The IPL Fever…

The IPL fever has picked up in India yet another year. How could the mobile industry then be left behind? Mobile phone companies are tying up with the Indian Premier League and the teams to become a part of what has become one of the most exciting marketing events of the country. Bringing together Bollywood with the nation’s favourite sport, the IPL has a fantastic wide-reaching appeal for peddlers of lifestyle marketing.

The Indian premier league or the IPL has been in the limelight for all the right as well as the wrong reasons since its inception. In 2008 BCCI initiated IPL in the Twenty 20 format along with eight franchisees. Since India cannot have enough of cricket the IPL nudged the love we have for our respective states to make IPL an even bigger game than ever. Cricketers from around the world come together and play for Indian teams that represent eight states/cities in India. Fortunately for some, unfortunate for the cynics, the IPL carries an enormous amount of commercial weight on its high-held shoulders. The numbers are exciting! It is estimated that each match of the IPL churns an approximate Rs. 50 billion. That is no mean number. It’s a party everyone is enjoying.

Mobile phones have become a large-hearted player of these the game. They are pegging with the punters, creating mobile applications and multimedia games, and partaking of the timeout and playoff spaces. Some companies are offering mobile net for internet-enabled handsets, while others are picking up SMS and MMS deals with the Indian Premier League. The word cricket alone can soar the excitement in our country, and that’s exactly what IPL has been doing for the last two years. Just as anything new is accepted with slight hesitation in IPL’s case too it was not easily welcome by the old school of people who still swear by one day and test matches. The whole idea of only 20 over matches was just not real cricket for them. It still might not be but as long as it’s keeping the audiences engaged and money flowing in who’s complaining.

Here’s the one magical thing that the IPL has managed to do. The shortness of a 20-over match has made the game popular with the women too. So no more fights over the remote and advertisers can be rest assured that the real decisions makers are also targeted via their ads.

With all the hullabaloo over this exciting mix of sports and entertainment, social media had to be an active member of the game. Youtube and Twitter have marked their entry into the IPL social discussion space and how. According to The Nielsen Company, Twitter is the third most popular social media platform that discusses IPL. Using the Online BuzzMetrics technology, Nielsen also identified that Kolkata Knight Riders has been the most discussed IPL team of 2009 and 2010 on social networking websites, followed by Kings XI Punjab. Deccan Chargers is the third most widely-discussed IPL team in the social media. Simultaneously, Ricky Ponting is the most discussed IPL player, followed by Sachin Tendulkar, MS Dhoni and Virendra Sehwag.

Youtube is broadcasting live matches with only a 5 minute delay in this season. Social networking sites have games to keep up with the IPL trend and Facebook has become a popular means of IPL discussions among its gazillion members. UFO screenings on cinema halls have also become a popular source of entertainment among big and small cities alike.

Alternately, IPL has also used mobile advertising to a great extent to spread the word and generate interest. Since the inception of the league, its promoters have engaged in SMS marketing and caller ring back tones as some unobtrusive means of promotion. Advertorials of the IPL were presented to SMS 2.0 users and live scorecards are provided for easy updates. These have added to the promotion of the IPL like none other. Love it or hate it, cricket is a sport no advertiser can ignore!

Ten Ways to Energize Your Product Configuration Strategies and Sell More

With the beginnings of an economic recovery on its way, now is the time to set goals around capturing greater market share.

Don’t overlook what you can accomplish by using your product configuration strategies to battle for more deals and win them.

Here are ten ideas to kickstart your product configuration strategies to gain greater sales :

• Move high maintenance products INTO your product configuration platform now – quit having them drain your channels of sales  time . One networks products manufacturer had to do this with their routers and switches, as the support drain was so significant that the demand for expertise was starting to outstrip the service organization’s ability to scale.

• Incite and encourage competition in your channels by actively ranking resellers by their quoting activity, accuracy, sales and profitability levels. Companies who get their channel partners competing on quoting accuracy often attach a first, second and third prize to the content as well.  Consider $100 AMEX Gift Certificates for each members of reseller teams who come in first,  and steak knives for those that come in second (from Glengarry Glen Ross but still, you get the idea).

• Consider adding in services bundling within your quoting systems and strategies to give resellers and direct sales teams a broader range of solutions to sell.

• Using your quoting system for win/loss analysis will give you entirely new insights into why certain configurations are winning sales over others.

• Automate special pricing request and provide resellers and direct sales teams with the flexibility requesting these on a 24/7 basis.

• If you haven’t already, integrate your lead qualification, quoting and CRM systems together to track how effective marketing campaigns are at driving quotes for build-to-order products. Integrating lead qualification to quoting will tell you how effective your marketing campaigns are very quickly.

• Give your product configuration interfaces an extreme make-over. From the companies I’ve spoken with lately many are doing this to also increase the performance of their applications as well.  Instead of relying on HTML which is painfully slow to develop on, many are embracing AJAX and completely re-doing their quoting systems in both appearance and performance as a result.  If your sales team have to go through more than two screens to complete a quote re-do the app now, which is too long.  The norm is two and there are some companies with a single page for their quoting system. Also consider letting your resellers put their own own design on the configuration and quoting screens, which has in some cases driven up adoption.

• Customer satisfaction scores for your quoting and product configuration systems – the headlights you need for the recovery. How satisfied are your resellers, channel partners and direct sales team with the product configurator?  It’s time to do an audit of their effectiveness and see how to improve how they are to work with.

• Take the next major revenue producing event (a product introduction for example) and model the new product, its options and services all within the product configurator. Go through a test run of the launch with key distributors, dealers and the inside sales force.  Link the quoting and product configuration systems back to order management and supply chain systems and see if you can get a demand-driven network running to alleviate stock-outs if your product’s sales take off above forecast.

• Look for new product taxonomies for your product catalogs that will make using the product configuration system even more efficient. Consider how a one electrical products manufacturer was working on a new series of distributors to sell to, and created a customized taxonomy just for this market.  When the demo of the new product configurator was ready the taxonomy had been fully populated and was invaluable to the manufacturer, and they won a distribution agreement as a result.

Bottom line: Re-energizing your quoting and product configuration systems is all about getting focused on how to be easier to do business with.  Knock down the barriers that separate your product configuration systems from serving customers and you can increase sales as a result.

Flick attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/extranoise/153341174/sizes/m/

Courtesy – Louis Columbus

Calling All Innovators

Forum Nokia announces its annual contest for developers.

You can submit your application in the following categories:

• Eco/ Being Green
  Save the planet with innovative, eco-friendly applications for use on Nokia devices
• Entertainment
  Submit apps that rock, and show off the coolest multimedia features available on the latest Nokia mobile devices. Include music, multimedia and games.
• Productivity
  Submit mobile applications that make lives easier and help people to become more efficient, such as utilities, business, or personal finance applications.
• Life Improvement
  Submit applications that positively affect the daily lives of people living in developing countries, and may include education, agriculture, health and more.
• Growth Economy Venture Challenge
  Submit the next big ideas that creates a strong, vibrant business that will also improve people’s lives and you can achieve $1 million in funding.

Visit www.callingallinnovators.com for more information.

Interactive {Marketing} Bandwagon

The evolutionary cycle of marketing has lead marketers wondering on how to leap into the interactive bandwagon. This no more seems to be pertaining to any specific industry, company(s), or sector. It’s now a global phenomenon or rather a cross industry phenomenon. The definition of interactive marketing comes from John Deighton at Harvard, who says interactive marketing is the ability to address the customer, remember what the customer says and address the customer again in a way that illustrates that we remember what the customer has told us (Deighton 1996)

Well, this could explain by President Barack Obama, Shashi Tharoor, Anand Mahindra, Gul Panag and so on is all on Twitter. Of course the another example that I love talking about is Amazon.com that mainly started to use interactive marketing so effectively, as customers record their preferences and are shown book selections that match not only their preferences but recent purchases.

I have to admit that though interactive marketing has been dominant in the digital domain, however the same has started to make inroads into other means of non-digital marketing. Though whatever terms we may use however the simplest way to understand interactive marketing is to understand the behavior of your customer and predict…well what ever predictions you can make about your customer, but not merely based on your intuitions, feeling and so on; rather based on substantial data.

While we, marketers, are attempting towards interactive marketing and trying to make a mark through getting into a conversing mode with its customer. Yes, I am talking about conversation mode in business to consumer environment. But with an event of such interactive marketing, marketers need to focus on two fundamentally important ingredients of Interactive Marketing - Analysis and Profiling.

Analysis and Profiling are fundamentals to Interactive Marketing. While I used the definition by John in starting of this articulation, I equally like to emphasis to the fact that it’s important to know your customer. Knowledge of your customer is the only way or element that could enable you to move towards interactive marketing to your customer.

For developing an effective interactive or conversational marketing, we need to understand and acknowledge about what our customer or prospective customer want to converse about. What are they like and what are their dislikes, and of course, what medium they prefer to converse with or at.

With an explosion of tools and technology we can start targeting consumer or prospective consumers about what they want. But….Hey….those are just tools. We cannot let a tool decide about our strategy(s) to converse with our customers. With the plethora of tools available it has become even more important to evaluate what tool to deploy and how the same would enable us to meet our strategic goals. It becomes little concerning and/or alarming when I enter into meeting or calls where we all are discussing about social media, Google keywords, etc without any clear strategic goal that is based on what profile of customer that we plan to target. It sounds something weird to me that we are going the interactive way without any substantial effort or homework towards understanding the customer. We just love to quickly get onto the bandwagons……… without even realizing that it may not be going where you would like it to go.

Now again how to gain that profile of your customer. Of course I can give a simple answer…Analytics or analysis of your current customer base. The analysis would yield “some” insight to your customer base, that could enable you to draw conclusion or at least draw a behavioral trend(s) of your customer. The same could be act as an important ingredient or the right spice for your strategic development activity for interactive marketing.

If I can come back on the example of Amazon, they did a wonderful study of their customer base to develop new understanding of their customer, based on which they developer programs for marketing and product offerings. Equally, if I may use an example of Facebook, a glorified discussion board that led to utilized a niche requirements of the customers. Again, this idea could have not been ideated before doing a great work at analysis of what a customer would or could have wanted.

Though this post alone will not justify the subject hence lookout for more discussion on this topic. Would appreciate your thoughts or comments at shiraz@shirazdatta.com

Talk Mobiles, Speak Ambassadors

The telecom and communications industry has witnessed decades of excellent growth. And there are no signs of any dwindling phase. Telecom providers across the globe usually dedicate themselves to tariff competition. Bill plans, call rates and SMS charges become key factors for people choosing their brand of mobile providers. On the other side of this hyper active industry are mobile phone companies. This one is more influenced by human factors such as brand name and brand ambassadors.

Brand ambassadors are known to drive home messages as varied as laptops, soaps, cars and social issues. Little wonder then that mobile phones, which have increasingly become a lifestyle choice for buyers, also always prefer a celebrity endorsement. All leading and niche mobile providers like to engage celebrities because they are known to affect mobile sales to a large extent. Time and again, surveys have proven that sales of mobile brands have been affected for lack of a celebrity endorsement.

Consumers around the globe have an unconditional tendency to gravitate towards stars more than anything else. Mobile phones and mobile technology is updating rapidly. It is being said that the number of mobile phone users across the world has reached the 4 billion mark. The number is estimated to reach 5 billion in the year 2010. To meet this speed, companies continue to launch new models with more innovations and features. In the world of mobile phones, it is important for manufacturers to choose the most appropriate advertising tools and promotional strategies well before they release the product. This helps companies to increase sales and create greater interest in their brand.

Technology has played an important role in the sale of mobile phones. We are seeing the cheapest mobile phones; the slimmest mobile phones; ideas have even begun floating of a wallet phone. There has been advancement in the innovation of mobile phones all over the globe. Companies are striving hard to provide all sections of mobile phones with appealing innovations such as internet, Bluetooth, camera, Wi-Fi, memory, e-mail and games.

The concept of brand ambassadors has always been more effective than traditional marketing tools. This is primarily because consumers trust and tend to identify themselves with their celebrity’s recommendations. The other way brand ambassadors work is by creating an interest in the consumer’s mind about the brand they are endorsing. Globally, most manufacturers look at targeting a large chunk of the population. This population, in turn, looks at celebrities for endorsement of their brand. Brand ambassador strategies are long term social media strategies adopted by companies who want to give their consumers active advice on the product. The celebrity can also help to gain a kind of official recognition for the brand they support. Brand ambassadors can be anybody from movie stars to sportsmen. They could easily be a youth icon--glamorous, well known and well respected. As people grow fonder and more conscious of their lifestyles and living standards, the best way to reach to them is by engaging a person they look up to.

Mobile phone majors usually rope in young actors and sportspersons as their brand ambassadors. The arrival of young brand ambassadors targets the youth and style savvy consumer. These celebrities represent the individuality, style and modernity of the buyers. Brands are used to make a personality statement and brand ambassadors are an important part of that identity. The personality of a brand ambassador is automatically transferred to the brand and therefore they should be chosen while knowing the positives of the product itself. In India, successful Bollywood celebrities and cricket players are the preferred celebrities to endorse mobile phones. This works because they represent power, statement and style. All of these are purely the aspirations of the young. Younger and the more popular celebrities appeal equally to all demographic groups and are therefore suitable to promote the brand.

Securing a brand ambassador for a mobile company can be expensive but effective if chosen carefully. The celebrity can be someone from within as well as outside the country. Consumers should be able to identify themselves with the celebrity. Some other niche mobile companies like to target the gadget savvy consumer. They prefer to choose celebrities who are savvy and superbly stunning and famous. These celebrities display status, determination, dynamism, success and a charm for the brand.

Brand ambassadors help consumers to discover the brand. They are the ones who appeal to the mass group in a demographic setting. Brand image is important in determining a buyer’s behaviour towards the product. Therefore, whether it is high profile brand ambassadors or under marketed (yet well known) celebrities, everyone has a place in the mobile branding market. Of course, the technology can never be left behind. So each time a company launches a new technology, promotion by a brand ambassador accentuates the message doubly so.

Brand ambassadors are an important marketing tool that assists mobile companies to achieve their key business objective of increased sales and of being a leading competitor. Celebrities are the utility vehicle that keeps the brands going. It is equally important that brand ambassadors are able to associate themselves with the brand name. Mobile companies have made the world a stage that has come into everybody’s hand through the use of mobile phones. It is important for the manufacturers to select and choose brand ambassadors in sync with their brand style and design. Global and local brand ambassadors together make the image of the brand. And knowingly or unknowingly, we all fall prey to it!

Making Sales Collateral and Lead Generation Stronger: Lessons Learned from Social Networking

Social networks are re-writing the rules of what best practices in marketing are. Listening is in, shouting is out.  Targeting is in; carpet bombing via e-mail is out.

Responsiveness is the new black and trust is the new currency.

Brands are laid bare in front of millions daily. It doesn’t take long for just one customer to make a major statement about how they feel about a brand and make a major impact on sales too.  Using Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, blogs or YouTube, customers can make their voice heard immediately.  United Airlines’ wake-up call last year is a case in point as is the recent controversy Southwest Airlines faced.

So Many Social Networks and So Little Time

With so many powerful social networking platforms, applications and tools available why are marketers still not getting to their lead generation and sales goals?

Why do companies who have such a strong passion for their customers lose their way to delivering exceptional experiences?

Why does their sales collateral promise so much and at times fail to deliver?

Because product marketing, product management and marketing teams fall into the trap of believing you have to inundate the prospect with features, in-depth data and tons of documents to prove you know what you’re doing.  Carpet bombing prospect’s in-boxes with e-mails to send the message you know what you are doing is ironically proving fatal.

Why?  Because you and I respect people so much more when they listen to us and talk with us instead of talking at us. Too much technology marketing, specifically in software, talks at the prospect, instead of with them.  That is the heart of the potential of social networks – to engage and talk with prospects instead of at them.  And it takes hard work to make relationships count. You can’t earn sales through a deluge of content; it has to come from being genuinely interested in helping a prospect over a major problem.

The First Step: Find the Passion of your Company

There are dozens of excellent software applications out there for managing lead generation and follow-up but unless it reflects the soul – the passion of a company – it is meaningless. What makes all these lead generation apps really work?  It amplifies, projects, makes more visible the passion a company has for owning a problem prospects and customers have.

No software application can compensate for a company that has not decided what it is passionate about.

But for those companies who have chosen a mission – a vision of what problem they will own for any prospect or customer – then lead generation becomes real for them.  Companies struggling to produce leads may not have a software problem; they may have a passion problem.  Defining that passion for service will go a long way to finding good leads, not those captured through attrition from lists. How much more powerful passion is for solving a problem over just endlessly listing off features and data.  Passion puts all that intelligence into motion and makes it relevant.

Lessons Learned

Social networks and the customer immediacy they provide make it imperative that marketing focus on what they have a passion for and what a company can deliver in terms of products and services.  From that vantage point consider these lessons learned:

Sales collateral, both in-print and online, must have a very clear customer it is aimed at.  Surprisingly so much is produced aimed at the “enterprise buyer of IT solutions”.  I have never met anyone who called themselves that.  Get real and if you can’t define the customer, consider cancelling the collateral.

Urgency to own the customer’s pain now and provide a proven solution. Marketers who are making social networks generate leads get this and get their company’s passion for owning the problem out loud and clear.  Features matrices don’t come close; re-think that strategy and go own a problem to gain leads and sales.

What is the collateral’s goal and how does it fit into the marketing strategy?  An excellent question to ask when there are many, many open projects in a marketing department and there seems to be little shared messaging.  Collateral, both online and offline needs to resonate the passion a company has to serve.  It has to be so strong that there is no doubt your company intends to be the global leader in solving the problems and pains you target.

Answers the question of how your products and services are different and proven. Differentiating at the benefits level, not at the speeds and feeds or features level is critical. What odes your company’s passion make it especially good at?  That is the most powerful differentiator there is.

Does your collateral teach or preach?

Go after teaching, and share your insight and intelligence freely as a company to gain thought leadership over time.  Your company will get what it gives when it comes to sharing insight, intelligence and knowledge.  Blog regularly. Give away insights from studies free.  Be open.  All of these tie back to a passion to own a customers’ problem.

Is your collateral evangelist-compatible?

Consider that if you are selling a complex system or service that your sales cycles often involve dozens of people in a variety of roles.

Is your collateral designed to make it easy for those championing you inside a company to carry forward what makes you unique?

Can the online collateral move quickly through social networks?

These are all relevant questions to this point and to evaluate your collateral on.

Design to Inspire and Educate.

The simplicity and clean layouts of social networks are the result of years of usability testing in some cases.  Make sure your offline and online collateral reflects these design criteria.

Bottom line:

Social networks are making companies confront what they really stand for and what they are the most passionate about. It’s best to start thinking about these issues and make your collateral all coordinate to what your company truly stands for.  Owning a problem and being passionate about it will generate far more leads than any other strategy.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus