Customer Engagement

Engaging Your Customers Is Not Sufficient Anymore

We are in an era where we are grappling with too much choice.  Consumers today are facing a challenge in keeping up with the different choices they have. Every product or service category has become crowded (maybe apart from some categories like online search, where Google still continues to have substantial market share). In this scenario, having a meaningful engagement with your customers has become table stakes for any business to survive and thrive. So, the question that every marketer grapples with is “How can my Product/service stand out in this crowded marketplace?”. Some marketers try to stand-out by providing […]

Customer Engagement

Customer Engagement during Moments of Truth

Last week, I was flying on a Jet Airways flight from Delhi to Bangalore. This was an evening flight and they serve food (dinner) in the flight. The service staff completed serving food to all the passengers and started to come back to collect the used plates. Meanwhile, I tasted the food and did not particularly like the food and so had left most of the food untouched. The staff came back, collected my un-touched food plate and went back without a word. I think, this was a moment of truth for me as a customer. If someone from the […]

Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Lessons from a Failed (Billion Dollar) Business Model Innovation Attempt

In May this year, Better Place, an auto tech company filed for bankruptcy, burning close to a billion dollars. They had a brilliant solution to a complex problem. Their idea was to replace fossil fuels with batteries – literally. What this meant was that as you re-fuel your cars with gasoline, you could get your batteries changed at a fuel station. This was in stark contrast to all the other start-ups in this space, who have been working on increasing the range of their batteries to go longer distances or increase the speed at which one could charge the batteries […]

Customer Engagement

The State Of Social Media Marketing is Not So Depressing After All

I recently ready a blog post titled – “The Depressing State Of Social Media Marketing” by Mitch Joel (btw, I highly recommend both his podcast and the blog) lament about how brands are not realizing the true potential of Social Media. In my opinion, the vision being proposed by Mitch or by Chris Brogan, Seth Godin or Nilofer Merchant is the extreme end of the spectrum of possibilities for social media. However, what we don’t realize is, that in order to be able to realize that vision of enabling connections/conversations, the entire marketing strategy and execution (to a certain extent, of the […]

Business Model, Ideas, Innovation

First Step in the Journey Towards Becoming a Real-time Business

There is a lot of talk about Real-time data and how real-time data can provide organizations to be able to respond in near real-time to business events. However, to realize such a vision, there is a lot that needs to change in the way we do business. One of the most basic thing that needs to change is how we run our business itself. Most organizations currently operate in the mode where the decision making sits at the top of the hierarchy. We have a C-Suite where we have the Chief Executives, who decide the strategy and roll-it out for […]