Author: Mukesh Gupta

Strategy

What ails the airline industry?

I am always fascinated and surprised by the fact that the most of the airlines in the world are operating under losses. This baffles me due to the following facts: There number of people flying is increasing by the day. The cost of new entrants is very high à Existing players have an opportunity to charge a healthy margin. One reason that many argue is that the input cost (cost of aircraft, fuel, airport usage charges, maintenance of the aircraft, salaries, etc) is spiraling upwards and the fare is dropping due to intense competition. Though the above argument is true, […]

Marketing

Interesting advertisement that left me wanting for more..

The latest ad from Airtel (HFZ) has left me wanting for more. I think the reasons the ad works for me are: Everyone has friends and some special friends. So, the ad which is primarily shot with young college kids also connects with everyone at an emotional level. The music & lyrics are very peppy and put life in the concept. This is also because, everyone of us have friends who fit each description they have used in the lyrics. I think that Airtel needs to come up with service offers which can feed off from this advert. Maybe introduce […]

Marketing

Leveraging virtual connections

Yesterday, one of my friends said that he needed some help to find himself a part-time job in the bay area and if I know someone who could help him land this. He wants to shift base from India to the US so that he can run his start-up. The only people I know in the bay area are on Twitter. Now, given this situation, I want to explore if I can leverage these connections on the virtual world to help my friend in need.  Now this raises a few questions which I will seek answers for by trying to […]

Ideas

TED Talks

We have witnessed phenomenal rise in popularity of the TED talks. There are enough number of people who have already analyzed the reasons behind their enormous popularity.  The questions that I want to ask are: Are they still as relevant as they were about a couple of years ago?   Considering them to be a successful business, is there an upstart who can challenge and beat them at their own? If so, will they also follow the classic route to displace category leaders – Identify a niche and go after it; once done, repeat again with a different niche?  Or have […]

Customer Engagement

Why are rewards programs so boring?

Today, I have been a loyal customer for HSBC credit cards and over the past sometime accumulated some 3000 points on their customer loyalty program. I wanted to redeem the points and so logged into the program site to explore the options that I had. I was not impressed by what I saw. They still have an option to redeem my points for a Kodak Film. Who uses a Kodak film anymore!! Maybe someone forgot to remove this from the list (that is if someone is reviewing this list at all). Then the collection of gifts is un-imaginative. There is […]