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

Credit Card Versus Debit Card / UPI / A2A

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Credit Card and Debit Card are both “cards”. Both are digital payment methods. Both are issued by banks. Both of them work on card rails owned by Visa, MasterCard, China Union Pay, RuPay and other card networks. Because of these similarities, many people tend to believe that there’s no difference between credit and debit cards. … Read more

Outflanking Incumbent Products With AHA Moments

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One of the chief ways in which we help software companies is by introducing “aha” moments in their new products. It’s almost not necessary to define “aha” moments. The term is quite self-explanatory. We see them all around us. A few “aha” moments that come readily to my mind are: Google Assistant: Google Assistant is … Read more

When Upgrades Turn Out To Be Downgrades

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In Latest Is Not Greatest, I covered four products whose new versions have omitted key features from their older versions. Microsoft Windows Lenovo Laptop Apple iPhone ATM In this post, I’ll speculate on the causes of the “latest is not greatest” trend and how users can cope with it if their upgrades turn out to … Read more

When Nothing Is Better Than Something – Part 2

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In continuation of Part 1, here are three more situations in which the old adage, “something is better than nothing” is critically flawed. #3. DARK STORE INVENTORY The way ecommerce works, you place an order on the website of an ecommerce company (e.g. Amazon) and the company ships the ordered good(s) from a central warehouse. … Read more

When Nothing Is Better Than Something – Part 1

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According to the old adage, “something is better than nothing”. This has become common wisdom because it’s often true. But there are a few critical situations where it’s fatally flawed. In this post, I’ll give a few examples. #1. CACHE MEMORY Back in the day, the IT hardware company I worked for launched two models … Read more

India Inc Is Not In A Slowdown. India Inc Is The Slowdown

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With a steady fall in GDP growth rate during the last five quarters, there’s a near unanimous verdict that the Indian economy is going through a slowdown. Most experts agree that the fundamental cause of the slowdown is insufficient consumption. I agree with both views. But I differ about the reasons advanced to explain the … Read more

PINless Card Payments – Innovative Or Harebrained?

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I’ve been asked many times to weigh in on the new PINless regime for credit and debit card payments in India. Most recently it was on Quora, where I was asked to answer the following question: Why is it not required to enter a PIN to authenticate a credit or debit card in many countries? … Read more