Digital Marketing

Cross Selling Is Hard

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I recently came across a post on social media predicting that WhatsApp will very soon become India’s largest digital payments product because it has 450 million users in India. I politely pointed out to the Original Poster that WhatsApp has precisely zero customers for its payments service and that nobody can tell how many of … Read more

Britannia World Cup CEM – Low Budget Campaign Or Outright Scam?

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Britannia recently ran a Customer Engagement Management campaign for its NICE biscuit. Like any typical CEM campaign, the BRITANNIA KHAO WORLD CUP JAO campaign required consumers to find a promo code on the product package and SMS it to a telephone number (92620 92620). But, from here on, the Britannia CEM campaign deviated significantly from … Read more

Britannia “Morning Jackpot” CEM – Making Digital Easier Than Paper

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I came across a Customer Engagement Management program on Britannia bread recently. The program was called Morning Jackpot and it was run jointly between India’s leading bread and biscuit manufacturer Britannia and Payment Service Provider PayTM. Like in any other digital CEM program, each pack of the product – Britannia Healthy Slice and Britannia 100% Whole bread, in this case – … Read more

Are Digital Natives Losing Their Data Chops?

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According to the popular narrative, new age companies leverage data in virtually every facet of their business (as against traditional companies that run on intuition). To a large extent, this belief is right. Many digital natives owe their spectacular rise in the last decade or two to their prowess with data and analytics. A big … Read more

Two New Ways To Overcome The Twitter Identity Crisis

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It’s not easy to find someone on Twitter. This includes handles of individual tweeples as well as brands. This creates an identity crisis of sorts on Twitter. In a 2013 blog post entitled The Severe Identity Crisis On Twitter For Digital Marketers, I’d suggested the following tools to overcome the Twitter identity crisis: Twitter Search … Read more

Five Google Backdoors You Probably Didn’t Know

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Sometimes you can use Google to find information stored in a certain website or app that you can’t by using the website or app itself. I call these hacks “Google Backdoors”. Here are five Google Backdoors I use regularly. #1. BUSINESS FINDER A new restaurant opened in my neighborhood. Its owner said they delivered via … Read more

Demystifying The Ubiquitous Sample Size Of 2000

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Back in the day, we learned in statistics that you need a sample size of at least 2% of the size of population to make statistically significant inferences about the population. In common speak, the expression “statistically significant” means “valid”. Nevertheless, if you’re like me, you regularly come across surveys conducted on sample size of … Read more

Social Media Customer Service – Use It But Don’t Abuse It

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Frequent readers of this blog and people who otherwise know me would be aware that I’m a big fan of social media customer service. Many years ago, I wrote Customers Of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But The Call Center Hold Music to explain why I found the channel very effective for reaching out … Read more

How Do You Find Early Customers For A B2B SAAS Startup?

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This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: This question reminds me of a Patek Philippe ad in which the luxury Swiss watchmaker says, “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation”. The tagline of the ad is “Begin your own … Read more