Official Blog of GTM360 Marketing Solutions
Ketharaman Swaminathan 
An old friend of mine from my alma mater, IIT Bombay, who is now a tenured professor at North Carolina State University, was recently carrying out a sponsored study on supply chain dynamics in various parts of the world. In this context, he reached out to me a couple of months ago to seek my … Read more
How Long Can Malls Remain Open If Stores Inside Them Keep Closing Down? Short Answer: Forever. Now for the long version. As I highlighted in Retail Winners & Losers Amidst Skyrocketing Real Estate Costs, many stores are unable to survive on the face of skyrocketing real estate costs. Although this post focused largely on standalone … Read more
Over five years ago, I’d written a post titled Cheque Deposit Systems — Are They Really Worth It? During the next couple of years, I found this contraption to be down every other time I went to pay my credit card bill. My overall poor experience with this technology led me to conclude in a … Read more
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half. This famous quote is attributed to John Wanamaker (1838-1922), the US businessman who is often considered to be the father of the department store. We use the slide at the bottom to explain the impact of our go … Read more
In my op-ed article titled “Impact of Regulation on Financial Services Providers” published in the August 2012 issue of The Journal of Internet Banking & Commerce, I’d argued that banks don’t have much to fear from the slew of financial products launched by non-banking financial services providers. Many career bankers averred that they heaved a … Read more
Going forward, we’ll announce new success stories on this blog. While the full case study will itself continue to be published on the CUSTOMERS page of our website, a short introduction will be provided here. Here’s the latest one: SaaS Vendor Acquires 3X More Customers With Same Ad Spend A/B testing helps maximize bang for … Read more
In Whither Cross-Selling And Upselling With eBills And eStatements?, I’d written about how I got hit by exorbitant SMS costs and how I solved this problem by ordering an SMS Pack that gave me 1,000 SMSs for only INR 35 per month. Things were fine for a few months. Then, suddenly, I again received a biggish … Read more
According to the World Retail Banking Report 2012 co-authored by Cap Gemini and EFMA and a few other research reports published recently, customers are viewing the Internet as one of the two most important channels of retail banking worldwide, the branch being the other. OTOH, many banks, nonbanking financial service providers and others are virtually treating … Read more
Soon after I wrote Cheque Truncation System or Contract Termination System, a senior banker averred to me in private that India’s cheque truncation program had a lot of loose ends. A friend of mine who used to work for a CTS solutions provider pointed out that the program had an ever greater impact on NBFCs … Read more
ROYAL DUTCH SHELL (Netherlands) and MANPOWER (USA) respectively bring up the front and rear of the latest Fortune GLOBAL 500 list published in July 2012. RANK* COMPANY REVENUES (US$ Billion) PROFITS (US$ Billion) 1 ROYAL DUTCH SHELL 484.49 30.91 500 MANPOWER 22.00 0.25 With growth rates of the Indian IT industry cooling down in the … Read more