Just Because Customers Can Find Their Own Solutions Doesn’t Mean They Will

There’s lot of data in the public domain. Buyer 2.0 is Internet-savvy. So they will help themselves to all that information and find solutions to their pain areas by themselves. Ergo salespersons should stop trying to sell solutions to potential customers. This is the sum of essence of one prevailing school of thought in B2B … Read more

Banks Will Know Chipotle Is Going Bankrupt Before Chipotle’s CEO

Following Chipotle’s e-coli scare late last year, the burrito chain’s stock has been on a free fall. From a peak of ~$750 in October 2015, the stock price plummeted to ~$400 at the height of the crisis last month. At the time, it was rumored that the company might be forced to file for bankruptcy. … Read more

Panic Not If Your WordPress Images Fail To Enlarge

Content marketers rarely find the space to squeeze in full size versions of images in the body of their content. Therefore, it’s customary for them to include a smaller size of the image within their (online) whitepapers, blog posts and other marketing collateral and leave it to readers to click the images to view them … Read more

Seller Power In Online Marketplaces

Buyer power in online marketplaces is obvious. Choice of platforms, sales returns, seller rating and venting on social media are among the many ways in which buyer is king in online marketplaces. Platform power is also fairly obvious: Blacklisting errant sellers and withholding payments to them are some of the tools available to the platform to flex its … Read more

Crack Multicountry SEM Campaigns With This Hack

Many midsized IT companies sell in multiple geographies (e.g. USA, UK, Germany) but have their marketing organization centralized in their home country (e.g. India). When they run search engine marketing campaigns, they’d want their ads to only show up in their target markets (that lie outside their home country). This means their corporate marketing would … Read more

#ProNetChoice Lets You Have Your #NetNeutrality Cake And Eat It Too

Enough water has flown under the bridge since I wrote Goodbye #NetNeutrality Hello #ProNetChoice. During this period, I got a chance to deep dive into the principle of “zero rating” and examine whether it can coexist with Net Neutrality. In this post, I’m pleased to say that #ProNetChoice, the concept introduced in the previous post, … Read more

Digital Marketing Must Get Rid Of Fly-By-Night SEO Operators

We focus on the SEM and CRO elements of digital marketing and work with third party SEO service providers whenever the technique could be useful in a specific campaign. (For a primer on the difference between SEM and SEO, see my blog post entitled SEO or SEM?.) Through the years, we’ve found it extremely hard … Read more

Why Advertisers Must Pay For Ads Seen By Bots

There’s a raging debate about ad visibility in recent times. Much as I’d like to think it’s triggered by my post Don’t Fall For The ‘Invisible Versus Unseen Ads’ Charade, the real reason doesn’t matter. The crux of the issue is that advertisers are claiming that ~15% of their online ads are seen by bots, … Read more

FORTUNE Is Changing – For The Worse:(

FORTUNE magazine seems to be undergoing a transformation lately. I’ve listed the key changes I’ve observed in the magazine over the past 5-6 months. Disruption. Disruption. Disruption. There’s a spate of articles on disruption of incumbents by newcomers. FORTUNE goes beyond the usual suspects like financial services, media and technology to drag industries like agriculture … Read more

Teardown Of Myntra’s App Mantra

India’s leading online fashion brand Myntra recently shut down its desktop and mobile websites and decided to go mobile app only. As far as I know, this is an unprecedented move by any ecommerce player anywhere in the world and flies in the face of moves by brands to increasingly hop on to the omnichannel … Read more