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

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

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

How To Remove Features And Increase A Product’s Appeal

Yes, you read that right. There are ways to remove features and increase a product’s appeal. This post was sparked off when I heard about GPSVoice, a new mobile app that uses GPS to help parents track their children’s location without draining battery life. More on the app in a bit but lest you think I’m … Read more

Treat Every Pageview As A Conversion Opportunity

Before developing a food discovery startup’s GTM strategy, we recently did a test drive of its mobile app. The app lists dishes of various cuisines from restaurants in the local neighborhood. Like many hyperlocal startups, this one also started operations in one city and then had plans to expand to other cities. As soon as … Read more

Appealing To Millennials – The Challenge For PayZapp Mobile Wallet

Since I wrote HDFC Bank’s PayZapp Ends My Bill Payment Woes, I’ve made a few more bill payments using the mobile wallet. All of them went through successfully (knock on wood!). I’m even more convinced that PayZapp is the best way of paying bills for people who’ve tried out other alternatives. That said, PayZapp faces … Read more