Interoperability – The Sole Loser In UPI

We ended Banks Have Not Lost The UPI Plot on a sobering note: Sadly, interoperability has been given the short shrift in the way UPI has evolved. In this post, we’ll see how interoperability has lost the UPI plot. One of the founding principles of UPI is “interoperability”, which stipulates that anyone with any UPI app … Read more

Health Insurance, Not Price Control, Is The Solution

Amidst the din of free versus paid vaccine and blackmarketing of essential drugs like Remdesivir, I thought it’s a good time for me to repost my letter to the editor of Times of India on the topic of price control. From: Ketharaman Swaminathan [s.ketharaman@gtm360.com] Sent: Sunday, 27 September 2020 7:33 PM To: ‘sunday.times@timesgroup.com’ Subject: Sunday … Read more

Corporate Gift Supplier Pivots To Technology Company

Here’s our latest success story: Corporate Gift Supplier Pivots To Technology Company Digital Transformation Accelerates Sales Cycle And Boosts Ticket Size The customer began its journey as the supplier of corporate gifts to midsize and large companies, who used them to reward their wholesalers, distributors, dealers, retailers, and agents aka “trade” for achieving their quota … Read more

Banks Have Not Lost The UPI Plot

The common man hears about Google Pay, PhonePe and PayTM while making UPI payments – rather than State Bank of India, HDFC Bank or ICICI Bank. Ergo there’s a widespread belief that banks have lost the UPI plot. Take this tweet for example: The statement on NEFT with stanchart applies to the HDFC as well. … Read more

Six Hacks To Escape Subscription Trap

In What Is Subscription Trap?, we saw several Dark Patterns used by brands and service providers (“Merchants”) to make it difficult for us to cancel subscriptions like Social network e.g. LinkedIn Premium Digital media e.g. Wall Street Journal Streaming video service / OTT e.g. Netflix Hosting service e.g. Hostgator SAAS software e.g. Salesforce In this … Read more

Why B2B Marketing Should Be Targeted At Company – Not Users

We saw a spate of B2C marketers trying to get into B2B six to eight years ago. At the time, I’d shared my thoughts on how to harness emotions in B2B sales in my blog post titled Role Of Emotion In B2B Sales. Maybe it’s the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic or whatever but we’re … Read more

On The Internet, Nobody Knows You’re Not A Big Dog

If you glance through LinkedIn, you’ll find a lot of people who claim to be big shots at the Amazons, Googles and Microsofts of the world when they’re not. Neither LinkedIn nor the companies named in these fake profiles seem to give a damn about these impersonators. Even I’m guilty of the nonchalant behavior: There … Read more