Month: May 2015

Going Digital

Shabbir Chunawalla

Photography has gone digital, making Kodak a ghost company. Book stores and publishers are worried because of e-books and e-commerce. Travel agencies have been challenged by digital bookings on sites like makemytrip.com and cleartrip.com. What is the difference between IT in the past, and the recent trend of going digital ? The main difference is that the CEOs and CIOs have no control over it — the control rests with the customer, and not the company.

A digital strategy is not just mere presence on the Net. It begins with a new mindset. You have to be in the shoe of the customer. What is it that the customer values ? How to connect with these values ? Much water has flown through the Ganga and Yamuna since the time the mainframes ruled the roost to the appearance of the smart phones climaxed by the entry of the iPhone6. A new relationship has been established among the people, business and information.

Tesco taps the customers in Seoul, Korea by creating virtual stores in the subway, accepting orders from the commuters waiting for the train. These orders will be delivered when they reach home. It is based on insight that people can exploit their free time, who are otherwise busy. It is important to be there to avail of that time slot. A cruise company can give a smart phone to the passengers on ship with an application that tells them about the traffic in the restaurants on board, so that they need not wait unnecessarily for their food.

The digital approach should be focused. It is more important than a big budget. There should be a quick offering — speed is the essence. Those areas are selected which have high value, rather than all-and-sundry approach.

Immediate Payment Services : IMPS

Shabbir Chunawalla

Immediate Payment Services or IMPS is one latest technology in account-to-account money transfer or remittance and cell phone money transfer space. It is a system that transfers money in real time. It is developed by National Payment Corporation of India. This is the future of remittance and merchant payment, as the transfer is in real time

IMPS is done directly or indirectly. Banks allow their customers to do money transfer over their online account or through mobile applications. The other indirect route is to approach any local agent or retail outlet of a pre-paid instrument company ( PPI ). There are many pre-paid instrument companies such as GI Tech, Oxygen, ItzCash, PayWorld and so on. PPIs command 40 per cent share of the transaction value.

Mobile transactions are popular and mobiles have penetrated the society much more than the Internet. In this payment network, the NPCI has tied up 85 banks and 11 PPIs.

IMPS is very swift. No other technology can match its swiftness. The system is popular among migrant workers, students, vegetable sellers and urban people.

GI Tech’s ICash is an IMPS-enabled card. It also offers a Scholar Card to students to pay fees at Lovely Professional University, the first-ever university to use IMPS-enabled payments.

Transactions of IMPS have surged from 3 million in 2014 to 13 million in 2015. In money terms, it stands at Rs 10,550 crore in 2015. NPCI wants to reach a goal of 100 million transactions by September, 2016.

 

30-Minutes Pizza

Shabbir Chunawalla

A customer calls. The order is flashed on the kitchen screen. The pizza makers looks at it. He gets down to the job at hand. He stretches the dough. Does saucing, cheesing, depending on the nature of the order, he does itemising or topping. It goes into oven. From order to oven, it should not take more than 4 minutes.

  • Baking takes 6 minutes, from where it goes to the cut table.
  • Cutting, packing and pick up takes another 5 minutes.
  • It is put in pizza delivery boxes that SDPs carry to the last mile. Delivery time should never exceed eight minutes.
  • It is a process which takes 23 minutes. There is a seven minute buffer to the employees for contingencies like traffic, rains etc.

Thus Domino’s pizzas come with 30-minute guarantee from the time an order is placed. If the time taken to deliver pizza exceeds 30-minutes, it comes free if it costs less then Rs. 300. If it costs more, the company subtracts Rs. 300 from the bill. In case , it is an order of more than 4 pizzas, it is regarded as a bulk order, and the guarantee does not apply.

 

Theatre — New Trends

Shabbir Chunawalla

Broadway is the principal theatre district of Manhattan.West End, London is also well-known. At Broadway, there are large theatres with large stages, huge audience capacity. The production is state-of-the-art. These theatres stage commercial musicals. This has been going on for over a century. These musicals are complete entertainment for the whole family. They are spectacular. In India, we too are adopting the Broadway-style theatre, e.g. Zangoora  completed 1000 shows in June, 2013. A number of international musical hits are being showcased in India.

Some plays use LED screens on stage. The picture on the screens are changed. The backgrounds look lavish. The audience appreciates this. This is a visual generation. The Indian theatre is coming of age.

Front Row in a Fashion Show

Shabbir Chunawalla

The front row in a fashion show has the coveted seats.The important guests expect to be seated appropriately. To some, it is a sign of arrival. These seats allow you to see the details. These are occupied by powerful editors, celebrities, diplomats and political persons. There are fashion industry magnates too. Some have the policy of seating the biggest buyers there, taking precedence over all others. In some shows, socialites who never buy the clothes occupy the front seats. These could be replaced by buyers and media people. The front row seats are limited. These should not be linked to the status. No one takes away your status wherever you are seated.

Trailers for Promotion of Movies

Shabbir Chunawalla

In order to promote movies, trailers are made lasting 2-3 minutes for theatrical release and 10-30 seconds for television. Generally, there are 1 or 2 theatrical trailers and 8-10 TV promos. The TV promos consist of song promos and dialogue promos. Trailers are loaded on YouTube, and are released simultaneously with the theatrical release. They may get millions of views online. To begin with trailers in the 1990s and early 2000s were cut by the filmmakers themselves. Today a trailer is a complete advertising package which is cut by a specialist. A film editor cannot do this specialist job. There are specialist agencies to cut trailers. The trailers create a sense of expectation from the film and drive the audience to the theatre. The potential audience has to get the feel of the film in 2 minutes. Slick and crisp editing is a pre-requisite for a successful trailer. Film-makers use between Rs.3 and Rs.25 lac on trailers and promos. Trailer makers earn a profit margin of 25-30 per cent.

Work on trailers start six to eight months before the release of the film. A good trailer must be accurate too. If there is disconnect between the trailer and the film, the film may flop.The history of trailer making is as old as 100 years. Hollywood studios in 1913 started screening films then. In India, Prime Focus and Trigger Happy are the two major players in trailer cutting.

Marketplace Model of E-commerce

Shabbir Chunawalla

According to Kishor Biyani, any retailer can be a marketplace and any marketplace is also retailer. E-commerce retailers advance the argument of just being the marketplace from which the consumers buy, but the goods are supplied by a host of vendors from their inventories. Here it should be made clear that for most supplies the inventories of even virtual retailers are held in the warehouses of the virtual retailers. The only difference is the accounting treatment of the inventories.

  • Some account this inventory on their balance sheet.
  • Other account for it in their suppliers’ balance sheet, irrespective of the physical location of the inventory.

However, there are brick-and-mortar stores who also do not account for the inventory on their books. That wipes out the artificially created difference between the virtual and brick-and-mortar retailers. Therefore, the demand for the physical retailers is to have one common policy of overseas investment in multi-brand retail. At present online retailors are violating the existing FDI policy in letter and spirit. Marketplace model is just another name for smart accounting.

Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)

Shabbir Chunawalla

The communication package consists of advertising, sales promotion, publicity and public relations. Don Schultz, Stan Tonnenbaum and Robert Lauterborn put forward the Integrated Marketing Communication model in a book titled Integrated Marketing Communication : Pulling It Together and Making It Work in 1997. It was a strategic problem-solving approach, and a new way of thinking. Marketing communication must have a unified approach to make it accountable for achieving the business objectives. The idea was soon interpreted as communication consistency, e.g. PR must be in sync with advertising. IMC supports a common idea of communication across all communication media. Grey calls it synchronized marketing. A core brand idea is extended across the media. In an agency, each division has its own business goals. They should emphasise the overall communication package. A single agency may not provide the whole communication package. The problem is that of the lead. Who will be the integrator ? If there is no proper integration, who will be blamed ? Advertisers tend to place the blame at the door of the agencies. However, the ultimate responsibility is that of the advertisers. It is the marketing manager’s responsibility to exericise control over the whole communication package.

Fundamentally Altering Organisation Structure

Shabbir Chunawalla

Arun Maira, formerly of  the BCG wrote book Redesigning the Aeroplane While Flying. According to him, institutions are not merely organisation with hierarchies and budgets. They are also processes by which socities perform functions. These also include norms by which the socities coduct themselves. Therefore, institutioal reform cannot be achieved only by redrawing organisational charts or creating new organisations with old templates. We cannot merely redesign the seats in the aeroplane when it is expected to fly out of the atmosphere into space. We have to change its structure more fundamentally.