Mastering Targeted Offers – The Uber Way

Uber uses targeted offers as the bedrock of its customer engagement management (CEM) strategy. For the uninitiated, a targeted offer is a personalized deal for an individual customer segment – or even individual customer. It’s the antithesis of spam, where the same deal is sent to all customers. A simple example of a targeted offer … Read more

Reliance Jio – All Good Things Don’t Come To An End, They Just Stop Being Free

In Reliance JioFi First Impressions, I’d shared my experience of buying the Portable 4G Pocket WiFi Router and onboarding the 4G Internet connection from Reliance Jio in September 2016. I’d followed this up with another post a month later in which I’d recounted my first two months’ experience with Reliance Jio. At the time, the Internet … Read more

Innovative Fintechs Don’t Need No Open Banking Regulation

Pink Floyd fans won’t need any explanation for this post’s title. As for the others… well, it’s never too late to become fans of Pink Floyd!  The recent buzz around Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning has spawned the next generation of Personal Finance Management applications. While the forerunners in the cateogory like Mint (now part … Read more

Five Reasons Why PayTM Is Miles Ahead Of Its Competition

With over 100 million users a year ago, PayTM was already ahead of its digital payment competitors before the November 2016 demonetization of high value currency notes in India. On the back of the push for #CashlessIndia consequent to #CurrencySwitch, the Alibaba-backed mobile wallet has increased its lead over its other mobile wallets (e.g. MobiKwik, PayZapp) … Read more

#CashlessIndia – Why Putting Cart Before Horse Will Work

On the back of the demonetization of high value currency notes in India, the government has been aggressively pushing cashless payments. Trending on Twitter under the hashtag #CashlessIndia, the initiative has attracted criticism from the blogosphere and mainstream media on the grounds that India is not yet ready for digital payments. The average urban business-sensitive … Read more

Omnichannel Couponing Drives CEM Success – Part 2

In Part-1 of this blog post, I’d described my experience with PayTM’s CEM campaign on Nescafe’s instant coffee bottle. In this part, I’ll describe my experience with the sachet of the same product. If you’re wondering how packing types matter in a CEM campaign, trust me, bottle and sachet pose different challenges and provide different … Read more

Omnichannel Couponing Drives CEM Success – Part 1

Barring a few exceptions like Dollar Shave Club, consumer brands still don’t sell their products directly to people who use them. Instead, they use the traditional multi-tiered distribution channel comprising distributors, wholesalers and retailers. Ergo they don’t know their end consumers. How do brands overcome the “anonymity” challenge, reach out to end consumers and engage … Read more

Why Do Software Companies Outsource Product Management?

The typical tech startup’s backstory goes as follows: Founders observe a problem in the real world, find a way to use technology to solve the problem, and build a product around the technology. According to common wisdom, product management is the foundation of any startup. Sales, marketing, HR, finance and other functions can come in … Read more

Winners Incite Action. Losers Wait For Actionable Insight

As a technology marketer, I constantly preach that technology must solve a business problem for it to enter the mainstream. I also believe that it’s the technology provider’s job to explicitly convey how their product or service alleviates pain areas. In the context of analytics, this would mean that analytics is useful as long as … Read more

Three Ways To Hide Your Secret Sauce

They say every product or service must have a secret sauce. Some startups take the secrecy part of this advice to the extreme by going into stealth mode until they launch. Some others point to today’s open world of startup events, mentoring sessions, Twitter and TED talks and question if it’s even possible to keep … Read more