What about ecommerce in India?

So then I have been around for about two months now and I have a laptop full of presentations made to CEOs, Marketing heads, product veeps and so on... I have met quite a few people in the internet space - actually the people I have met are more from a marketing background and less from an internet marketing background.
This is a good thing for those in the business of knowledge arbitrage. But is it?
I think that it is best if a company which can spend Rs. 50 crores on online marketing spends it. It does not matter if Envigo - online marketing par excellence gets a share of this money or not. This seems counter-intuitive, but it is not so. The reason is this - A big corporation (or a small firm with VC money to burn) will spend this kind of money only when it sees positive, sustainable and reliable returns. It will adapt its systems and delivery mechanisms to deal with such kind of additional volume. Apart from the marketing funds, such money would also drive further investment within the company. In other words, it is not easy to deal with 100% more bookings overnight. So, the investment and the effort behind it will mean that the company is going to stay in the online arena. Even if Envigo does not get to see the money directly, eventually the benefits will trickle down. The benefits will be in the form of greater acceptance of this media and a general willingness to try this out. It will also be in the form of competitors lining up to replicate such successes. It will mean a gradual reallocation of funds towards online channels - for the firm and for the industries in which the firm operates. That is how it begins to start looking rosy for Envigo.
A lower ROI - because of sub-standard agency work or simply because of cleverly negotiated contracts does not help anyone except for the agency negotiating such contracts. And such joy tends to be short-lived. This is because the client will wisen up, with agencies not eating such low hanging fruits more than eager to educate the client .
This is why a great team of people, who may be in different online marketing shops, delivering exceptional results in a consistent fashion is what is needed. The online marketing pot is supposed to grow and grow - read this. It needs to grow faster. Such a team will generate that confidence and make client pockets deeper.
The good news is that in a lot of firms, the internet is the next big source of customers. This is because the customer is increasingly adept on this medium and she demands and expects to engage with her basket of brands on the internet. Things are very unorganised - Where to drive traffic from, how to measure returns, which channels to use and how much to pay an agency - but such things are a necessary companion of early stage growth. (For example, when the railroads were growing in the US in the 1800s, there was a time where you had to change your train 8 times between Philadelphia and Charleston - a distance of about 800 miles - because of different rail gauges).
In such a scenario, with rapid growth, unorganised service providers and service seekers, what should a marketing agency try to do to become bigger and better?
Not surprisingly, the same factors would help an agency which would help any other company, say in manufacturing. What is key - Motivation, Innovation and Agility. Self-driven employees who strive for personal improvement and client satisfaction, an open culture which supports cooperation and fosters innovation and an overall nimbleness in the way work flows in the organisation to deliver client requirements on time and show results.
Growth, in my opinion, will be delivered not by superstar business development (sadly, this is my current job at Envigo) but by a robust sales funnel and client management - all supported by well designed processes.
Processes are the oxygen at Envigo today. After closing the first round of business development, we are now taking stock of what went right and wrong and are writing out what to do next time around.
All the best to us!

What is online marketing?

Every few days, I meet someone and have to explain what I do for a living and it gets a bit irritating because very few people seem to get it.

a1: so what do you to?
a2: I work in an online marketing agency.

a1: (blank)
a2: Well we advise clients on how to spend money online...

a1: (Eating something and looking away)
a2: It is like how a regular marketing agency works - Suppose a company has a million dollars and wanted to spend it in selling more soap. They would go to a marketing agency and ask them for a media plan. The marketing agency would tell them how to market their soap, which TV channel and programs to use for advertising and how much to spend where. An online marketing agency that for an online audience, with a website owner as a client and online audiences as a target audience.

a1: so you are selling soap online? (between mouthfuls)
a2: we can help a client sell whatever he wants to

a1: Hmmm. So what do you do then?
a2: (imaging a car crash in slow motion) grr.,..

I get to play a2 about 50 times a month.
Below is an answer with the eloquence it deserves.

Online Marketing is a set of activities undertaken on behalf of a client or an employer to:
1) help drive online actions
2) in the most cost effective manner and
3) to track and report online actions.

Online actions could vary from a Purchase, Lead generation, email quote request or just viewing a website or a banner.

Cost effectiveness would mean:
3) What was the cost of buying traffic from this specific traffic source (How much did the click cost?)
4) How much did it cost for a given source to drive an online action. Remember that traffic is not bought for traffic's sake (not any more) but for driving a particular online action.
5) How much money was made as a result of this online action? (what was the value of the sale which happened?).
6) If 5) is greater than 4), then we turn up the knob for the given traffic source. If not, the knob is dialled down.

To make every one a bit more calm, there needs to be a system of accurate tracking and reporting:
7) Such reporting would provide data for questions 1 to 5.
8) it would also help us do 7) for every single link, website and campaign.
This set is the set of things an online marketeer does. It has a certain deterministic appeal to it. It also has a real world uncertainty about it. Every campaign shows a diminishing marginal return after a point. Every campaign has an elasticity - price, volume, conversion all change. Thankfuly, every campaign has its own predictability as well.


The interface with the client involves providing answers for the following questions:

1. Which set of online mediums/websites to be used?
2. How much to spend on each such website?
3. Which kind of commercial arrangements to be set up - Pay per click, pay per view, pay per action and so on...
4. Which creative formats to use?
and 5. How to track and run reports so as to measure what is going on?

What makes a good online marketer:
- To understand the nuances of reporting systems
- To have a good eye for detail
- To be a natural flair for analytics
- To be able to work in a team

This, in a nutshell, is online marketing. This is what we do!

Road rage!

This post is going to be a long crib - a vent about life, justice and anything else that might come into my head as I write this post.It all started because of something else, but then I had to drive about 250 kilometers over the weekend, all in and out of Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad and Greater Noida (Yes, even Greater Noida).
I have been thinking about a post on the traffic, but thought that it would be too much of an ex-non-resident thing to do. But then, this weekend tippeth the cup over.
There are so many things wrong, I am not sure where to start.
I will list some of my favourites:
- Red light jumping
- Red light creeping
- Wrong side driving with lights on
- Switching on headlights to tell the other side that they are coming first
- Selecting an incorrect lane on a red light
- Speeding
- Selecting an incorrect lane on the expressway
- Not stopping when it makes civic sense and common sense to stop
- Blocking the left lane at a red light

The main problem here is that there is no incentive to conform, no disincentive for misbehaving and strong incentives to misbehave!

Are these not the kind of things which the government is supposed to set right?
- The Gurgaon expressway cost Rs. 7.5bn (or Rs 10.0 bn), however, travel times which had fallen have shot back up thanks to the toll bridges. The Toll bridges take an average of 15-20 minutes to clear up.
Reasons:
- Bad design - no clear signs, no punishment for people found in the wrong lane (Cash payers in the tag lanes and so on)
- Bad behaviour - people always try to get into the shortest lane
- Bad planning - Toll costs are Rs 16, Rs 49 etc which few people carry. the toll booths do not have the forms for the getting a tag

I feel sorry about this. For a few reasons in no real order of importance.

I go to Delhi using the MG road. The traffic on this road has gone up because of the toll being implemented on the expressway. Was the expresssway not supposed to be a boon to all traffic heading out of Delhi into Gurgaon and beyond.
Secondly, is this not a very sad waste of money if the travel times actually go up. Long ago (1996), my dad had an interview with someone at Gillette who told him that it took him 50 miutes to go from Vasant Kunj to Bhiwadi. It takes someone about 80 minutes today to get to Bhiwadi (and there are 6 more lanes to play with than in 1996).

A small fraction of this is my money. And some of it is yours. If anyone I knew spent my money in such a bad way, I would take my money someone else (Is this what immigration is all about?).

I wonder if we could make the NHAI sweat a bit more for such blunders.

Moving on the brighter things, I have a personal yoga instructor, India still being one of the few places in the world, where such luxuries will not burn my pocket. Anyway, she has exercises for everything. The usual objectives are boring - weight loss, tone-up, stamina - she has exercises even for hair growth, sleeping better... I wonder if she would have something for "I dont know what to do now" or with love. Imagine going to the yoga teacher with a broken heart, hearing her reply to your query (with the strings of the sitar being strummed in the background), “Do surya namaskar and the pranayama along with these other allied asanas five times every morning at four am.” Wonder if such a thing exists in Yoga. It would make Yoga more popular than all the self help books about life, love, relationships, rebirth redundant. It would help reduce icecream sales. It would also give gyms and other fat loss related money making schemes a run for their money, the link being: heartache > icecream > weight gain > weight loss programs > new boy > heartache.
If only...

A Noteworthy Journey

Thanks to the Virgin Atlantic online checkin and also because a colleague who was supposed to get me upgraded had a baby daughter, I ended up on a window seat and in economy on my way back from London. After dinner and a few hours of sleep, I woke up and looked out of the window.
I like looking out of train windows - this habit started early with a lot of 2nd sleeper journeys while travelling around Bihar, Assam and Delhi. There was a brief interlude when my parents started booking the 3-tier AC sleeper and staring out of the air conditioned windows is no fun, even in the day. I was back at the looking out of windows in college , which was 40 hours away by train from Delhi and had some of the most interesting landscapes on the way with tunnels, bridges, valleys, mountains, creeks and even a stretch of sandy beach. I will dig around for pictures and post some, but the best way of seeing this stretch of rail is by traveling by 2nd sleeper in a non-rainy month (which are only a few and the best months are just after the rains!) from Kurla down till Mangalore. My father likes to say that nature comes in four varieties - hills and hills, hills and forests, forests and hills, forests and forests - and this route has each of the four in plenty. However, the best sight I have seen was even before the Konkan started and going to Mangalore from Delhi used to take 53 hours, as the train used to take a gigantic U turn and works its way back up through Kerala. I remember one morning, when we were passing through Kerala and were in the middle of the mid morning bathing. All the men had left and gone to work, while all the women were washing their clothes and bathing. It was quite a sight for the young testosterone being transported right through the middle of god's very own country! Amen. I want to add another variable into the natural beauty equation - women.
Cutting back to the journey at hand, I saw a huge city to the north next to some water. It was Teheran, which is to the south of the Caspian Sea. It was very peaceful - the time probably being around 5AM local time, the time when a city is usually most asleep than others. (In any case, I was too high to notice any movement). For a passing moment, I thought about Ahmadinejad and some of the things he has written or said, but the view tore me away from such things. I went back to just taking in the view of the city, albeit from 10 miles up, which has been habitated for the past 8000 years.
Gradually, the scenery became more interesting. We crossed the Zagros mountains as the sun rose and the scenery only improved with the Hindukush ranges coming into view. It was a goegraphy class in fast forward - glaciers, ravines, valleys and rivers - all in quick succession. What was interesting was how some rivers seemed to cut right through a mountain range - as if they had existed all along and the mountains rose afterwards. This is what plate tectonics also suggests - that the earlier continents were very differently shaped and located and they have drifted away from and into each other leading to the current continents. In the process, they created the Himalayas. The Hindukush is located approximately where the western edges of the Indian island would have rubbed against the Asian landmass and would have led to the mountains slowly rising out of coastal plains. Hence, the rivers.
May be.
This was also the age old route to India over which I was flying. Iranians/Aryans/Persians/Greeks, Scythians, Mongols and then the Arabs all have had their go at my precious and till very recently, a predominantly benign (read lazy and fat) country. I could see all the hell they were willing to go through to reach the pot of gold which was India. Every father west of the Hindukush who had a particularly headstrong son would rear him with his head towards the east and his mind full of a tales of gold in India. On the plane, the entire horizon was filled with lethal looking mountains and passes - and while I was flying over them, all kinds of adventurers had made a highway across this landscape for India.
Faith can move mountains. Greed can get you across.
The tremendous sense of calm is worth a mention. On sea level or thereabouts, every problem seems bigger than it really is. Religions (all of them), countries, economies, commodities or the lack of it have all been invented by humans over the past thousand years or so. The mountains and the planet have been changing, but have moved by a few inches in the past 10000 years. They are all that matter when you are ten miles up. They are all that you can see.
Maybe all of us should just chill a bit more and takes ourselves a bit less seriously.
Just for a bit.

Whatay Whatay fun!

About time I started writing again, there are just too many things happening and I want to document all of them. This blog will remain my personal blog inspite of earlier plans to find another domain... so now I need to think up of a cool new name for an industry expert(!) blog. The last few days in London and the trip back deserve one blog entry each - it will be nice to store these memories in text format.

The online marketing agency - UK and India started its operations in Delhi with a small team and small facilities but with big ambitions. Initial work includes search, consulting, affiliate management and some web design.

Bombay and Delhi are fun - there is just so much energy all around. The food tastes good, the women are prettier and crazier, my low bar seems just right (for those who know). I went partying but what happened after the partying was more memorable.

I was taking a new phone connection and I was asked how many I need for the new company. The guy then went on to ask me if I had already hired these new people, or if he could help me get a few. "It is easy sir.... Marketing people are easy to find!"
Imagine that - Orange and Vodaphone providing head hunting services while you are filling up a form for a new phone.

Mobile rates are low and are getting lower. Internet speeds are getting faster - 8MB broadband is there for the taking. Flights are full, on Sunday mornings at five am and on Thursday afternoons as well. I booked a Bombay to Delhi flight, when I was actually trying to go from Delhi to Bombay and supplied some entertainment to the ticketing women of Simbldy Deccan.

I do miss London. I miss my space. At the same time, I love my space being squashed out of shape by those in my life in India now. The title of this post is from a radio jingle which plays on one of these FM channels and I can't help but smile at how well this captures some of what I feel every day. So what if I have to spend two hours in a car every day.

The country of my birth and the land of my people, Welcome back into my life!

Changes

Times change and we change with them.

This blog also, is going to change.

The URL here will be kept for a blog related to my line of work. There will be another which will be for me to spout the kind of random musings I seem to specialise in.

Watch this space!

Saurabh