Sunday Posts

I have been through quite a bit - big companies, small companies, failed start-ups and successful ones, big companies pretending to be start-ups and start-ups pretending to be big companies - and despite my sincere efforts, I am yet to discover how to market a start-up. One could indeed say that about Marketing itself: John Wanamaker's " Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half " has been embraced as the justification of the marketing practise. However, while this may sound playful or funny in a big company, such an approach is plain fatal. The company could easily die, and mostly die, before ever reaching the useful part of marketing. But, then, this is perhaps a starting point to talk about marketing a start-up. That there is no money to waste, and therefore, no money to spend on marketing without knowing what works. Which is basically to say that start-ups must market itself differently from the big companies...

Being The First Writing in 90 s, Al Ries and Jack Trout made the Law of the First their first law in the celebrated 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing . The proposition simply was - It is better to be FIRST than to be BETTER! Citing a rage of examples from Yuri Gagarin, Charles Lindbergh, IBM and Harvard, their point was that customers always remember the first, and the second person/ brand doing the same, even if they did it better, is usually forgotten. Presented as a Law, this may not really stand up to any scrutiny. IBM was never really the first, as were not a host of brands that came to dominate the market. In fact, Ries and Trout themselves added all those qualifications in their later laws - like, it is not First in the market but first in the mind! To be fair, what they were trying to do is not create new laws based on evidence, but rather presenting the generally accepted marketing wisdom and marshaling the evidence to support it. But, it held - and we got obsessed wi...

Maggi Noodles was a great success story in many ways. When it arrived in 1983, the Indian concept of snacks did not necessarily include Noodles. Its timing was great - just as television and cricket were conquering Indian homes and middle classes were looking beyond government jobs - and its communication was perfect, the 2-minute food! It combined global aspiration, motherly love and emancipation of women into one, the perfect combination for India. The traditional Indian snacks, all those Puri-Subji and Dosas, gave way - none of those could be made within a few minutes and without great skill and preparation. Maggi even tasted modern, always warm and alien to any taste one has grown up with. This was, in a way, one of the first stirrings of culinary globalisation! As it falls apart in the wake of the nationwide ban on Maggi this month, this makes a cautionary tale. One regional authority first discovered unusual amounts of Lead and MSG in Maggi, and then the panic spread nation...

Shall we call it the brand? But reputation is slightly different from a brand. Brand is like personality, what one's known for. It can include the likeable and not so likeable traits, sometimes intentionally. Reputation is somewhat of a subset, what's good of the institution in question, word of which spreads far and wide. Reputation is also more than word of mouth, because it is not just what my friend said, but this is supposed to be - what everyone knows.  I am interested in reputation as I think this is the only way way an education business can generate a surplus. In the strict economic sense, this surplus isn't profit: This will be more like rent. Profits are generated for taking risks, rent is for having created a privileged position. Reputation is all about creating a privileged position which students want to gain access to. What price is the access to the class of 2015 of Harvard: Priceless, I would assume. The analogy to rent is useful because it seems e...