Ketharaman Swaminathan

How To Make Co-Creation Work?

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It’s over a decade since the late C K Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy wrote their seminal book The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value With Customers. During this period, users have written millions of articles on Wikipedia and posted zillions of updates and photographs on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks. Judging by the explosive … Read more

Right And Wrong Ways Of Using Case Studies

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All business development teams understand the importance of case studies in B2B technology sales. But, when it comes to producing and using them, we’ve come across two diametrically opposite approaches followed in many IT companies: Kool-Aid: Use case studies for everything Phobia: Shun case studies altogether  Case Study Kool-Aid Vendors in the first category launch into … Read more

How The Obama Credit Card Decline Shapes The Future Of Analytics

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President Barack Obama’s credit card got declined in a New York restaurant. Because, to quote Obama himself, “…I guess I don’t use it enough, so they thought there was some fraud going on.” While this is the most high profile example of predictive analytics going awry, it’s not the first, and it certainly won’t be … Read more

Five Ways To Win Lost SaaS Customers Back

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Many of us have signed up for free software trials and not upgraded to the paid version when the trial period ended. Some of us might have bought a subscription for the paid version, used it for a few months, and then bailed out. In all these cases, we become the SaaS vendor’s “lost customers”. … Read more

Difference Between Data Mining & Predictive Analytics

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I’ve been asked several times about the difference between Data Mining and Predictive Analytics. Well, that’s not strictly true. I’ve been asked only once and that too in the following tweet from @IBMAnalytics visible to me among 15.7K of its followers: https://twitter.com/IBMAnalytics/status/459004965298528256 Replies ranged from the ubiquitous “depends” – will some people begin all their … Read more

How To Fulfill Targeted Offers To Hear More Ka-Chings!

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All of us receive spammy offers from banks, consumer brands, ecommerce websites, retailers and many other businesses. If you’re like me, you probably delete these SMS / email messages without even opening them. Once in a while, we get a discount coupon on our birthday or wedding anniversary. They are more targeted but we still … Read more

How Can Fincumbents Grow When Banks Are Shedding Customers?

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In their diatribes about the underbanked, unbanked and financial inclusion, many suppliers of financial services technologies to banks (aka “fincumbents“) and members of the digerati threaten banks with the risk of losing customers to prepaid cards, P2P lending platforms, money transmitters, and other types of fintechs. In their urge to dish out free, unsolicited advice, … Read more

Apple Pay Puts Banks Squarely At The Center Of Mobile Payments

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Like many, I’ve long held that nothing is broken with plastic cards for instore payments and made the case for mobile wallets to stick to gift, loyalty, ID and other forms of non-payment cards (see Mobile Wallets Should Fix What’s Broken – And It Ain’t Payments). Until I read this line about Apple Pay: “Every … Read more

Walking The Tightrope Between Driving Repeat Purchase And Rewarding Loyalty

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I recently received an offer for INR 100 discount on my next trip on Meru Cabs, India’s leading cab dispatch company. To redeem this offer, I’d need to enter a certain code when I used the company’s mobile app to book my next ride. My first reaction to this offer was, “How the heck am … Read more