B1 Integrated Marketing

“If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going” – Tagline of Boeing ad. All through my career in sales and marketing, I’ve been exhorted to write in positive style. The strong guidance applied to copy in ads, email marketing, datasheets, brochures, case studies and other forms of marketing collateral (hereinafter referred to as “content”). In my … Read more

Every now and then I come across a techie or two who complains that overselling by their sales people is making their job of creating a satisfied customer harder. For example, take this OP on Quora, who asks: Is it common to oversell in B2B? My boss has a tendency to oversell our company services, … Read more

The asphalt road outside my house was getting concreted last year. When I was walking down on the road one day, I noticed that a narrow gully of around two feet width was left untouched on one side of road. When I saw this, I thought there was a massive goof-up somwhere. In all probability, … Read more

In Use And Misuse Of Personas In Marketing, I’d defended personas from being lampooned by some misguided marketers. That doesn’t mean I believe everything is hunky-dory with personas. There are at least three problems I see in the way personas are created and used in Persona Based Marketing (PBM) campaigns today. A. SOLE FOCUS ON WHO … Read more

The ink on my previous post Indian IT – Turning Crisis Into Opportunity has hardly dried than two Indian IT majors Infosys and Wipro have announced better-than-expected quarterly results. Much as I’d like to attribute their superior performance to the guidance given in my post (!), these IT veterans have been doing all this and more … Read more

Buyer persona is the bedrock of targeted marketing. HubSpot provides a succinct definition of the term: A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Data includes not just demographics but behavior, emotions, wants, aspirations and other buyer attributes. A sample persona … Read more

At the end of my blog post entitled Indian IT – Crisis Or No Crisis?, I reflected on the zeitgeist about the looming crisis faced by the Indian IT industry due to growing automation, digital challenges, H1B restrictions and Trumpism-driven Middle America outsourcing. Even if these challenges are real, there’s no need to panic. The industry … Read more