A Real Ride!

The cab service just made waves in the media with the company’s introduction of a new ‘automobile toilet service’ on instant hire. Seeing the ad, my wife was intriguingly thrilled!

Since the time the commercial on the new service went on air, she kept thinking about it. I realized that the ad had impacted her a good deal, because she kept on speaking about it! She had a stream of questions. It was a Sunday and she had enough and more time to spend on mulling over her crowding thoughts. Excitement filled the air as she voiced her remarks while lobbing her thoughts aloud.

“It‘s a novel service idea! This company is the first to have thought of customer urgencies! You think of the company, and you think of the need to ease yourself, even when you are out in a busy market…. just like whenever you thought of colour, you thought of a particular brand of paint, those days!!” she said in a tone of appreciation of the fist-mover’s idea.

Coming to reality instantly, she grinned with a ring of sarcasm, “The expected time of arrival of the cab showing on the app has always been far from the truth, at least in my experience! So, I can imagine how the efficiency of the delivery of this service is going to be! Some drivers may ask for cash. If you say that you are paying by e-wallet, they may refuse the trip! How would it be, if after waiting for long, the driver calls you and not willing to serve you, cancels the trip? And then I am charged for the cancellation too and what will happen to my urgency? Oh my God!...” 

She went on with an analytical bent of mind as a prospective customer, “Hey, it’s on the road! How would anyone call for such a service on the roadside?”

“Do you think, it’s going to be safe for a lady to get into such a huge truck all by herself and fearlessly lock up inside?”

“The driver may ask for the PIN; in a hard attempt to get it, he should not try to enter the toilet cabin!” she remarked in her own way with a reflection on the safety angle!

“Isn’t easing oneself going to be too expensive? Wouldn’t it be funny if the app tries to show five nearby automobile toilets on the road?! After the job is done the van can double-up as a cab as well… may be…” she remarked, not giving any time for me to react!

The ad gave her every opportunity to think about the company’s current performance! Recalling a few cabbing experiences, she retired to bed that day.

The next morning was quiet until I could hear her shouting, with her voice reverberating off the closet walls, “I’m relieved!”  I wondered for a moment what she was talking about!

My eyebrows rose in amazement when she said,  “It was all a prank! I just got a message, on my phone from the cab company just now. There’s no toilet service! You know today is 1^st of April!”

I was just dumbfounded!

Hola, you’ve taken everyone for a real ride!

- Dr. Gibson G. Vedamani

Breaking Brand Ambassadors - 'Facing' the Music!

A brand ambassador offers credence to the brand. The brand is personified with the qualities of the brand ambassador and thus the brand is transformed in identity to take in the characteristics of the brand ambassador in value and spirit. 

Celebrities are used as brand ambassadors in organizational campaigns. Companies leverage the identity of the brand ambassador to have a rub-off of the ambassador’s lofty image on the brand. The synonymous identity struck between the brand and the brand ambassador is built by using repeated associations in communication. The reach of such communication results in the reinforcement of the personality traits of the brand ambassador as the tenets of the brand itself. Cadbury was earlier faced with the worm infestation crisis and since then it needed to reposition itself as a credible brand. The engagement of Amitabh Bachchan as the brand ambassador has adorned its campaigns all these years and it has reinforced a great deal of trust in the brand.

It has become commonplace for brand owners to project themselves as their brand ambassadors in recent times. Vasanth & Co, is a home electronics and household appliances retailer whose owner is H. Vasanthakumar, a Congress party politician in Tamil Nadu. He is featured in the brand logo itself, which is in the form of a quality and trust seal. In all the communication campaigns of the retailer Mr. Vasanthakumar is starred. More known as a trusted politician in the catchements of his stores than the proprietor of Vasanth & Co, his identity has indeed helped promote his brand of stores in Tamil Nadu.

We have been witnessing the emergence of the yoga guru Baba Ramdev and his associate Acharya Balkrishna as the brand ambassadors for the Patanjali brand in India. In fact the range of herbal and ayurvedic products has been built on the aura of the yoga guru Ramdev. All the Patanjali retail stores feature the image of the guru on their signboards! Whether it is Patanjali Atta Noodles or Patanjali Cow’s Ghee, Ramdev signs off with his yogic credentials, anchoring his stance as the brand ambassador!

Motivated by the owner turned brand ambassador concept, the owner of the New Saravana Stores in Chennai has become the value retailing company’s brand ambassador. The youthful looking hero-like owner dances to the advertisement tunes amidst a show of expensive cars, pompous models and sartorially elegant clothes! A non-entity otherwise, he has quickly become synonymous with the brand and the whole audience now knows that it is the proprietor of the brand himself who has become the brand ambassador! The ads feature popular actors like Tamanna and Hansika also (along with him), whose faces sway the audience's attention from the unknown face of the brand ambassador who tries too hard to sell himself. Has it worked for the brand? Only time will tell us!

We may see many such owner-cum-brand ambassadors standing by their own brands in future!

After all, a Trump is only known by his brand to the World!!

 - Dr. Gibson Vedamani

The bell rings ding-dong! There goes Jabong!!

Discounters always have a huge sales turnover. Wal-Mart is yet the largest organization in the World! It is reported that only one out of the top ten retailing companies in the World as on 2015 is an online retailer (amazon.com) and all others are yet brick and mortar retailers. Retailers struggle hard to organize their merchandise assortments, make customer deliveries and refill their shelves, but the brick and mortar ones excel in these functions. Most of the online retailers are mere ‘moderators’ of the business, having an establishment of humongous supplier linkages that facilitate customer deliveries without any inventory holding responsibility at their end. If one becomes successful in identifying deep pockets that could place trust on the business model one projects, any new online retailer may commence his business easily these days!

Today in the newspapers in Mumbai we read a huge full-page advertisement of a new online retailer of ‘customized’ products! The advertisement features a high-powered customized motorcycle on the front page but in the second page it shows products as simple as clothing and footwear for customization! The offered scope of customization is huge – items that range from high involvement purchases to even impulse buys! One has to wait and see how ‘customization’ is executed on such a wide variety of products. While customization partners may actually execute the business, the online retailer may just provide the platform for the business and the company’s role is that of a moderator who coordinates the business deal and collects the revenue! In short, such ‘moderating models’ of business may crop up in plenty in the near future, imaginably fashioning their own new valuation methodologies as well!

Mergers and acquisitions may become commonplace in the Indian online retail sector, these days. As many organizations have grown in product transaction value, they have discovered the new methodology of assessing the value of the company by its Gross Merchandise Value which is the sum total of the marked retail price of all the products put on the platform for sales. These online retailers could never go by EBITDA figures as they all presumably had negative gross margins. Investors are yet hopeful of making money some day and see the light of day!

At a reported negative EBITDA of Rs. 415 Crores ($ 60 million) on a total sales turnover of Rs. 940 Crores ($ 135 million) in the financial year ended March 31, 2016, Jabong went on the block. Myntra, belonging to the Flipkart Group clinched the deal according to recent reports, at $ 70 million. The buyer’s offer got the better of two offers – one at $ 35 million from the Future Group and the other at $ 50 million from Snapdeal. The erstwhile valuation parameters have been defeated perhaps for the first time. Jabong made a desperate attempt to make a sell-out as it was struggling hard to make both ends meet! Newspapers reported that it was a ‘hush-hush’ deal between the Flipkart Group’s Myntra and Jabong! The valuation of the company resulted in a worth that was considerably less than a quarter of its sales turnover! And what the other contenders offered was even much less; the offer from the Future Group reportedly being only a half of the deal amount!

The valuations of such companies may go down to even smaller fractions if profit further fractures and true value revelations may be made! Reality seems to slowly dawn over the online retailing madness of valuations and investments!

Judiciousness, I see thou unfurling, in the right time!

Dr. Gibson G. Vedamani

Go Incognito, Ye Online Shoppers!

Online shoppers show a variety of shopping behaviors.  One may enjoy window-shopping in a department store or one may love strolling in a mall with the objective of spending time all by oneself or with family for sheer relaxation. Likewise online customers too enjoy browsing retail sites often, just to understand trends or to know about the latest products or service innovations and introductions. Often while browsing we are bombarded with information and recommendations continuously based on our browsing history. Even as we open our emails and begin to focus on them, information from various online service providers would pop up distracting our attention, through the cookies stored in cache memory. One is awed many a time about how this tracking machinery could consistently do the job! Offline retailers tend to forget their regular customers, as people’s memories are short-lived. Even customer relationship programmes do not have an efficient process to alert the presence of regular customers in the store premises as they seldom deploy any reliable system to know repeat visits of customers, despite having a track of purchase histories.  

Quite a few technology geeks who are employed with marketing organizations, eagerly exercise their capabilities to do online snooping and search engine indexing. They attempt to closely track customers’ browsing and search behavior and successfully direct them to their own websites and offers. The intelligence system of online retailers is mind- blowing. No one can hide from the tracking of information when they are determined to snoop on customers’ browsing and purchase behavior. It is a man-eat-man world out there in the cyber space to grab customers from one another. Search engine indexing is found to help a great deal in the matter of collecting, analyzing and storing data for use by the search engine. The search engine index is the location where the collected data is securitized. Technical experts in competing online marketing organizations would work overtime to outsmart each other in designing the most efficient search engine indexing so that their product or service would get precedence and priority over the other in showing up first in the order of search results. Often such competitors pip each other at the post!  What may appear first in search results may also stand the chance of gaining the customer view first. Thus search engine indexing is said to precisely help overcome competition on searches made. The adequacy of the search is dependent on a properly designed search engine index with a plethora mix of key words and linked content, so that information is picked instantly to show on the results page first. Search engine spiders or crawlers, as technologists call them, are said to be deployed to go all around the web universe to enable the search engine index update information in a jiffy. 

Technology experts recommend online shoppers and browsers to go through the privacy options built into the software, including the operating system, which as customers we may have ignored so far. The safest way for organizations is to connect to the Internet through a Virtual Private Network (VPN). The VPN helps securitize information from any kind of snooping consequent to adopting the order of encrypting and decrypting of information, rendering it unreadable by snoopers. Individuals who would shop and browse online and want to be free from the botheration of advertisement pop-up, alerts and suggestions during unwanted occasions, can browse and shop from the privacy of their space by using the ‘go incognito’ mode in the browsers. Though it may not ensure a snooper free browsing experience, it may give relief to the browser from the information storage and the consequent pop-up troubles caused through cookies stored in cache memories! Most of us may have been unaware of the knack of escaping from cookies while browsing! 

So, isn’t it high time we went incognito while browsing?!

- Dr. Gibson G. Vedamani

Retailing in 2015: Looking at the Rear View Mirror!

The year 2015 is passing by as it leaves behind some mixed retailing memories.

For modern retailing in India FDI policy hurdles have been looming large as a spectre that seems to haunt the sector. The year’s policy issues in retailing peaked when two different writ petitions were filed in the Delhi High Court against ecommerce companies – one by the footwear retailers association challenging that FDI norms are violated and the other by Retailers’ Association of India on behalf of modern retailers seeking FDI policy parity with ecommerce companies. The Court has ordered the Enforcement Directorate to probe 21 ecommerce companies for any violation. Ecommerce companies argue that they carry out their business only on a B2B model as they facilitate the business between the seller and the customer! The matter is still under judicial consideration. In truth, they sell the products and services to customers directly, though listed sellers raise each sales invoice but they collect the proceeds on their sellers’ behalf!

Small and medium retailers across the country especially in towns and villages are flourishing as a principal result of good availability of quality Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and many new product launches in the right value price-points favoring the mass consumers, still augmenting internal consumption. Maggi had its testing time but it is currently coming back to life like a phoenix in the marketplace. Brick and mortar retail growth is stunted and the pace is reportedly at around 6%, which too is contributed to, perhaps only by inorganic growth. Above all those domestic big retailers, who depend only on FDI to benefit, are still waiting in the wings for divestiture (though with their mounting troubles of gross merchandise mismanagement and product value run down by way of going on huge discount sales).

Online and multi-channel retailing have been the focus of brick and mortar retailers in the year that is passing by, while the online retailers were seen to be enthusiastic about opening physical stores. Industry experts have opined that this validates the need for the co-existence of one another! The ecommerce companies have placed trust on brick and mortar retailing as they have opened their physical pop-up retail stores in 2015.

Online retailers had a ‘treasuring’ as well as a testing time in 2015. Industry reports said that the Indian ecommerce space may be in for a shake up in 2015 because they feared a fall consequent to the poor performance of online retailers in the last two fiscals. Key players like Flipkart and Snapdeal continued to acquire funding with increased valuations during the year. Both companies have banked on their Gross Merchandise Value (the worth of goods traded through the portal), which is currently considered to be a key yardstick for performance for online retailers as these companies have been posting huge financial losses. GMV for the online retailers has been reported to be growing at a very fast pace. Strategic initiatives like the Big Billion Day Sales of Flipkart, Weekend Super Sales of Snapdeal have been undertaken to increase sales by creating a huge hype across the nation that reportedly saw millions of app downloads! Online retailers line Myntra killed their websites and went with their app only in 2015, which is seen as a daring move to confidently depend on the migration of customers to mobile shopping. Online retailers like Firstcry, Fabfurnish, Lenskart, etc. opened up their offline presence as well. Amazon opened its first offline bookstore in Seattle in the USA in 2015 while many bookstore branches closed their doors or de-risked their space deployment in India during the same period.

The Industry looks forward to the growth of the online sales customers who would again facilitate the tremendous increase of the business. The brick and mortar retailers would have to count on their efficiency while 'piggybacking' on successful malls in cities and high streets in towns. The towns may be their best bet in future if at all they try to match the growth pace of their online counterparts. 

Fortune yet lies in the bottom of the pyramid for organized retailing in India!

Happy Retailing Year 2016!!

-       Dr. Gibson Vedamani

                          gibsonv@yahoo.com

The Faces That Launched A Thousand Ships...

Everyday is a special day. Every day of the year is almost celebrated nowadays - to commemorate an event or to remember someone. Usually celebrations are done to perpetuate the remembrance of the day at least once a year for things gone by! We celebrate birthdays and memorial days. Perhaps it all began in the Biblical Days when people had to be helped to remember important days in History so that they could continuously cling to God and religious disciplines. Later, the focus on the celebrations and remembrances of days might have moved towards human beings and mundane events!

Our ancestors perhaps never had to celebrate Father’s Day or Mother’s Day to remember their parents. They were so much an integral part of their lives, though they may not have been in touch with them everyday. I have always wondered why the Son’s and Daughter’s Day is not celebrated with as much pomp and glory as the Father’s Day and Mother’s Day are celebrated. There is no separate Son’s Day yet, though! Perhaps consequent to a yet strong or binding relationship that is nurtured by parents that they do not have to celebrate these days to remember children! May be it is the children who have lost the strength of the bond (often leaving parents to feel like a weaned child!), that they have to celebrate a Father’s Day or a Mother’s Day to remember them! Some argue that the Father’s Day and Mother’s Day would suffice for the parents too to remember their children. Hence there is no need for separate days to be found to commemorate in reciprocation! Critiques reveal that these days have been called into existence for commercial reasons – reasons to sell greeting cards, gifts and bouquets!

Let me come to the brass tacks of business. B. S. Nagesh, the founding CEO of Shoppers’ Stop who is known in the Indian retailing circles as the Pioneering Modern Retail Professional conceptualized a Day to recognize and reward the achievements of the front-end sales and service personnel. He calls it the Retail Employees Day with an acronym RED! He gives an opportunity to the sales and service people every year to tell of their great deeds – where they have gone the extra mile to satisfy customers! Some argue that people in the service industry have to serve by going the extra mile all the time as hygiene need. They quiz the very need to talk about the demands of the nature of the job and fulfillment of the job’s responsibilities! Others say that it is only just and fair to recognize and reward the best. Yet one may say that millions of floor personnel are serving customers on the shop floors day in and day out in the retailing continent of India and it may help to remind every one of them to excel in delighting customers. And reward the best among them!

India’s Father of Brick and Mortar Retailing, Kishore Biyani conceptualized many significant days to celebrate on his shop floors. The most significant of them are The National Festival Holiday Day Sale (that eventually got extended as The National Festival Holiday Week!) and The Big Billion Day Sales. He has marked the days to shake his customers out of the comfort zones of their homes on National Festival Holidays and make them go to his stores in loads every year!

It’s now the turn of the billion dollar online retailers. They sell at less prices. Customers can enjoy additional value. That’s super value! And here comes one more day – The Super Value Day!

We are sure to have many genres of retailers who would be competing to establish their own ‘days’. On the other hand, we would have our retail floor personnel vying with each other for achieving excellence.

Now for the doyens of Indian retailing and for all that they have done, the retailing posterity may remember them and ask the Shakespearean way, “Were these the faces that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”

- Dr. Gibson G. Vedamani