New sales channels - traffic signal

Driving in one of the metros in India? Watch out of your window at one of those numerous clones of traffic signals and observe what happens for the next 30 seconds. A swarm of urchins, vendors intersperse into the traffic. For the next 30 seconds, each one tries desperately to make sales. Everything sells at the signal; right from green leafy vegetables, fruits, flowers, newspapers, magazines to huge artifacts . One might wonder why would anyone buy a huge painting or a bulky flower vase at a traffic signal, especially with Indian Marketeers believing strongly in the principle of touch-feel. But you see these items being sold. Once I happened to ask one of them whether these high involvement products do sell at the traffic signal and he said yes they do.

In Bangalore,I have seen women clean the leafy vegetables, what is called "Souppu" in Kannada, on the footpath by the side of the traffic signal and sell it when the light turns red. Originally what was the domain of the urchins has largely become a sales channel today. I was not able to find much on the history of when this started , but whoever started this. had a hell lot of creativity.

Now some analysis of a traffic signal from the point of view of a sales channel. With traffic congestion increasing at most cities, there is no dearth of consumers stopping by. You know there are consumers incoming at a particular rate, ( data collected from past , would differ according to time of the day and season). There is really no data about these consumers , no segmentation variables available but you do know generic products like fruits , vegetables and maybe some FMCG products can sell. Extremely perishable items like newspapers sell really well at signals.

So amidst the irritating cavalcade of vehicles, constant honking of cars and bikes, these vendors are able to break the clutter and catch the attention span of their customers. And they do know their customer well. The vegetables are neatly packed, and change is kept handy. Moreover the small time frame does not allow too much bargaining.

This is all fine for our daily goods, but what about a wall hanging or a vase or painting. There is immense scope to cheat.

And finally coming to the urchins. They are masters of emotional marketing. Usually accompanied by a baby , or a broken limb, they are able to convey their message to their customers who out of pity give them pennies. Again they play the volume game here. Within a time frame of 30 seconds, they know who to target, and exactly after how much time they should discard the first car and move on to a more promising next. Talk about optimisation of profits!

I'm still eager to know what all can be sold at a traffic signal in India, and whether this channel would continue to flourish.

Coffee shops galore

Walk through the streets of Bangalore and you will spot a minimum of three Coffee Day outlets. The Kormangala area near Forum has about eight if I am not wrong. Now in addition to CCD you can see Mocha, Gloria's etc.

Sitting in a tea shop , Tea Centre at Churchgate yesterday, I started thinking about coffee shops in general. I was sitting in a classy, plush ambiance exactly reminded me of Barista except for a much more classy and sophisticated appeal. And what's more the place was extremely reasonable , it was comparable to the Mocha beside , but the service and ambiance was so good, anyone would expect the rates to be as high as a ChaBar Leela , Blore.

Now what is the difference between a CCD, Barista, Mocha, Costa Coffee, Gloria's etc?

According to me, CCD caters to the extremely discount segment, right at the bottom. CCD if for all and sundry. The service is abysmal, most Bangalore CCDs bring the cheque at your table with your coffee even if you have not asked for it!! So much so for their tagline " A lot can happen over coffee". CCD has increasingly started playing the volume's game. They need fast moving crowds, but this would affect their customer base and brand in long run. People do not go to coffee shops to drink mere coffee, they go to spend time and if CCD does not allow that , then I really do not know what is their value proposition. The only compelling reason for me to enter a CCD would be their Green Apple Soda!


Barista has always been my first love. Since college times we as a group would flock to the St Marks Road Barista ( now HRC Bangalore), play pictionary, scrabble and other games. Now Barista conjures memories of several friendships, all over a cup of Hazelnut cappuccino. Barista is a place where people can simply read their fav book at peace, have an official meeting, kill time if you are running early between appointments, and hang out with friends. Barista never drives out people. They have an extremely loyal customer base and slightly more upmarket as compared to a CCD. Barista allows me to customise my drink if I need more HazelNul flavour in my cappuccino, while CCD charges me if I ask them for more green apple squash in my soda! That was surely pissing off!
Barista provides most comforts of a 5 star coffee shop at a reasonable price. Plus I love their standees and merchandise. Barista also follows a consistent positioning though I must admit their service delivery is not consistent. Some Barista's have a self service thing while others serve at your table. When I asked them about this, the store manager said Barista is slowly moving towards serving at the table because CCD does that. Well... mebbe but I think Barista should not take any parity with CCD because their whole strategy, TG etc are very different.

CCD follows a cluster strategy like Starbucks, where incremental sales would compensate for the cannibalisation. Barista opens it outlets carefully ensuring enough footfall would occur. Once Barista has opened its outlets, CCD opens several outlets nearby.


Coming to Costa Coffee- premuim pricing, more for the youth, plush ambiance , and more variety on their palette. Pricing is the only difference which filters out crowd and ensures a more homogenous segmentation. I did not like the place at all and thought it was extremely over priced for no extra service at all.

Mocha has differentiated services for its loyal customers, based on membership and gives a very different ambiance. Primarily aimed at youth and groups. It is not a place where you would go on a solitary outing. It is for socialising and hanging out.

Gloria has matched Costa Coffee on its price points and has all the POPs. It is still a recent entrant and let us see if they modify its palette.

Waiting for some tea chains to come up in this tea drinking nation, but until then Barista and coffee shall remain my first love.

Twitter goes Freemium.. and finally:)

Twitter has become a buzz word , where once having 1000 odd followers would have gotten brands to chase you as influencers today you would need 20k+ followers. After deferring attempts at being acquired, and being constantly questioned by press, media, experts etc... Twitter finally has unveiled premium accounts and that is the title of my post.

Let me explain what Freemium means. Free + premium = Freemium. In Web 2.0 world , these are the new business models followed. Organisations struggle to build a base of loyal customers, a sort of cult following. In fact the valuation of any company in web 2.0 world would be as follows

Value = Customer base * Customer Lifetime Value.

So to have a higher valuation you would want to enhance either your customer base or increase lifetime value ( CLV).

So the mantra is like this, offer a vanilla service free on the net, get customer hooked onto it and then when your customer base has become substantial , add in more features to the vanilla service and charge a premium . LinkedIn, Flicker etc have gone the premium way. Why forget gmail. Gmail also has a freemium business model. Now Twitter has finally entered the arena.

So coming back to twitter. Twitter has just unveiled its premium account types. They came in 4 categories each differing at the level of extra services and the rates you pay. An obvious service they could offer with premium accounts was extending the word limit, because most tweeters feel restricted with the word limit. Now each of the four levels have differing word limits. One thing I had not thought of for premium accounts was that buying each package gets you random followers. Some packages also offer random celebrity followers and embellishments.. Now it seemed absurd to me when I read it first. I sincerely hope that would a rumour. If not then Twitter would probably lose it hard core fan following and would ultimately lead to brand dilution. Also a recent thing I noticed on my twitter page, nowadays there are ads to promote twitters own products like twitter search, widgets etc. Twitter definitely has a long way to go!

Read the complete article here.


http://www.bbspot.com/News/2009/03/twitter-unveils-premium-accounts.html

Measuring online influence

http://mashable.com/2009/03/02/measuring-online-influence/


Good read to follow up on my prev post. Measuring online influence!

Influencer Marketing

While at Microsoft , as an intern I was working on a project " Influencer Marketing". This deals with identifying high profile people on the web( preferably) who can influence the entire community about Microsoft, tools and technologies. typically these are avid bloggers, people with huge no of followers on twitter, high recommendations on LinkedIn etc ... While companies are increasingly interested in engaging with such high profile influencers and keep them happy, they are forgetting the layman out there who is equally capable of starting " Ihatedell.com" and make it popular.
There have been instances of these high profile inlfuencers using twitter as a tool for their cribs and complaints. Say you are one of these and you have a problem with your Vodafone GPRS. You have just tweeted it and before you know it, the social media division makes a note of it and it is escalated and in no time your connectivity is smooth and noiseless. Talk about Customer Satisfaction. you tweet and blog about how responsive Vodafone was. Now imagine you were a tweeter with 50 odd followers, your cribs and complaints are doing rounds inside the call center itself.

The age old philosophy of the customer pyramid as shown. Here Gold tier customers were a meager 20% of all your customer and brought in 80% of the revenues. However there is a paradigm shift with the introduction of the Long tail concept.
For Eg :-
Even if X is a great influencer, he might not even be on Vodafone. He could be on Airtel, but blog about the positives of Vodafone and he would be on the radar of the company more than you 10k plus billers. This is because X is helping Vodafone cater to a huge community and spread positivism than a 10k plus customer who has no circle of influence beyond family and friends.

Well, I do not know if this is the right thing to do. I personally do not agree with this. A company should try to achieve operational excellence and ensure that their most loyal customers are kept happy and in fact all their customers must be kept happy. A company must measure its responsiveness of customer service and delivery through servicing time for any customer, not the top notch revenue contributors or influencers. Because if your existing loyal customer base itself is not happy , the blogs and tweets would look engineered. And how logn does it take to start a viral on the web? When a company is due to come on campus, we look up their consumer complaints. Information spreads fast ,especially when it is negative, albeit it is definitely more trusted and valued if it comes from your favourite blogger or critic or tweeter.