Stores Have Themselves To Blame For ‘Showrooming’

In How Can Organized Retailers Respond To Showrooming?, I’d written about “showrooming”, the new shopping behavior in which consumers use a physical store as a showroom to touch and feel a product but ultimately buy it from an online competitor – often at a lower price. Although showrooming hasn’t yet become mainstream, it’s bound to gain … Read more

Small Conversion Can Create A Large Business

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

SaaS Vendor Acquires 3X More Customers With Same Ad Spend

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

Has The Indian IT Industry Missed The FORTUNE 500 Bus?

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

Your QR Code Works. What Next? – Part 2

Following on from Your QR Code Works. What Next? – Part 1, we illustrate a few more best practices of QR code based CTAs (Call To Actions): INTRASOFT. The ad offers download of the company’s financial results by scanning the accompanying QR code. Since financial results are bulky, we presume that the ad chose to employ … Read more

When Does Marketing End & Sales Start?

The typical sales funnel starts from Target Audience and goes through various stages like Suspect, Lead, Qualified Lead, Opportunity until it ends with the Deal. It’s jointly owned by Marketing (which includes product management, business development, marketing communications) and Sales (which is comprised of presales and field sales functions). Since times immemorial, there has been a … Read more

Don’t Blame Google For Everything

Apart from using its search engine regularly and being a customer of Google AdWords and a couple of its products, I’ve no personal or professional interest in Google. However, as a technology professional, I feel compelled to point out that the recent Economic Times article titled Is It Time to Sign Off is full of inaccuracies, and … Read more

The Business Case For Social Media Customer Service

In a previous blog post titled Customers Of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But The Call Center Hold Music, I’d written about customer service via social media and how it could be a great experience for customers of airlines, banks, insurers, mobile network operators and other service providers. We now look at … Read more

To Pinterest Or Not To Pinterest?

With all the recent buzz around Pinterest, our inboxes have been flooded with several white papers and blog posts on the relevance of the latest social media network for B2B. After a quick glance at its website, we realized that it was easier to simply jump aboard Pinterest than to keep mulling over whether to … Read more