Entrepreneurship

Its a fancy word nowadays with everyone jumping into the fray.I being one of them.When you are spectator you don't realise the seriousness involved with game but when you step into it you get to know the real pressure and fun.I recall subroto bagchi's quote from the book The high performance entrepreneur when he was asked by a reporter on why he wanted to quit the high flying job at wipro and start on his own.He reverted back asking the reporter as do you know why every women wants to be a mother in spite of all the troubles that she undergoes in that nine months of pregnancy.No body knows the answer still everybody knows truth.The new enterprise is like a new born baby who has just entered this world and the baby will grow the way you want it to grow.It will try to emulate you by looking at you and after sometime it will be your replica.Every enterprise carries the DNA of the founders and the people who nurture it.People who help it to grow and gives the strength to stand tall amidst all the adversities.Every company has a unique identity and values of its own.The value which defines not only its future but also the way it treats its employees, compititon,society and nation as a whole.Though the end objective may be a healthy bottomline but the most important factor is the way to the healthy bottomline.The way is determined by the value the company carries within itself.This is the same value which it has inherited from its founders and the promoters.

Retail Redesigned

Once upon a time the business of world was war. The focus has sincebeen shifted. Man has decided to enjoy the fruits of previousgenerations' labour. Now economies compete for consumers. Old order isgiving way to a new order- 'Serve Consumer for Profit'. Of many thingsthat go into making this a reality, Organized Retail surely occupies avery high rank.Miracle of Organized Retail is attributable to the `Pull' ithas on customers. In its more than a century old history, OrganizedRetail has proved that it is the `Ultimate Clearing House' of 'Demand-n-Supply', Mother of the concept- `Marketing' and muchmore. Take a look at the following snap shots and judge for yourself:

* Ron Jon Surf Shop is known worldwide for its extensive selection ofactive lifestyles apparel, board sports equipment, and dive apparatus.Their 52000 square-feet Coco Beach - Florida store is open 24 hours aday - 365 days a year - just like the beach itself.

* Recreation Equipment Incorporated is one of the largest outdoor specialty retailer operating more than 50 stores. Its flag ship store inSeattle is an exciting shopping experience. It has huge 65-feet high,free standing climbing rock; mountain bike trails; and 'rain rooms' forcustomers to test their equipment at the time of purchase.

* Japanese '7 Eleven' stores scan each customer's basket and data getstransmitted to corporate HQ which in turn makes it available to all the8200 stores and countless vendors. Orders for fast-food and fresh-foodsupplies are placed three times each day. Magazines are ordered once aday. Processed food is ordered once in two days while each store receives deliveries ten times a day.

* Tiffany & Company, which has been around for over 160 years, is amongthe best known of all the great American brands. Tiffany is more than aretailer; it is an American icon that has worked its way into moviesand songs. The company's flagship location on Fifth Avenue in New YorkCity has become a tourist attraction.

* In 1997, Maxine Clark opened doors of 'Build-A-Bear Workshop'. Nowchildren could walk in and make a Teddy of their choice themselves.There are Master Bear Builders present to make it an enjoyable andmemorable experience. With in five years the idea grew into a 100 storechain with annual sales of US$200 million.

Malls,money and Market

INDIA WILL emerge as the sixth largest retail market by 2012 because of income, population growth and saving behaviour.
The sector will grow on the strength of the rising purchasing power of the consumer, which will mainly come from the services sector.
The rising population of working women, the rising services sector, the growing middle class and easier access to credit are some of the factors that will fuel the growth of retail industry in India.
The private labels will constitute a big part of organised retail. But the industry to deal with supply chain constraints, wastage and poor storage and distribution

The retail evolution in India is still in its nascent stage and said, though the Indian retail market is promising, it has a long way to go to make a mark on the global level.Though a number of retailers from emerging markets are doing well, no Indian player figures in the list of top 10 Asia-Pacific retailers.
The retail industry is very dynamic and competitive. Many players, who were doing well in the past, are no more in the picture. Retailers can cash in on the growth in consumption in Asia but with the US financial turmoil, other markets would be affected.
Organised retail is poised to grow at 30-40 per cent and the country will see one of the fastest growths in the retail sector. India will be an attractive market despite its complexities and marketers need to adapt to Indian realities. Ability to differentiate will determine the success of a retailer.
Consumers are more prepared than retailers for organised retail. Retail is undergoing transformation, but we need to keep typical Indian buyer in mind while chalking out strategy.

OOH -the next boom

What does a bus stop have in common with a footwear firm? Ask Reebok. The sportswear giant’s newest outdoor display for its recently-launched Reebok HexRide is a shoe hung by a string inside a standing panel of a bus shelter. Each unit of this street furniture costs around Rs 1,75,000. For Reebok, the leader in the Indian sportswear market, this attempt at out-of-home advertising (OOH) is an effort to break away from the clutter. But why OOH? Traditionally, outdoor advertising has a lower cost per 1,000 views than any other form of advertising. With rising costs associated with mass media advertising, marketers are increasingly depending on emerging media — be it digital or OOH. And that’s not all. OOH media companies, too, have started attracting higher valuations in the market. For instance, Kishore Biyani’s Future Media is offloading around 10% stake for $10 million. “The second round of talks are in progress to bring in fresh capital. The OOH sector is an interesting place to be in right now and we are optimistic about its long-term potential,” reveals Mr Biyani.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If the buzz in investment banking circles is to be believed, PE firm Warburg Pincus is most likely to pick up 15-20% stake for Rs 300 crore in Mumbai-based outdoor advertising firm Laqshya. Then just a few months back Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers picked up equity stakes of 8.28% each in the Rs 1200-crore Times Innovative Media, the OOH subsidiary of Entertainment Network India, for Rs 200 crore. Similarly, ILabs Investment Funds LLC pumped in Rs 17.8 crore into Mumbai-based Integrid Media, which has chalked out aggressive plans to expand in the OOH advertising activation space in a few months. And all this is besides half a dozen venture capital investments in digital signage and in-store TV companies such as LiveMedia (DFJ), DSN (Sequoia Capital India), vJive (Matrix) and Tag Media Network (Intel Capital). So what’s up? It’s very clear. OOH advertising is all set to become big. Sample this: The Rs 1,250-crore Indian OOH industry is estimated to touch Rs 2,400 crore by 2012, at a CAGR of 14%, according to a report by FICCI-PricewaterhouseCoopers. And according to experts, it may even account for 10-12% of the country’s total ad spend by 2010. Last year OOH industry grew 25% over 2006. In comparison, the darling of the entertainment & media industry — online advertising — is estimated to cough up only Rs 1,100 crore by 2012, at a CAGR of 32%. So what is fuelling this exceptional growth? Sunder Hemrajani, MD, Times OOH — one of the country’s top outdoor ad firms — says, “There are several factors. The growing investment in infrastructure has opened doors for new forms of advertising. For instance, if there wasn’t a DND expressway near the capital there wouldn’t have been any scope of advertising through big LCD screens there. Secondly, the Indian consumer’s out of home spending is noticeably increasing. People are shopping, eating out and spending quite a lot of time outside. That is where a huge opportunity lies for advertisers.”

brand promise

Virtually every major corporation today is facing the same challenge: how to create sustainable long-term growth. Over the last several years, companies have captured the "easy" earnings enhancements from operational improvements and cost reductions yet they remain under considerable pressure to increase earnings.Meanwhile, the business landscape is increasingly challenging due to increased commoditization of core products and service offerings, profound shifts of value from manufacturers to channels, fragmentation of customer segments and proliferation of brands, increasing costs to serve, reducing scale and adding complexity to execution.Amid this environment, companies are turning to marketing which they see as under-developed relative to the process rigor found in other functions and the key to organic growth. Consequently, many companies are launching major corporate initiatives to drive step-change function improvements in marketing and sales."Unlocking this growth potential requires a far greater integration of marketing into the main strategies, functions, and processes of the business, and even outside the business with channel partners and suppliers," says Tom French, head of the North American Marketing & Sales Practice. The best marketing organizations are focusing on four priority areas in order to take the marketing function to the next level.
Infusing customer insights into the businessGenerating customer insights has traditionally been the job of the market research unit, working mostly within the marketing group. “Marketing research groups need to move beyond serving just the marketing group, and get away from focusing primarily on process, to providing value-added answers to key strategic questions,” says John Forsyth, head of the global Customer Insights group. Further, marketing research groups should cast a far broader net to capture insights, collaborating with their channel partners, salesforces, call center managers and other third parties. lastly, and most importantly, companies need to redesign core business processes so that customer insights are incorporated, on a routine, operating basis, into strategic business decisions, and other key departments like R&D, operations and sales need to become more immersed in the insights process.
Integrating business and brand strategiesStrong brands historically have yielded faster growth and higher returns to shareholders. Accordingly, top marketers are applying three imperatives to brand strategy:

Delivering a differentiated brand promise. As companies lose the ability to differentiate their brands based on functional attributes, they must focus on process and relationship benefits, such as ease of ordering or responsiveness to customer requests. Thus, frontline employees must understand and deliver the right brand promise to the customer.
Identifying opportunities to leverage a brand into new markets. Great brand growers challenge their existing market definition to stimulate growth. Companies that look at the market in this broader sense can uncover much greater growth opportunities.
Managing product portfolios. In the view of Steve Carlotti, head of the Branding group, “Top performers coordinate their business strategies and marketing operations across the full portfolio of brands.” They also restructure their budgeting processes to allocate more resources to brands with the greatest future potential.
Go-to-market execution"Recently, large companies' go-to-market organizations have evolved beyond the sales force to encompass multiple channels and functions, inside and outside the corporation," according to Roland John, head of the Sales & Channel Management group. This network owns most of a company's customer touchpoints and data. To succeed, marketing executives must be far more involved in go-to-market activities, including sales force deployment, pricing strategy, and brand delivery at the front line.
End-to-end redesign of core commercial processesMarketing and sales functions need to become increasingly intertwined if companies are going to achieve the growth they require. In world class enterprise selling organizations, for instance, it is impossible to define where marketing ends and sales begins. Further, companies need to integrate the intertwined marketing and sales function into the day-to-day operations of the organization and apply the same rigor to defining commercial processes and systems that they have long applied to manufacturing and other operational processes and systems. This "commercial transformation" can take many forms and involves 1) a concerted, multi-year effort to substantially upgrade the effectiveness of a company’s marketing and sales processes, including aligning top management around a forceful transformation theme; 2) driving performance improvement programs around 2-3 carefully selected commercial levers and striving to lead the industry on these levers; and 3) embedding the change through a comprehensive commercial operating system, comprising not only processes and tools, but also IT systems and performance management.

why we buy

If you didn't know anything about marketing, you might think it was important to advertise what a new product does. The makers of HeadOn aren't so naive. Their commercials have an actor repeating "HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead" while another presses what appears to be a glue stick to her brow. No one mentions that the substance is supposed to cure headaches homeopathically. Early ads did, but focus groups showed that the superrepetitive version made people remember the name the most.
It's not a bad strategy, considering how consumers respond to names that they recognize. A flurry of new research is shedding light on people's tendency--when presented with a known object and an unknown one--to assign more value to the thing they've heard of, even if they don't know anything else about it. It's easy to imagine the evolutionary roots of a go-with-what-you-know principle--avoiding poisonous plants, say--but these mental shortcuts suit certain modern problems as well. For example, studies have shown that people are able to pick which of two foreign cities is larger or who will win Wimbledon just by employing the assumption that if a name is recognized, it's likely to be more important.
Enter the world of marketing. The power of name recognition helps explain the multibillion-dollar business of plastering brand names on everything from ballpoint pens to NASCAR racers as well as the thriving cottage industry of reviving brands that have fallen out of mainstream use, like Ovaltine chocolate malt and Westinghouse televisions. "We tend to believe, If I've heard of [a product] before, it's probably because it's popular, and popular things are good," says Dan Goldstein, an assistant professor of marketing at London Business School.
In 2002, he and Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist at Berlin's Max Planck Institute for Human Development, dubbed this effect the recognition heuristic and started detailing how it is used to manipulate consumer decision making. Gigerenzer's new book, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, describes a study in which people tasted peanut butter from three jars. Each jar contained the same peanut butter, but 75% of participants thought the contents tasted better in the jar that had a name-brand label on it. In another study, published this month by researchers at Stanford University, children given the same French fries and chicken nuggets in different packaging preferred the taste of the food delivered in McDonald's wrappers. "Ideally, a manufacturer increases the quality of a product, and that in turn increases word of mouth and media coverage," says Gigerenzer. "But advertising shortcuts this process. There's no longer a connection to quality."
That's true even when the stakes are high. A study published last year looked at how we choose an airline. Researchers at Germany's University of Cologne asked participants to pick between two carriers--one familiar and one unknown. Predictably, an overwhelming number chose the airline they recognized. What was surprising was that many stuck with it even as the researchers gave negative cues about its safety. With three troubling bits of information--like past accidents--67% of study participants remained loyal to the airline they knew.
But, as that paper argued, going with what you know isn't inescapable. Brain-scan studies indicate that choosing among items is a two-step process, with the first being a subconscious decision whether to rely on the recognition principle. But you can also deliberately opt out. Why is it that you always buy Crest? you might ask yourself. It's not such a crazy question in a consumer culture in which we often know brands simply because advertisers want us to.

why we buy

its very interesting to understand the consumer buying behavior.The buying behavior of the consumer gives a lot of insight about consumers perception about the brand.The brand can be perceived in different ways by different people.
We will talk more about the consumer buying behavior and the impact of buying behavior on marketing campaigns in forth coming blogs
so keep reading

cheers