stuff.

If you want to learn to play Hockey, no amount of reading and researching will help. No amount of instructions from an SRK like coach lecturing his team on ‘70 minutes’ will help. Jump into the pool to learn to swim.

The mantra for success, in short is not about getting the best tools. It is, in fact, in knowing how to use them.

And you have the poor, unsuspecting candidate trying something new in the next episode, more often than not, messes up his / her performance and is soon shown the door by either the judges on the show or the junta that votes for or against the candidate.

So the questions I have are: Is the Kuchh Naya Karo, really good advice? Isn’t this a competition where one is pitted against the other and audience loyalty has the life of just one episode? Would the audience who votes and decides the fate of the candidate really care if the genre of the candidate doesn’t change as long as he / she keeps performing well? Wouldn’t the candidate have enough time to hone his / her skills in other genres after having won the competition?

So here’s what I feel - Understand the objective of the competition: Is the objective to prove your versatility or is it to win? If it is to win, and win alone, it is better to stick to your specialisation and make sure you perform well in that genre. If, however, the objective is to prove your versatility, you obviously don’t have a choice but to try other genres.

More often than not, objectives in the workplace are to win and not to prove versatility. Having to prove versatility and operating outside your forte is almost akin to being asked to play Beethoven’s symphonies with one hand tied behind your back.

Opearting within your forte will let you sharpen your skills further and make you perform better. Quite akin to the message in 3 idiots and one of my earlier blogs on Passion. Do what you are passionate about and you will do it well. If you do what you are not good at, you have a fair chance of messing it up.

BUT - does that mean that one should not expand the scope of one’s talents? No, of course not! It only means that the expansion of this scope should not be in a situation where there is business or reputation at stake. One should definitely work on new skills and attain versatility but in spare time. I would urge a person to “kuchh naya karo” in critical situations only if their existing way of working DOESN’T work. If it does, don’t rock the boat and forget “kuchh naya karo”.

CMO Council’s Delhi Region was launched on Friday, 2nd July at Taj Mansingh in New Delhi and Dr. Bhaskar Das Of Times Group, Shiv Kumar Of Nokia and Alok Bharadwaj of Canon along with Dr. Bhatia lit the customary lighting of the lamp followed by what to me was the most intriguing presentations I’ve been through in recent times.

Before that, through this blog I would want to congratulate everyone involved on the wonderful initiative and the gathering was exquisite with the best of marketers (CMO) from different organisations coming together to what would be a beginning of CMO Council’s Delhi Chapter.

Shiv presented at the gathering and it was an eye opener of sorts focussing on the tasks marketers had in the years to come. He focussed on 2020, 10 yrs from now on how consumers would behave through some very smart research findings of Indicus. Surprisingly what stood out was the age group that we are trying to address will formulate the largest chunk of India’s population totalling to 72%, this age group will be from 15-35 and keeping in mind India’s population this would approximately be 3/4th of over 1Billion, which is good and bad both. However some of their behaviour and thought process were very surprising.

For example:

1) These individuals biggest worry is poverty and environment.
2) Their biggest focus is on education along with health and wellness.
3) They do not make compulsive buying decisions.
4) They ponder over everything through the wonderful experiences they garner.
5) They expect nothing less than world class in terms of services.

While I could clearly relate to 4 & 5, I just could not believe that they were concerned about environment, health and wellness and are not compulsive buyers. These points in itself gives a different paradigm to many of us as marketers in our thought processes.

I clearly could relate to education, experience seeking and world class services keeping in mind that these are people, whom you would want to term as Gen Y and for all practical purposes haven’t seen any of India’s earlier days of struggle with inflation, economic reforms etc simply because all of these attributes of economy and subsequent growth of our nation came into foray only post 1991, which is when our economy opened and in 2020 if these people are going to be 15-35 yrs of age it clearly indicates that they were born after 1991.

As individuals they are far better planned, wiser and smarter having been exposed to the best of everything.

So the real task on hand as per Shiv was services that are at current cost moving towards no cost and then subsequently no cost because of the kind of expectations that are getting in by all of these new generation consumers.

The presentation was awesome and as always a big eye opener, people have told me about Shiv practicing what he preaches and I could relate to how Nokia’s branding strategy has been over the years and where it is headed going forward, or should I say where the focus areas are for them going forward.

Clearly Go Green as an effort by many organisations today indicate the most marketers have similar challenges they are addressing and many organisations are working towards such concepts keeping in mind the priority of environment that these consumers have going forward.

Thanks Shiv for such a wonderful presentation, while the above thoughts have been lingering in my mind all along, I am sure there have been more in that presentation.

It was a lovely evening and Iam looking forward to many more of these in the coming months and I can for sure say that this body will be the right answer for many of our concerns in the marketing space.

Superb!

Best
Ram