Official Blog of GTM360 Marketing Solutions
This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: “We’ll disrupt uncouth taxi unions.” “We’ll kill greedy banks.” “We’ll upend shady realtors.” Startups with noble mission statements like these get billions of dollars of VC funding and enjoy unicorn – or even decacorn – valuations. As a result, the average … Read more
At the end of my blog post titled Retail Is Still Barking Up The Wrong Tree Against Ecommerce, I’d made a bold prediction that, within a few months, I’d find a few more non-price related reasons for shopping online. Well, it took me longer than that but I found one recently. This was at the outlet … Read more
Like me, you may have come across people who appear obsessed with security but happily book cabs, send messages, order food, and even make payments without entering a single password / PIN on their smartphones. This is not as contradictory as it seems if you look at the end-to-end customer journey. For the uninitiated, Customer Journey can … Read more
On the tenth anniversary of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the media is full of articles questioning why nobody went to jail for the Great Financial Crisis that followed. Take, for instance, A crisis nobody went to jail for. According to most of these articles, the GFC happened beause of greed, laziness, cronyism and cheating … Read more
Fans of Lewis Carroll will immediately spot the striking resemblance between the title of this post and the refrain from The Mock Turtle’s Song in Alice in Wonderland. A newly opened electronic brokerage gave free eTrading accounts to all employees of the company in which I was working in circa 2000. I signed up for one immediately. … Read more
Let’s take the following two statements: Indians are obsessed over security Indians make payments without entering any password. Each of these statements is a fact. But, taken together, they appear contradictory and portray Indian consumers as fickle (or worse). Not true. In this blog post, I’ll use the principles of Customer Journey Mapping to explain why these … Read more
There are two styles of testing in corporate and academic assessments: Subjective / Descriptive: The test has a question and the test taker – “assessee” in Learning & Assessment Management System-speak – writes their answer on a piece of paper in the case of offline assessment or types their answer into a form in the case of … Read more
Today’s Times of India has two op-eds on petrol pricing. The one by Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyer (@swaminomics) advises the government to hold taxes at their present levels and leave petrol prices as they are. The other by Chetan Bhagat (@chetan_bhagat) advocates exactly the opposite approach. In the past, I’d leaned towards the former point of view. That changed … Read more
India’s central bank-cum-banking regulator Reserve Bank of India relaxed the two factor authentication mandate for instore card payments below INR 2000 (~US$30). This means that you can pay with credit or debit card at a store without entering a PIN for purchases below INR 2000. Ever since that announcement was made, card issuers and acquirers … Read more
There’s no better introduction to this year’s FORTUNE GLOBAL 500 than Fortune’s own lede: Change is everywhere in this year’s Global 500 – except at the very top. Walmart, with $500 billion in sales, ranks No. 1 for the fifth straight year on Fortune’s annual list of the world’s biggest companies ranked by revenue. Apple … Read more