Just Because You Can Show Digital Ads Doesn’t Mean You Should

In Digital Ads: Whose Preference Is It Anyway?, we saw how digital ads are targeted on the basis of advertisers’ specifications regarding consumer preferences (“Meta Preferences“) rather than the consumer’s own preferences. That speaks to the propriety of the advertiser to show its ads to a particular consumer. But you might be wondering, just because … Read more

Digital Ads: Whose Preference Is It Anyway?

A few years ago, many disruptionistas predicted that ad blockers would kill digital ads. I pooh-poohed their predictions. TV survived DVR. Web will survive ad blockers. — Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) November 6, 2015 Sorry to say I told you so but I was right: Digital ads are alive and kicking During this period, digital surpassed … Read more

RIP Google Plex – But Big Tech Can Still Disrupt Big Banks

Bank accounts are not heavily branded, barring IndusInd Bank and a few more exceptions. The fifth largest private sector bank in India tries to create a strong brand for its bank account on the back of differentiators like return of canceled cheque. (For the uninitiated, banks return canceled cheques to customers by default in USA … Read more

Colgate Total PayTM Cashback – Most Rewarding CEM Ever?

Colgate-Palmolive is currently running a Customer Engagement Management program for its premium toothpaste brand TOTAL. Like all CEM programs, this one also mandates product purchase. The price of the product is INR 102 (US$ 1.25) and the reward for purchase is a cashback of INR 50 (US$ 0.67) credited directly to the consumer’s PayTM eWallet. … Read more

If The Pandemic Persists, Indian IT Will Enter Fortune Global 500 Next Year

The title of this blog post might sound insensitive at first glance but I couldn’t find a better way to capture the fact that Covid-19 has favorably impacted some companies and adversely impacted others on the FORTUNE magazine’s ranking of the top 500 corporations in the world. Last year, I predicted: … the assymetric nature … Read more

Calling BS of Disruption of B2B Sales

It has become a favorite pastime for a lot of people to predict the disruption of B2B sales. (Ditto banks, telcos, et al.) Take the author of this LinkedIn post entitled Enterprise Sales Has Been Disrupted – Why Sales Pros Should Care for instance. Like disruption talk in many other areas, this is a sureshot … Read more

Calling BS Of The “Indian Market Is Big Enough For Indian Companies” Myth

Every now and then, somebody points to the challenges of cracking the overseas markets and claims that the Indian market is big enough for Indian companies. Take the example of this founder of an Indian IT company, who commented as follows on LinkedIn: We (INDIA) can beat anyone in the world with Quality First, Customer … Read more