Author: Mukesh Gupta

Business Model, Innovation, Strategy

The Real Higher Education Challenge

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion around Higher education and how this is creating student debt at an alarming rate. There are estimates which out student debt in US alone at more than a trillion dollars. The common thinking seems to be to look at ways to reduce the overall cost of delivery of education. MOOC’s seem to be the flavor of the season as they can obviously reduce the cost of delivery by leveraging technology. However, in my opinion, we are trying to address a symptom and not the root cause. I think that the root cause […]

Customer Engagement

Brands Beware! We can turn the tables on You!

Complaining about a brand, that fails to deliver on its promise on social media is now a given. A consumer has now taken this practice to a totally new level. When businessman Hasan Syed got fed up with the inept handling of his complain about his father’s lost luggage, he decided to take action against the airline. Rather than just tweeting his complain, he decided to promote the tweet. He chose the market that hurts the airline the most – New York & UK. @rubigodi@BritishAirways@British_Airways Yes. I’m promoting my tweets to all BA followers since their Customer Service is horrendous. […]

Customer Engagement

Two Kinds of Loyalty Programs

There are two types loyalty programs that a brand can run: Bought Loyalty: All loyalty programs that rely on points and freebies against the points are trying buy loyalty through these freebies and lock-ins. For example, flight operators want to lock people in with their Frequent Flier Plans. This is the reason, that you find customers of these organizations complain about the service provided but at the same time continue to use their services. These kinds of programs are in reality not creating loyalty. All they are doing is dangling the carrot in front of the customer and thereby encouraging repeat […]

Business Model, Innovation, transformation

Going from Products to Services

One of the biggest challenges that most product organizations face is to constantly innovate and be a step ahead of their competitors. Most of us tend to continue to remain in the boundaries of more features/functions or newer products, etc. Most of these changes will work for you for sometime, but soon your competitors will catch up. Then the whole cycle starts again. One way to break this cycle is to package your product into a service. Though this may seem a very simple idea, it is very difficult to execute. And precisely for this reason, the pay-off for this […]

Ideas, Innovation

Rethinking the Role of a Bank

Can banks transform themselves to remain relevant both in the financial economy and for the network economy? Traditionally, the role of the banks have been to be collect money from people who have money, aggregate the same and loan out the money to people who needed it. The banks were needed as there was no way that people who had money could know about other people who needed the money. Also, banks could assess the risks associated with the loans and cover the risk by way of lower, but guaranteed returns on income for people who deposited cash with the […]