Customer Engagement

Brands, Please Stop Sabotaging Yourself (Like @InoxLeisure did)

Today, I went to watch a movie at the INOX cinemas in Bangalore with my extended family. There were five of us and a small kiddo.  We bought Gold Class tickets and went and took our seats. The entire experience so far was neither too good not too bad. I was fine with that.  The movie started and 10 minutes into the movie, someone came by and asked me to show my tickets so that he could verify if we indeed had Gold Class tickets. I let this go once. Then came the interval. We ordered some snacks and came […]

Innovation

Reframing Failure as Iteration Fosters More Innovation

One of the biggest hurdles in fostering a culture of innovation in an organization is the fear of failure.  This is one of the most critical aspects of a culture. The fear of failure creates a lot of additional hurdles in the innovation process.  No Breakthrough Innovation: The biggest impact on the innovation process that the fear of failure can have is that this almost ensures that there will be no breakthrough innovation coming out of the innovation process. Any breakthrough innovation requires at some stage for the team to decide to follow an insight/idea that is unconventional or against […]

Strategy

Its time for Celebration and Some Introspection

Celebrations: My last blog post was the 250th post on this blog. When I started this blog, I had not realized that this would be such a long, fulfilling and an interesting journey. Thank You: Along the way, I have met a lot of people who have shared my beliefs and those who did not share my beliefs. Irrespective of us agreeing, I have gained many more friends.  In order to write a blog post, I have read many different perspectives that have already been shared by other bloggers. This enabled me to stumble upon some of the best content […]

Customer Engagement

Burger King (Norway) Gives Away BigMacs to test the Loyalty of their Fans!

Burger King has attempted a coup of sorts.. Their Norway operations decided that they wanted to identify and engage with their true fans who would not trade their whoppers for anything.  They decided to test the loyalty of their facebook fans (~ 38000 of them). All their fans on Facebook got an offer, the “Whopper Sellout”:   Burger King gave their fans an option to get a free “BIG Mac” (a product of McDonald’s, their biggest competitor) and get banned for life on their fan page or to stay a fan and join the new facebook page for the true […]

Sales

How Can Children help Sales Executives Regain Control On their Sales Process (B2B)

In the past couple of months, I have had the opportunity to interact with sales leaders in India, China, Singapore and Australia. One thing that everyone agrees is that selling, and more importantly, B2B selling is getting more and more challenging.  Buyers are getting more and more intelligent as they are able to do all the research even before inviting any sales teams in for discussion. This also means that most of the interaction tend to lean towards order fulfilment or what I call “Selling to Specs”. This is a zero sum game with no clear winners at all. The […]