Dr. Kotler holding online video-conference for Pakistan

Philip Kotler, selected the #4 management guru of all time, and author of the textbook on Marketing: Marketing Management, one of the prioneers of Social Marketing (Not to be confused with Community Marketing) and adored by MBA grads all over the country — is going to be presenting in our own Lahore, Pakistan  over a live video conference for Pakistan on April 27, 2007.

The event, I believe, is sponsored by Dawn Bread. is supported by a number of companies including CNBC Pakistan, Dawn group and others I couldn’t quite catch on the advert.

Details are very scant, in that I dont even have a venue for this — can you guys ask around the grapevine to dig up more information and add it to the comments?

Oh and after the event come back to Green & White where hopefully in time I might start describing the global marketing trends that leap-frog Kotler’s textbook theories.

The 5-second message

I’ve written a post before about the 5-second brand — an absolutely clear way of getting across everything you stand for. The idea is that most customers will only give you / your company / your brochure / your brand 5 seconds of their time, and if they dont understand you in that time they will inevitably forget about you.

I found another great example of this yesterday — a new book store on Main Blvd in Lahore has a great 5-second message.

They say:

“Readings… books for all

60,000 titles at a time
50 plus categories
100 rupees on average”

Now tell me, doesn’t that tell you everything about them?

In fact their benefit is that this message is short enougth to read even if you are just driving by, and can quickly compel you to turn around and drive back up to them to check the store out.

Good job.

Analysis of Customer Feedback methods - UFONE vs MBL vs Union Bank

Companies in Pakistan are beginning to recognize the strategic importance of curbing customer churn. As a result, some of the leading companies are implementing interesting and new ways of getting Customer Feedback to get some data on customer experiences.

While this discussion should generally be a market research conducted over
hundreds of companies, lets analyze three approaches.

Disclaimer: This may not be the apples to apples comparison you expect, because I am not counting traditional approaches such as help lines, ticketing systems, etc. What I am analyzing are “innovative” new ways of getting customer insight that the three firms are using.

Marketing Challenge of the Day

Time to test our LUMS grads for their claimed omnipotence. The challenge is equally open to everyone from all univs or outside — let’s just have some fun.

Here is the super simple marketing challenge for today:

You are given a challi-walla cart (corn on the cob in the sand) for one day. You are given Rs.500 as SEED capital, and you are allowed to go any any one location in any one of the three major cities (KHI, LHR, ISB). You are asked to create atleast a 100% profit at the end of the day.

Your Challenge: What would you do to sell each cob at a premium price of Rs.50 / challi ? What location would you choose? Why?

(Update) Note: Fresh Business School grads everywhere — this is your moment to shine. A lot of potential employers and managers read this blog and you can get a lot of visibility through this post. So lets see some creative ideas.

The Disconnect between Marketing Strategy and Ability to Execute

This seems to be a day for Customer Experience posts.

Another great post from one of my actively read blogs that I though I should share.

This one has some very interesting stats. See the post for detailed analysis

According to the study, 70% of companies indicate that customer strategies are more important than they were years ago. Yet,

• 60% of senior executives claim they do not deserve their customer’s loyalty.
• 51% of respondents claim that their company does not deliver unique and beneficial products or services.
• Only 34% affirm that they have the tools and authority to serve their customers

Leading companies go the extra mile in Customer Experience

If I provide consulting to you on Product Design, or manage product development, you will likely find in me an obsessive desire to focus only on User Experience.

At CDF the engineering lifecycle does not look at requirements or design — Engineering is asked to look only at “User Design”, which is a detailed description of what a user should feel when using something, even if it requires 4 more hours of tweaking code in places that makes no sense.

With product design, this same obsession expands to all aspects of the product — the brand, the marketing message, the distribution plan — everything has to reflect a story of (1) What you stand for (2) What the customer will feel by working you, and (3) How you will continue to provide that presence and insight.

But — does it really matter? The #1 Question I get from CEOs and Product Managers is “Why dont we launch a limited product which just proves the concept and then improve it over time?”

Today, I found the one-line answer I have been looking for.

Dale Wolf, part of the fantastic group of passionate experts at www.perfectCEM.com, puts it beautifully in this post:

I get asked all the time why I think delivering a perfect customer
experience is so important. My knee-jerk response is “do you want to
deliver an imperfect customer experience?”

What’s more, Dale has collected insights from leading businesses on whether or not it is important.

So, does going the extra hard work matter? HP, Dell, Computer Associates, Motorola, The Home Depot, Xerox, and many others seem to think so. Check out the post linked above for that document.

Shouldn’t you be looking into best-of-class business or engineering practices as well?

—-

As a side note, Dale Wolf was also kind enough to write a wonderful warm comment on Green & White, and such professionalism is always a treat. I’d like to highlight that comment below.

Thanks for the compliment about www.perfectCEM.com … we’re trying real hard to deliver good Cx
content, but as you know this is more a passion than a vocation. I just put up a
post that offers a download of a little research I just completed. I got tired
of colleagues who prefer to stay with a product-centric approach instead of
making the jump to Cx … the basic challenge was whether this Cx stuff is real or
a fad. So I put together a dowloadable document on 25 Business Leaders Who are
Committed to Customer Experience. It is accessable at http://contextrules.typepad.com/transformer/2007/03/is_customer_exp.html.
Best
wishes to “the other osama” — Dale Wolf

What is the Digg Effect?

Well, my humble attempt at creating some activity on digg for a recent post didn’t quite pan out.

On a side note: I believe that is because the total effort required for a new person to get digging is too much.

Today I talk about another basic term Evangelists and System Admins
should be aware of today (granted: it has been around for more than a
year now).

I’m talking about www.digg.com. Digg is a “social newspaper” — a news site where the people (YOU) decide which story on the internet is worth being on the front page of the virtual newspaper.

It is a fantastic demonstration of the effects of collective wisdom, and a great way to find news from the fringes that mainstream newspapers wont cover.

So what happens if your website lands on the front page? This article describes it well, but basically you get a sudden spike in web traffic that often your servers will not be able to handle. Digg users are proud of this “Digg Effect”.

What is so special anyway?

So earlier we talked about the Network Effect, which was a pull in interest and leads for your products / brand because of purely social or relationship-based effects. Marketing people specialized in word-of-mouth marketing spend the better half of their lives studying this.

The Digg Effect, on the other hand, is much more interesting. It is based on the idea of “collective wisdom” (cannot remember who coined the term) — that often people in a large enough number analyzing something collectively can yield better results than seasoned analysts.

The interesting thing is that this creates the same sense of insurance about a product than the Network Effect can. Even though anonymous strangers will vote on what they feel is a relevant story, collectively, new strangers looking at that will be compelled (perhaps out of curiosity) to explore other strangers recommendations.

Hmm…. maybe this is the virtual version of how all Pakistani people will gather immediately at the site of an accident?

Maybe. Or maybe it is part of general human nature to feel more secure with being one element of the greater opinions of masses, rather than the person on the fringe. It would be interesting to measure the correlation between Digg users and Social outcasts.

What do you guys think? Do you agree with peoples’ votes on www.digg.com ?

What is The Network Effect?

Understanding the Network Effect is almost critical to the life of a marketer focusing on long tail / edge-centric models.

Here is a live example of the effect in progress.

Yesterday I wrote a somewhat controversial post on this blog. Here is the traffic that resulted:

Just to be sure, yes, it’s all traffic for one post (seen below)

The thing is — almost all of these people have never visited Green & White before. So how did they hear about the blog? Why did they choose to come?

The evidence is here:

Notice all of the gmail, yahoo, and lums squirrelmail accounts.

So what does this example have to do with marketing?

Doesn’t controversy sell? Ok seriously.

Everyone who read the post proabably forwarded it to their friends and their friends and their friends.

If this was a product, I would just have to market this to one person — and the news would spread across the social networks to where people will be diving over each other to buy the product.

Provided ofcourse, that the product is actually valuable. Scratch that .. that the story around the product is valuable.

So, the product is a blog post, but maybe the story in these emails was “This raving madman is shunning lums — all students: organize yourself in groups to march out and burn buildings until he stops because we will be destroyed unless we defend our university”

That’s a good story, and it certainly drove people here in hordes with pitchforks and silver stakes.

A good actual physical product can do the same thing: A good product will automatically create a good story around it that people would want to

• explore for themselves to make their own opinions about
• give them an incentive to participate in the story of the product (by either sharing with others, or refining it for themselves)

Did anyone hear about or use this software Napster? Did you know they only ever marketed that product to 50 people?

They called up 50 students in 50 fraternities in 50 universities in America. “Hey man, there’s a cool new software which lets you share music files with your buddies”. That was their total marketing cost.

How many users did they have when the illegal version was shut down — 5M? 50M?

So now you know what a network effect is — the challenge: How to make one for something not controversial.

More Product Management

An interesting Day in the Life of a Product Manager

Nice video to showcase the Rise of the Edge

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE