It is not just people who are anxious, businesses overall are eager too, as they stare towards a challenging three-quarter of Recession or very significant economic impact.

Being slightly insulated from the global supply chain, we are caught in the downward spiral of our own, and there are many questions unanswered.

Once the lockdown is lifted will the following period of scarcity of product and services have a long term impact on the customer loyalty/ demand for their products.

Business Continuity, along with the overall impact of the future, will be the next challenge on their minds.

Instead of focusing on future and opportunities that the future brings in most people are currently spending time anxiously waiting for this period to get over.

Light(goal) at the end of the tunnel (even if not visible now):

Whether lockdown ends on a particular date as announced or sometime in future businesses will have to walk on a thin line between immediate to long term goals. Everyone was affected by the scarcity of essentials due to sudden lockdown, hoarding, anxiety.

This experience is one of the best ways an organisation can build “Scarcity” as a means to their growth strategy. Scarcity as growth strategy allows an organisation to showcase their offerings as extremely useful and needed by consumers, but, that it’s also not widely available. Shortage can push a customer towards higher value instinctively and creating the pull.

You don’t need hundreds of crores to drive a scarcity led growth strategy. Even smaller organisations can offer innovative offerings at a limited budget. The opportunity is to create a bundle of product & services apprising customers the need to invest in a priority.

However, scarcity will bring new learnings. The learnings of growing old fashion way, without investor money or growing slowly. Scarcity work only in cases where the product and services are irreplaceable. There are many case studies (Apple, Bose, Vulcan tablets, Vertu Mobile phones, Patanjali – a few years ago-, Goldvish) available to learn.

However, it’s a dual-edge sword, and if companies what to pursue have many things to consider.

What should you as an organisation do

Urgency

• Create a sense of urgency. Offer a value bundle at a price point for a limited and minimal time. Make this value offering a once in a lifetime opportunity obviously without compromising on profitability or maybe on a cost-plus basis
• Product & services should not be easy to replicate, or the offer under the scarcity business model should be too good to be true
• Ensure these value bundles are available to your customers as soon as they are ready or the situation allows
• Offer this on a limited time limited stock basis
• There should be a genuine demand or a need.
• It should be affordable or if expensive than premium only.

Market, market, market (effective campaign)

• Create a marketing campaign around FOMO (fear of missing out).
• Workout to make a profit or cover costs
• Associate with top leaders industry leaders influences To endorse your product and services offered during this time to create herd mentality or follows following their leaders
• Capture stories well timed in well covered promote it heavily on digital space, source to get better returns for your communications
• How about re segmenting/undertaking a review of market segment quickly more like a dipstick then a deep dive
• Create examples for customers to follow
• Capture mind Share and wallet share

Cost Driven approach

• Don’t be greedy. So what should one do?
• leverage shared services
• identify your / customer goals
• How can you help customer
• Create your buyer persona

Reciprocal Relationship

• Create a mutual relationship as part of this initiative. Or create a loyalty program for customers who explicitly endorse to associate. This will be a way for companies to tell their customers that they value the Association.
• Associate your brand with the community do inspire people to take action off buying your product or service
• Create case studies

Please leave your comment. Share your story on how are you going to deal with the scarcity of your product and services. Has shortage ever helped your business goals?

The post Scarcity-based business approach -the new normal? appeared first on Monk consulting | Strategy Consulting and Advisory firm.

Today Segmentation is shifting away from being something uniform towards dynamic. The critical question is not if or which Segmentation is right for your organisation?’, but ‘what will drive your customer segmentation, to serve your customer better and help solve the complex business problems.’

Having done this exercise with multiple Telcos over many years, one thing I can share is Segmentation has been a building block of the telecom business. I have seen instances of this across e-commerce and retail & FMCG.

FMCG was the pioneer in India for Segmentation followed by consumer durables and well adopted by new-age verticals like Telecom and E-Commerce as well as financial services. Traditional verticals like manufacturing are not far behind either.

Most Startups today are either trying to fill in the gaps not addressed by existing players or innovating to create new products and services. In such a scenario, Segmentation strategy can and should become the basis of their business plans.

So what is Segmentation:

Market segmentation is a process used by organisations to split up customers or cohort into tinier classes who share common characteristics.

Segmentation is what people bought (related or unrelated categories), but it goes beyond that, identifying who that person is, why they buy, and what it is that they need from you.

So, Segmentation is your guide to or basis of your offerings. I can even go ahead and say that Segmentation is the basis of your business case/ business model and your future outlook.  Most of the startups naturally know what their product is and whom their product is going to serve. What their basic needs are and how can your product or service serve them better.

Today market evolution ensures that companies and service providers should focus their attention on the customer. Organisations need to involve customers more in the product/service development process so that new products designed must be market-driven. This requires:

• Understanding customer needs and economics
• Determining the marketing and sales costs
• Identifying appropriate options based on customer values and company objectives
• Developing clear marketing goals, action programs by segment

Key components of your Segmentation Strategy

Key Challenges

• How to Measure?
• How to access the target group?
• How to measure segments and micro/ niche segments?

Approach to Segmentation

Organisations use Segmentation as a tool to identify their target audience based on unique attributes, create effective marketing strategies, find opportunities, optimise offerings. One way to Segment market is:

• Geographic – Classification based on geographical territories
• Demographic – Classification based on individual attributes
• Firmographic – Classification based on brand or organisation characteristics
• Behavioural – Classification based on behaviours like product usage, technology laggards.
• Psychographic – Classification based on attitudes, aspirations, values, and other criteria

How it’s done?

• Preliminary KYC activities
• Select bifurcation or segmentation criterion
• Prepare research design
• Measure & Analyse responses
• Test & follow

While the generic approach to Segmentation is good to read in books, the actual Segmentation is pretty scientific and time-consuming. Hence most of the companies tend to carry out these exercises once every few years. I for example have worked with companies in Agriculture Vertical who have carried out these exercises once every decade. However new-age verticals undertake these more frequently. Startups too tend to focus on their close relationships with their customers to segment, while not taking external help. However, this approach changes as they scale.

Let’s take a Startup ecosystem as a case and define how to segment/bifurcate.

Startups Segmentation is carried out in many ways, it depends upon the choice of attributes & parameters. One way to split up the startup ecosystem into four groups:

Stars with limelight or Growing Startups (Showstoppers) – These are the entities which pursue disruptive business models and target large addressable markets, scale. They are the buzz creators who always seek growth, size & leadership via new or innovative offerings or business models.

Objective driven or Niche Startups – These startups also create innovative offerings but only for specific markets or customer segments, confining them to their addressable market.

Dynamic Startups – These entities operate in traditional business environments & industries like trading, manufacturing, retail, and services by employing proven business models & strategies. Such entities often operate at moderate scale and growth rates but steady returns.

Opportunistic Startups – These entities are small units which employ resources in small proportion to tap the available opportunity. They often operate on a small scale, with low growth potential primarily serving the local markets or value chains.

Above illustration highlights, different segments will need different strategies as you cannot treat all patients with a conventional drug. When you use Segmentation as a tool, you identify where your organisation sits in this Segmentation. What are you doing right, and what needs working?

Some organisations may choose the strategy to grow organically or finding compatible organisations to merge /acquire. While others may identify joint go to market opportunities, while some may choose to find other locative segments to serve, and that is how you can deploy Segmentation to your advantage.

Above matrix depicts the positioning of different segments or cohorts when exposed to the parameters like Innovation & Market Scale. It also underlines that identification of parts is essential, but unless exposed to actionable metrics, one would not be able to arrive at best conclusions.

In the above illustration Innovation & Scale became the necessary parameters in the derivation of cohorts or segments, loyalty could be another way to segment brands, as shown below:

To use loyalty as a Segmentation parameter, we first need to identify stages of loyalty

Analyze attributes & parameter

Segmentation of brands based on identified stages & parameters

In this case, loyalty & customer maturity became the basic parameters of Segmentation, while other factors such as brand dominance & position added another layer of distinction to arrive at relative positioning of device brands.

To interpret loyalty is not like climbing a staircase. A customer is going from a discount hunter to a loyalist to a promoter of the brand. Loyalty is a roller coaster, and any artificial factor or attempt to build loyalty may become a boomerang any day. Awareness about a brand’s relative position could help management device strategies, align objectives & identify growth opportunities. Thus, highlighting the importance of Segmentation in corporate decision making. Unfortunately, most sectors & brands fail to give importance to these attributes and rely on gut and intuition, but leaders are wise enough to deploy Segmentation to make most out of their portfolios.

Conclusion:

I don’t say that a vast topic like Segmentation can be covered under 5 mins. I believe, startups already struggling with limited resources, need to prioritise where to focus their energies. Especially where do they find paying customers and how to reach them. Segmentation is the definitely a first step in that direction.

Unfortunately, most Startups make the mistake of ignoring these important attributes and rather rely only on gut and intuition. If you want to move beyond “Gut and Intuition”, reach out to us at Monk Consulting to help you with the following:

1. Due Diligence of your Marketing Segmentation Strategy
2. Build customised Segmentation tools
3. Creating an action-based proactive segmentation approach
4. Set measurable outcomes for your segmentation strategy
5. Masterclass / Session on Segmentation.

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.”  -Dr Michael LeBoeuf  Author, Speaker and Thinker.

The post Divide and Rule – Is Segmentation the crucial first Step? appeared first on Monk consulting | Strategy Consulting and Advisory firm.

The GSMA last week announced the nominees for the 2017 Asia Mobile Awards. Winners of the “AMO Awards” will be honoured at the Asia Mobile Awards Ceremony and Dinner Reception at DaGuan Theatre in Pudong, Shanghai on Wednesday, 28 June.

I would like to extend my best wishes to all the nominees for the 2017 Asia Mobile Awards. Look forward to meeting some of you to celebrate our industry’s best and brightest at Mobile World Congress Shanghai.

It was a pleasure to Judge these thorough entries and some exciting work that went behind them to bring those solutions to life.

If you are not planning to be in Shanghai, I look forward to meeting you in Delhi / Mumbai / B’lore  sometime in July. I will be happy to share the work we have done in Telecom Media and Technology space and take you through our following offerings:

The post Girish Trivedi is a Judge at GSMA Mobile World Congress (MWC) Shanghai 2017 appeared first on Monk consulting | Strategy Consulting and Advisory firm.

Trends 2016: The ‘elements’ telecoms can brace for this year

By Girish Trivedi

The many developments that can impact how industry evolves in 2016.

• Move towards consolidation: 2016 will set the tone for an upcoming structure of the industry. Entry of new players like Reliance Jio will enhance competition and as a result can lead to few players looking to build synergies. Possible stake sell or friendly mergers can initiate in 2016.
• Price wars/ Migration to 4G: Launch of Reliance Jio, better data bundles and device bundle offerings can be seen in 2016. This will lead to escalation in price wars. However, choice will continue to be bread and butter… We expect a revival in better voice offerings as well. Reason being as more customer will move to 4G and 3G, the network will free up for more price-conscious users.
• BSNL revival: This can impact Pan-India players, given the reach BSNL has. However it will depend on how quickly they get their house in order, expand capacities and improve services.
• New technologies and areas:  Cloud services, Mobile Broadband (3G /4G), OTT services, will continue to expand.
• Smartphones: We will continue to grow as fastest growing smartphone market. More players will enter offerings me-too products.  Product launches will intensify and will remain a hyper competitive market in entry levels and mid-market segments.
• Preference for fiber network: We can see resurgence for fiber connectivity. The need for consistently better connectivity, and use of Wi-Fi for data connectivity will lead to this demand.
• Enterprise offerings: Enterprise offerings will see a growth especially M2M, Industrialized IoT, Big Data, Digitization across verticals.

 

 

 

 

 

(The author, Girish Trivedi, Co-Founder, is Director, Monk Consulting)

The post Telecom Trends 2016 appeared first on Monk consulting | Strategy Consulting and Advisory firm.

1. How does your customer view you? Leader? Follower? Me too product? Etc.
2. What is that a high end product buyer in India is looking for?
3. Does Microsoft actually lives up to user experience and expectation and brand image with Lumia range?

The simple answer as most of the Marketing teams give was: we have a product that matches Apple products and in various aspects is better.

I was candid and shared the Bitter truth:

• Pricing: I had strong views that they cannot and should not launch product at the premium. Suggested them to rework their pricing (they eventually did lower prices after initial sales took hit and stopped pitting their product with Apple).
• User Experience: A high-end phone users will like to compromise on anything especially:
  1. Fantastic user experience with device and ecosystem.
  2. Range of apps.
  3. Range of Products.
  4. Technology should help get the best experience associated with the Brand and products.
• Softly conveyed that arrogance of Nokia (which eventually led to their downfall) should not be taken forward.

Did the Strategy go wrong??

Yesterday’s admission by Microsoft to layoff 7800 employees, most part of erstwhile Nokia, sends a signal that they are ready to rectify mistake under new leadership. Something, which we have been predicting, will come before the 4^th qtr arrives.

In our Blog dated 14^th Jan 2013 we analyzed Microsoft-Nokia merger and that is going to be an uphill task for Microsoft to turnaround. There was a clear urgency to gain market share (2/3 times or maybe more) else things could turn Ugly.

Also See: Microsoft-Nokia: Few Gains, More Work http://monkconsulting.co.in/microsoft-nokia-gains-work/

Monk Mantra

For Microsoft: However not everything is lost, we believe that Microsoft will continue to remain amongst the top three ecosystem for short to medium term, but will have to quickly consolidate their position.

For Customers: Don’t rush to your next-door retailer to buy Microsoft’s product. Wait for announcements and clarity over the next few weeks.   This may not be great news for Customers, especially who don’t like Android and Apple as platform.

So choice is clearly between fragmented Android ecosystem, which is not optimized for updates and versions across various OEM’s or Apple ecosystem, not fragmented but users shell out premium for a closed ecosystem or equally troubled Blackberry ecosystem.

For Business: Again don’t rush into your discussions and wait for the events to unfold further. Derive hard bargains and look for better deals.

Funny thing is we were already operating in a practical Duopoly and hope that this step from Microsoft is like a Stitch in time saves nine.

monk_consulting; girish_trivedi

The post Hard(ware) to Digest, Microsoft’s changes direction on Lumia appeared first on Monk consulting | Strategy Consulting and Advisory firm.

Late 1990’s: As a trainee, with a telecom operator in Mumbai, I learned the most common problem faced by the network team was “RIGHT OF WAY”*.

Jump to 2015, venue Delhi, A Digital India conclave, as I speak at a Panel discussion on “Digital Governance”: telecom industry’s biggest challenge continues to be “RIGHT OF WAY”.

During the same session, an example was shared of so called “digital service”- appointment confirmation on sms- at AIIMS Delhi. Where a user can be informed about their upcoming appointment with a doctor. A good initiative, however lacks sense of purpose, that the outcome should be effective medical service delivery using “Digital Platform”.

Legacy:

Can you imagine yourself at a railways e-ticket counter/ passport office few years’ back. Entire experience was a nightmare, long queues, rude staff and –“I am doing you a favour”- attitude.

Today technology is transforming government processes. From being the gatekeeper to one who offers services, government approach towards digital is like, young adults- want Sex but not ready mentally and physically (High desirability but lower readiness).

Limited involvement of government, especially, introduction of Self Service option has definitely bought improvements in service levels. Again these initiatives are successful because the government machinery is not directly involved. Thus establishes effectiveness of technology based service delivery and lack of “Digital Culture” in governance.

So is this really about technology or the Culture in governance, which we need to amend first?

Mobile / social media has changed expectations and digital inclusion has leapfrogged (though nowhere near to being complete) in India. The power is now being snatched away from governments hands and the citizens at large will decide how where and what services they will consume.

Steps like integrating Jan-dhan, Aadhar and Mobile (JAM) is not making this transformation easy. Whereby government has to move from being to boss to being the service provider and welfare delivery mechanism (real servant?).

As the information becomes more transparent, easily accessible layered with user demanding information (as we move to e/m governance).It looks like we are headed for a conflict, as digital and governance are poles apart.

Digital allows transparency while, Governments want to protect and own, a fundamental difference.

What Next? :

The current government structure is part savvy and part naïve (fighting the change). To embrace change Government needs to start working in new way more like a Digital Enterprise. Urgency is the need of the hour, and culture will drive the success.

There are definite steps that needs to be taken

• Don’t hide behind the “IT / Digital” technology. Create a framework for identifying the barriers to enabling effective implementation of digital culture.
• Digital culture needs holistic approach, towards culture and structural transformation of the government machinery.
• Only collaborative engagements, continuous dialog, sharing and collective learning can enlighten this path of “Digital India” from an effective governance point of view.
• Accountability and delivery mechanism

Hoping for a Digital India in next few years.

 *Right of way is a term used to describe “the legal right, established by usage or grant, to pass along a specific route through grounds or property belonging to another”, or “a path or thoroughfare subject to such a right”. A further definition is that it is a type of easement granted or reserved over the land for transportation purposes, this can be for a highway, public footpath, railway, canal, as well as electrical transmission lines, oil and gas pipelines.

For Comments pls write to girish.trivedi@monkconsulting.co.in

girish_trivedi/Monk_consulting

The post Digital India – We need the CULTURE Curry appeared first on Monk consulting | Strategy Consulting and Advisory firm.

• Experience in a market research firm, a market intelligence division of an IT MNC or Software industry, looking to further their career in Consulting and advisory
• Experience in the ICT/ Healthcare/ Financial Services industry with marketing and product management portfolios, is advantageous.
• Excellent PowerPoint / MS Word/ Excel Skiils

Desirable Skills

Comfortable working on a virtual geographically disparate team; Leadership skills, ability to work as part of a team, and with a high level of integrity

• Global perspective, international experience (has worked or studied abroad can be handy)
• One or two areas of topical expertise (technology, geographic market, industry)
• Preferred background in any of current priority industries viz. Banking &
• Financial Markets, Chemical & Petroleum, Electronics, Energy & Utilities,
• Government, Healthcare, Retail, Telecommunications, Transportation
• Flexibility and Adaptability; Open to new ideas
• Strategic consulting skills; Consultative experience with internal or external clients (i.e., a strategic thinker, strong business acumen, and comfortable speaking with senior clients)

Background

• Strong Educational Credentials; Master’s degree preferred

Connect with :  info@monkconsulting@co.in; girish.trivedi@monkconsulting.co.in

The post We want YOU! Monk Consulting is Hiring appeared first on Monk consulting | Strategy Consulting and Advisory firm.

This discussion was not just about security, but looking at the future source of  revenues and if Telcos are ready . While the general agreement was that Telcos have lost some initiatives, they still have direct relationships with Enterprises and mid market a reach that is unparalleled and not available to cloud service providers.

There are many challenges and over the next 18-24 months Telcos will have to work harder to earn trust and loyalty of their customers:

• New entrants: like Rjio will add to hyperactivity.
• Lot of Commoditization and little innovation / differentiation amongst top players in terms of services, pricing and coverage.
• Dubious quality of services user experience for data services (Ericsson report on services quality in India) is way below satisfaction.
• Customers have little idea how to measure service or understand what they want, and as long as operators are only seen as a commodity, there will be no trust.
• Transparency will be key, resulting in better share of revenues.
• “Net Neutrality” will effect perception and resulting loyalty etc.
• Business don’t rely on single service provider anymore
• Regulatory mechanism still evolving…can make or break a value-chain
• Data Integrity will define the flow and usage of data across the entire value chain. Data Protection / Privacy issues are back at the top of mind of the customer (Data users)
• Consolidation /innovation will create new challengers

 Exploring upcoming opportunities (e.g. Cloud) will need operators to shed the minutes and GB mindsets. Operators need to move fast to offer cloud services as they are playing CATCHUP.

• Telcos need to move up the value chain – from IaaS provider to may be CLOUD BROKER?
• Telcos are losing their traditional stronghold or the tool used to bargain – Customer Ownership and in the future, customer ownership will move to multiple custodians (IT providers, Device Providers, Other services / brokers/ Integrators) from Telcos
• Skill Upgradation: Telcos sales teams will have to trained to sell apps and digital services.
• Mid market and SMEs /MSMEs can be a big opportunity for Telcos in India esp selling new services like Cloud
• Well a great deal of challenges, does not mean that everything is doom….but if you are part of the industry time to think on these lines and work towards newer more collaborative way of working towards future.

 Unfortunately most Telcos in India are not inclined towards providing business (both Enterprises and SME’s or Mid Market) cloud services. Despite the fact, that, there is a BIG opportunity emerging.

 Will Telco’s arrogance work against them??? Only time will tell.

 Share with us your thoughts on Telcos thinking on these services, some interesting case studies, Proof of concept or deployments and what are the steps to differentiate these services from other cloud providers.

 Attached below are some of the snaps of the event. Follow us for more insights in upcoming posts. Keep writing and commenting to us @

girish.trivedi@monkconsulting.co.in

info@monkconsulting.co.in

The post Can Telcos propel Cloud?? appeared first on Monk consulting | Strategy Consulting and Advisory firm.

What supports such a decision? Well few developments in recent past may endorse this move:

1. Network Led Developments:
   • Mobile networks and payment companies entering into partnerships enabling them to become semi banking entities.
   • Mobile payment is catching up fast to become a key mode of money transfer esp smaller denomination (volume value at the bottom of the pyramid)
   • Agent outlets now outnumber bank branches in 3/4^th markets where mobile money is available (GSMA). This remarkable fact shows just how the mobile money ecosystem is identifying and meeting the needs of the unbanked.
2. Technological Changes:
   • Change in Google’s algorithm to enable better ranking to mobile-friendly sites
3. Mobile driving traffic and revenues
   • More than 70 percent of Facebook’s revenue now comes from mobile
4. Financial Inclusion:
   • According to GSMA 47 out of 89 markets, offering mobile money both banks and non-banks are allowed to provide mobile money services.
   • Most markets will witness mobile apps taking over ( US happened last year) PC web usage in future.

However for this initiative to be successful more questions need to be answered first

1. Will the app become lighter and faster?
2. Will mobile network be ready to support the explosion in data/video using app?
3. Will devices continue to improve memory and processing power?
4. How many apps are people going to use for day to day living? (From our study last year of enterprise end users average no of applications used were 25 or just over) (See Featured Image)
   
5. Will mobile drive preference to making final decisions?
6. Will IoT influence this app based business model?
7. Data challenges, will still push consumers away?
8. Will presence /absence of net neutraility be a boon in this segment – paid for services ?
9. Cost of developing and maintaining a desktop /mobile ready website vs mobile app?

Do share your thoughts comments on girish.trivedi@monkconsulting.co.in

The post Death of Desktop Website? too soon appeared first on Monk consulting | Strategy Consulting and Advisory firm.

Every business looks to serve a set of customers in order to maximize profitability and add new customers for further expand their base. All businesses understand that few customers can be more profitable to serve (may be due to repeat purchase and loyalty), remains good prospects for up-selling.

Similar is the case for eCommerce companies. Your best customers, spend lot of time on your site, purchase regularly, because they value the offerings and services. They in turn educate and recommend your site, to their friends and families as well as to other users. They offer positive feedback and become unofficial spokesperson (word of mouth marketing).

So get good customers and print dollars …easier said than done? So what are the Challenges??

Moving up the loyalty pyramid (Pls click here for 4 STAGES OF LOYALTY PYRAMID)

depends on customers’ approach to purchasing online, their perception (refer  http://monkconsulting.co.in/is-perception-overrated-in-ecommerce/  ) and their preference for a brand. Loyalty is a sum total of various activities from the idea / need for product or service to post sales recommendations and beyond.

With deep insights available thanks to technology help and use of Analytics as well as BIG Data, large eCommerce companies have various matrices like frequency, stage, interest, time, demographic insights etc. to make efforts and gain loyalty.

Loyalty is directly proportional to user maturity on e-commerce platform and inversely proportional to importance of discounts for customers. eCommerce companies e.g Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon tend to focus on all the stages/level of customer maturity and loyalty. Target cognitive level by offering huge discounts/sales offer on specific days and at the same time try to create value for mature users by introducing exclusive offers/services for them.

Some others like Shopclues and Naaptol try to attract customers majorly with discounted prices on their product offerings, which they do not directly promote on television commercials but their website design, look and feel exhibits so.

Then there are some brands like HomeShop18 and Rediff Shopping that have evolved into e-commerce brands from their other segments businesses like Television Shopping (HomeShop18) and web browser (rediff.com). These brands generally fall somewhere in a zone of indifference for customers as they do not form top of the mind recall for generic product categories.

Niche players across categories Apparels (Myntra), furniture (Urban Ladder) etc. focus on value proposition to customer and therefore most of their branding and promotional activities will exhibit variety, quality, convenience, style statement and so on depending on the product category they cater to. Discounts and promotional campaigns happen but the idea here is value proposition. Niche players reach Cognitive level quickly (if there is a positive experience for high value products) or may have a long way to go (for an unsatisfactory experience).

MONK MANTRA:

LOYALTY is not like climbing a staircase, in which a customer will go from discount hunter to a loyalist to promoter of brand. Loyalty is a roller coaster and any artificial attempt at building loyalty can boomerang.Spending money and building communities and loyalty program will not buy a company loyalty.

SO what should online business do?

Its one of the most repeated statement, it costs five time to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer. If these companies spend time to analyze individual needs using technology and buying behaviour, we can have many more innovations coming out of Indian market for India and global markets.

Strategic segmentation is one of the most important activities in building and developing loyalties In a Article published in HBR in 1964, Daniel. Yankelovich first introduced the idea of going beyond demographics as the basis for sorting buyers into groups. He argued, “Once you discover the most useful ways of segmenting a market you have produced the beginnings of sound marketing strategy.” Nearly 40 years later he broaden the use of segmentation so that it could include not just advertising but also product innovation, pricing, choice of distribution channels, and the like.

Unfortunately most upcoming sectors make the mistake of ignoring these important attributes and rather rely on gut and intuition. If you want to move beyond  your Gut and Intuition, Monk Consulting can help you with the following:

a) Due Diligence of your Marketing Segmentation Strategy
b) Build customized Segmentation tools
c) Creating action based proactive segmentation approach
d) Set measurable outcomes for your segmentation strategy

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all”  

Dr. Michael LeBoeuf Author, Speaker and Thinker.

Comments Welcome:  girish.trivedi@monkconsulting.co.in,        ankita.lakhani@monkconsulting.co.in,    info@monkconsulting.co.in

The post Curious case of eCommerce Loyalty appeared first on Monk consulting | Strategy Consulting and Advisory firm.