Socially Yours

5 Strategy lessons from Sun Tzu’s Art of War

Posted on April 26, 2012 by admin

Art of war strategy lessons for SMB & Start Ups

Have you ever felt blessed after reading a particular book, an article or blog post? In life, seldom we stumble upon one such magical thinker, who make us ponder about the things around us for the way they are and the way it should be simultaneously. ‘Art of war’ – by Sun Tzu is one such brilliant masterpiece which shook me from within while I was reading it and left me with a serene silent touch even after a month post I’ve finished it.

What was so interesting about the book which trully justifies its all time bestseller tag is its simplicity yet critical & clinical approach towards strategy. Sun Tzu has showcases strategy that cuts across cultures, societies, communities, individual people & of course, Space & Time. ‘The Art of War’ presents an antithesis to Western world’s segmented & fragmented version of strategy which, if co-related properly, can be applied in everyday life with ease.

While reading the book, I had this strange feeling that this is going to be one of those books which needs to be re-visited again and again to interpret its true essence, just like the hollywood blockbuster movie “The Matrix”, which opens your imagination to its vastness, everytime you watch it. Arguably, Sun Tzu is one of the finest masters of Strategy in the recent modern history and there are few lessons which any individual or small business owner can draw from this ocean of strategic learning.

1. “Keep your ground ready” – spend all your time & resources in making your product/ service robust & insulated from any external competition. Arrive at your product USP after much deliberation as it the only bait for your customer and hence that is your “Art of War”

2. “There are towns not to be besieged, there are terrains not to be conquest” – Selecting your audience & customer carefully is the most critical marketing exercise. Your strategy should continuously aim at pinpointedly filtering the right audience for your product or service because that will save you a lot of time & resources in the long run and will eventually become your “Art of war”.

3. “Victory should be swift” – This statement should be a bible for all sales & presales professionals. Once the product team has prepared the final product, pre-sales team needs to flesh out most relevant product USPs along with Sales & marketing teams keeping in mind any cross question based on compete product features/ price/ value proposition etc. The pitch should answer all the relevant FAQs of customer without him asking and it is indeed your “Art of War”

4. “Winning the battle without even fighting” & “Knowing when to fight” – Companies who are into B2B marketing should not hit the same customer with same messaging multiple times or make an extra effort every time, instead they should target multiple weakness of the customers and let him show signs of surrender at some point.

5. “Quick decision making & clean chain of command is vital” – Sun Tzu says that in War, confusion among troops is a sign that the general is not respected. Similarly, in business, if your marketing & sales teams are not aligned like hand & glove, it will be a pain for CMO & COO to marshal their resources & achieve company’s short term targets and long term vision respectively.

Posted in Books, Business, Sales Strategy, SME, Social Media Strategy, Strategy, Technology | Tagged Consultant, Digital Marketing, Small & Medium Business, SMB, Strategy | Leave a comment

Digital Marketing turns Shortcut Marketing

Posted on March 26, 2012 by admin

Shortcut Marketing

For the past few days work @ office has gone up substantially and there is no time to even put together your thoughts.

Execution..Execution..Execution.

Fast..Fast..Fast.

Years ago, words like ASAP not just became part of the oxford dictionary but also got ingrained in the DNA of 21st century professional, forcefully or by choice. I truly believe that speed of work any professional should be a critical parameter during the hiring. With the beginning of digital era, the world, as we know has gone into a full throttle mode. Evolution has become thing of the past, “Growth” is latest buzzword. And in this super fast, timelines driven, super hard competitive world, as a marketing professional, ideas should be sitting in your palm and not your head. But hang on, you are just a fresh from B-school MBA who was never prepared for this battlefield. None of your project presentations put you against the test of time so much.

DUDE – WELCOME TO THE DIGITAL ERA!

In the world of business, money is all that matters, no kick ass marketing idea is good enough if can’t be translated into dollars and that too within a stipulated time. The pressure of delivering is so intense that often marketing teams are forced into taking shortcuts which make them pay later for their mistakes.

Lets take example of most sought after digital marketing tactic of today’s times, Social Media. I mean think about it, everyone knows that the world has turned into a Social Marketplace..Literally! It is no einstein theory anymore, yet the marketing teams discuss about social strategy as if it is a day’s job to become a Social Brand. More often people start doing social campaigns just to join the current social brigade & to boost the ego of their Chief Marketing Officer. Marketing & Advertising teams still haven’t been able to get the complete picture or to put method to the madness when it comes to digital marketing. Starting from choosing the right marketing success metrics, the communication plan, the campaign sustainence strategy, the customer engagement & eventually acquisition plan, none of it actually is laid down in details.

Pretty much similar to the fast food movement of 80s & 90s which made housewives lazier day by day. In 2 minutes mothers could settle the hunger of their young ones. Digital Marketing, as we speak is becoming 2 minute noodles, the concept, we call it the modern day “Shortcut Marketing”

Posted in Online Marketing, Online Strategy, Social, Social Brand, Social Identity Management, Social Media, Social Media Strategy, Strategy | Tagged Advertising, Brands, Community, Digital, Digital Agencies, Digital Marketing, Shortcut Marketing, Social Identity Management, Social Media, Social Media Strategy, Strategy | Leave a comment

Does Marketing Automation holds the future for Indian SMB?

Posted on February 13, 2012 by admin

Talking about SMBs, first thing that comes to our mind is cost efficiency and why not, it is no longer an einstein theory that Indian SMBs are price sensitive. Whether it comes to technology adoption, infrastructure, human resources or for that matter, sales & marketing. Nobody wishes to loosen up their wallet unless it is absolutely critical for their business and eventually can be translated into ROI.

No wonder, insurance companies finds it difficult to convince SMBs to buy a Group Insurance for their employees as it is an additional cost liability which does not offer any immediate perceptible gains to the business owners. Even SMEs who are cash rich never consider these expenses productive for the business.

Coming back to the point of marketing automation, lets juxtapose today’s Indian SMB & B2B scenario with the core business needs of any small business owner.

Indian SMB Scenario 2012

In this scenario, following few points are very critical:

SMB should focus only on what they do best i.e. BUSINESS and the rest, in particular processes like HR & Marketing, should either be outsourced or automated, in a way that it should become scalable overtime. Think about it, why do you need marketing:

Generating Demand
Optimizing leads & campaign
Monitoring ROI
Managing sales teams through integrated CRM
Building strong social relationships & connect.

Today all these tasks can be managed by sophisticated tools which will seamlessly connect all these pieces together and would present a 360 degrees view about SMB’s customer & business which will allow him to take quick & rational decisions in real time. What SMB’s lack is to build a smooth work flow for their marketing and eventually connecting their sales efforts with the marketing efforts. Most of the SMB’s end up spending a lot of money on marketing platforms which give them no value for money which further dissuade them to spend on innovative new age marketing.

Take email marketing for instance, a lot of SMB’s deploy tons of emails to their prospective customers but hardly there is any method to the madness. Without applying proper segmentation & data mining rules, all they are doing is firing in the dark which will land them only in wonderland. Marketing automation can lay down the basic foundation for any organization in order to allow them to build & achieve their overall marketing & sales success metrics with pinpoint accuracy.

Posted in Business, Online Marketing, SME, Strategy | Tagged B2B, Brand 2.0, Marketing Automation, Small & Medium Business, SMB, Strategy | Leave a comment

Is Customer Retention really important for Technology Companies?

Posted on January 20, 2012 by admin

: Is Customer Retention Important for Technology Companies?

In between the mad race for generating more and more leads, prospects, opportunities, fight for higher conversions with the competing sellers & maximizing quarterly revenue figures, a marketing manager hardly gets time to think about the customer who has just purchased his product. As professionals, we are trained to look ahead and think about “what’s next” once the sale is completed. Ofcourse, the race is never ending & it should never end, but what we also need to look at is how we monitor the growth of our existing/new customers. Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Sales Strategy, SME, Social, Strategy, Technology | Tagged Adobe, Google, SMB, Social Media Strategy, Strategy, Technology | Leave a comment

5 Ideas that can transform B2B in 2012

Posted on January 11, 2012 by admin

: Ideas for B2B Marketing & Sales

Every year the web gets filled with various numbers pertaining to the B2B market growth. These are the numbers which are repeated in various events, conferences & workshops. Often discussions happen around, how the SME would be the key lever which will trigger the next level of industrial growth but seldom we take the plans to the execution table.

While working at Microsoft India as SMB Marketing Specialist, it occured to me that we want the SMB to run very fast but he hasn’t event started jogging yet. Can’t say about the developing economies, but here majority of the world is yet to come at par with the 21st century technology. Even those who claim to be the early adopters knows little about its use and lacks skillset to leverage it completely. Nobody ( especially SMEs ) has the time to train the manpower, moment anybody is hired, he is expected to bring momentum in his field of work almost instantly. Marketing teams are still working on archaic demand generation models which will do little good to their business.

In these times, we need few ideas which are executable in the current ecosystem and also gets easy buy-in within the B2B community.

Better Adoption of technology by Small & Medium enterprises in their day to day processes which can help them work at-par with their enterprise counterparts. What is required to revolutionize B2B is the evangelization of the entire value chain and not small industry pieces. We need to understand that any SME would jump on the new technology or innovation if:

It is used by their entire business eco system ( especially people upward in the value chain ) for standardization of key day-to-day processes.
It is adding substantial amount of value in terms of scale/ productivity or cost efficiency.
It is helping them to track their resources, performance & customer lifecycle.

2. Consolidation & Collaboration of Small Clusters operating across B2B spectrum in various categories & geographies(especially co-operatives in non metros and smaller towns). The sooner these small groups will combine their efforts to create a consolidated output unit, the better it is for the market as the prices would be much better bargained from the government ( in case of manufacturing or agri related businesses ) & private. Small Industry Associations are still doing this job effectively in their regions but we need to polevault their speed by aligning them under single banner by creating association of associations managed by semi-government / autonomous bodies like Ficci or CII.

3. Evolution of Online community driven B2B Marketplaces & Supply chain which will open up a completely new domain of managing B2B business. The conventional definition of marketplace i.e. “where buyer & seller meet” ( via third party) needs to be where buyer commune with seller. Transparency in the marketplace needs to be of pivotal importance which will also allow proper standardization, benchmarking & effective pricing.

4. Effective branding of goods & services in the international circuit and this can happen only with strong policy making from the government and industry bodies like CII, Assocham, FIICI etc. Not just the right environment is required for information exchange for SMEs but a strong platform that can create & manage demand & supply chain lot more effectively. SME’s should just focus on their own business without getting bothered about the nitty gritties of the changing technology. An effort should be made to bring the small entrepreneur up-to-speed

5. Stiching the B2B marketing & sales funnel through Customer Life Cycle Management which will map the entire journey of the customer across all touch points ( Demand Generation to final sale & beyond ) and would enable the salesforce to engage with them at various stages with right messaging & communication.

Posted in Business, Community, Sales Strategy, SME, Strategy | Tagged B2B Marketing, B2B Sales, CII, Community, Customer Life Cycle Management, Customer Relationship Management, Ficci, Small & Medium Business, SMB, Social Media | Leave a comment

Year 2020 – Peak of the Pixelated Era

Posted on January 8, 2012 by admin

Have you ever wondered, what would be the peak of this ever changing, ever so fast Digital Era. Perhaps some of the following would open your eyes and make you think as to where We - The Humans are actually heading.

1. Soon names of our kids would start with “@” symbol.

2. The Church would replace the “I-do” written in the bible for Bride & Groom with “i-like”

3. People would be hiring Managers to manage their virtual friend list.

4. We would be applying for leaves or sabbaticals from facebook & Twitter.

5. Newton’s theory would replace falling apple with falling tweet in textbooks. Time would be measured in terms of tweets and not seconds or minutes.

6. Stealing/ copying tweet would be a bigger crime than stealing money in the court of law.

7. Phone Calls would become free while tweets and fb status would be paid.

8. Kids would grow only in the FB album or tweet pic.

9. Dreams would come only on your FB or Twitter account.

10.Celebrities would auction their tweets, FB statuses, blog posts for charity donations.

11.Family fights would happen over social assets (fb & twitter account) of the demised individual.

12.Copywriters & Journalists would be the new billionaires.

13.Stock trading would be replaced by tweet trading.

14.Only those who can tweet would be considered educated.

15. Ashton clutcher, Lady Gaga, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey & many more would get lifetime achievement awards for tweeting.

16. Our major defence spends would go towards strengthening our forces on twitter.

17.Hollywood’s “End of the world” movie promo would start with the shot of your FB & Twitter account crashing.

18.China would become the biggest manufacturer of (“Made in China”) tweets.

19.”Global warming” would be replaced by “Global Tweeting”

20. Stephen Hawkins last book would title “Brief history of tweet”

Posted in Thought, Twitter | Leave a comment

Digital Account Planner – a necessity or luxury?

Posted on January 8, 2012 by admin

Recently one of my copywriter friend (of a huge ad firm) was narrating his sob story of being a copywriter in this fast paced world of advertizing. To my disbelief he was vehemently dismissing the work done by the planner in his organization, and guess what, he outrightly refused to believe any existence of a specie called digital planner.

“Ahh, you mean the Digital media planner”, says the copywriter friend, “We have loads of those excel eaters in our organization. They keep churning excel files whole day. I mean anybody can do that dumb shit.”

For the next 10 mins, I just kept on listening to his “not so good” opinion about the digital (media) planners and
don’t even ask me about the words he used for the servicing chaps.

To start with, I do not blame him for his ignorance as most of the industry ( including our digital folks) have still
not either accepted the existence or the need for this animal called Digital Planner( not media planner) in our current marketing communication eco system.

Very basic question, why do we need it?

You have the client servicing manager, isn’t he sufficient for the job? This would be a common argument given by most of the Business heads in digital agencies or traditional ad agencies.

Yes & No. To begin my argument, I doubt if people including the client himself actually expects the servicing person to add any value to their marketing plans. They just want him/ her to get the things done “ASAP”. Any mess up and the servicing guy ends up becoming a punching bag for the client, for group head, for Creative director, for copy head. Result, he spends his weekend drowning himself in loads of alcohol. This calls for a re-branding of either the servicing guy with the set of KRA’s that would give him a position of a planner or perhaps the agency needs an upgrade by hiring someone with the following roles & responsibilities.

5 Key KRAs of a Digital Strategy Planner

1. Interpreting the analog brief into digital objectives for the creative team.
2. Mapping Customer insights from real to virtual world.
3. Highlighting key product benefits that can be showcased through digitial messaging
4. Keeping the Brand’s current positioning & identity consistent in the virtual world across campaign platforms.
5. Not excelling in various forms of technologies but keeping an eye on the digital consumer’s behavior to leverage them at will for the brand.

digital strategy planner

A planner ( digital or traditional ) is just supposed to do the same job, i.e. focussing on the key strategic insight & messaging that can be leveraged through any delivery/ technology/ content platform since the selection of media comes much later in the communication chain. But a lot of this depends upon how an agency/ organization looks at their business. Most of them want the conventional planner to be equipped with solution & the know-how of both the worlds, which, according to me offers a myopic view to the client.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Advertising, Brand Strategy, Digital Agency, Digital Planning, Internet, KRA, Online, Planner | Leave a comment

Are you Social enough?

Posted on October 21, 2011 by admin

: are you social enough?

SY(Socially Yours): So Mr. Brand Manager, are you ready for some rapid fire questions?

BM(Brand Manager): Yes. Shoot!

SY: Alright then. Your first question, have you heard about the term Social Media?

BM: (LOL) What kind of dumb question is that? Ofcourse I have.

SY: Well, then you would know what does it mean? Do you?

BM: Ahh, that’s easy, I recently gave a PPT( powerless pointless presentation) on The Future of Social Media in India at a Digital Seminar hosted by leading media house. Continue reading →

Posted in Social, Social Brand, Social Identity Management, Social Media, Social Media Strategy, Socially Yours, Uncategorized | Tagged Brand 2.0, Brand Management, Brands, Image Management, Social Identity Management, Social Media | Leave a comment

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Digital Account Planner – a necessity or luxury?

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