BRIDGING OPPURTUNITIES

A group of young people is trying to provide better educational opportunities to children through development of ‘sustainable friendships.’ The idea
is to create a bond between children in Delhi’s affluent schools and those in budget or government schools. The group has started visiting schools to initiate a collaboration between affluent schools, budget schools in slum colonies that charge a fee of Rs 100 per-month and government schools that serve mid-day meals to prevent dropouts. Explaining the rationale behind the project ‘Bridging Opportunities,’ Deeksha Sharma, a final year student of Amity Law School and one of the project members says: “Our research indicated a high percentage of dropouts in budget and government schools, especially at the primary level. Though the predominant reasons are lack of adequate resources, we have also identified an absence of out-of-school mentors, role models and stable friendships among children from disadvantaged communities.” Sharma, who is also the only Indian to be featured among the top 75 oralists of the world, adds: “Having met some like-minded people at a capacity building seminar organised by the Centre for Civil Society, we, as a group of four, initiated this project.” With the guidance of participating schools’ principals and teachers, the project proceeds by making students in affluent schools sensitive towards the needs of other students, for whom a friend can go a long way in ensuring that completing school education remains a real possibility, explains Kush Verma, a member and a graduate in chemistry from Delhi University. The groundwork has been initiated, informs Manu Sundaram, another member. Sundaram completed his graduation in physics and astronomy from the Australian National University. He says: “We have had field-visits to the budget schools, interacted with school authorities and children to identify and understand their needs.” Explaining the USP of the project, Tanya Narula, a fourth year student of Amity Law School, says, “There is no pressure on any student for contribution. Any child who volunteers to be involved will be provided the resources and we will facilitate the process. Initially, the level of facilitation is high, but it gradually fades out to allow children to form friendships and apply their own initiatives. In practice, what each volunteer student does is to make friends and develop a genuine relation at a personal level that can be sustained over a period of time — outside and beyond the school set-up.”

How Marketing Analytics Can Drive Change

How Marketing Analytics Can Drive Change

Let's head out for a real-world spin and see analytics in action, helping to drive marketing campaigns and programs to the next step.

Say you're ready to send out hundreds of thousands of email messages to your customer base for which the purchasing cycle has just ended. When is the best time to push the send button? You can use marketing analytics to identify seasonality of the purchasing cycle within your customer base to establish optimal campaign timing.

Or, perhaps you are seeing too many purchasers leave your online store with a single product in their basket. Leveraging information gathered via marketing analytics, you can present purchasers with additional products related to their primary purchase, which in turn boosts attach rates.

Another example is if one of your marketing teams purchases a large list of names for an upcoming campaign. You estimate that 80 percent of the potential recipients aren't even interested in the subject. You could forge ahead with the "spray-and-pray" approach, or you could turn to your marketing analytics team to identify those customers most likely to respond. This will reduce list purchase and production costs as well as increase targeting by providing recipients with information that they are actually interested in. In turn, your response rates should improve and the recipients will likely opt to accept information from you again.

Here's another real-life scenario: a much-hyped demand generation activity generates ineffective leads and plenty of tension between marketing and sales.

Marketing analytics can help avoid this kind of negative campaign outcome. You can develop a decision framework through the analysis of past leads and sales data to optimize lead routing - and create a prioritized lead-follow up score based on budget, authority, need and timeframe. This can generate increased sales and marketing effectiveness, keeping both your marketing and sales teams happy.

Tracking the Trends

Today, marketing analytics can already touch everything you do around customer behavior and marketing spend. So what's next?

Many companies will begin to combine clickstream analysis with deeper insight into who your customers really are, what they are thinking and what motivates them. Through more complex quantitative methodology, you'll be able to not only understand customer behavior patterns but also understand what prompted them to exhibit that behavior in the first place - and, most importantly, if the prompts ultimately generated the targeted revenue.

Marketing analytics is also likely to become more of an efficient macroeconomic activity as it scales out from the narrow focus of an individual regional marketing person tracking a campaign on a PC to a more global, corporate-wide focus. At the same time, larger IT systems and data warehouses will enable you to effectively reach more customers with a more repeatable, sustainable process.

Whatever path your company chooses to follow, you can look to analytics to help you improve marketing efficiency and increase marketing effectiveness - with greater understanding of and accountability for the results.

Marketing Analytics Checklist: What Works, What Doesn't

No matter where you company is today regarding marketing analytics, a common set of challenges presents itself as you seek the right balance between the art and the science of marketing. Keeping these guidelines in mind can help surmount, or even bypass, some of the biggest challenges.

Start with the data itself. Are you already collecting data? Is it the right data? How do you access it? Is it centralized? You need to place equal emphasis on the quantity and the quality of data. Both are equally important. Likewise, don't always implicitly trust all the data you receive. Mistakes can be made along the way in terms of data entry and maintenance. Don't be afraid to question the data when it feels right to do so.

Don't get too fancy too fast. If you do, you run the risk of losing sight of your analytics objectives. It's easy to get more caught up in how you are solving a problem than in reaching an actual solution. Consider simplifying analytics to align with basic business rules. You don't always need to employ the most sophisticated analytics methodology or technique to generate results that are right for your business. Even the most basic analytics tools can take your company far.

View analytics as a strategic core function. It's not just something you dabble in here and there or something you start and stop. It's a continual process. Consider establishing a central analytics team, much like an R&D function. Then use that team to help transfer knowledge from one team to another across your global and regional sales and marketing organizations. Also consider establishing a unique career path for your analytics professionals. This can help you attract and retain the best in the field.

Commit to marketing analytics. And follow through on that commitment. Don't just talk about marketing analytics. Invest in it. You can start with a pilot program or two, but when that program delivers positive results, leverage it. Build on what you've learned as you scale, and repeat the program in other relevant marketing areas.

Build partnerships within your company. Marketing analytics initiatives should logically intersect and integrate with your IT and corporate strategy.

Secure executive buy-in. As with any program or initiative, the effort you put into securing executive sponsorship for your marketing analytics program helps turn your plans into successful execution and delivery.

India marketing scenario

India marketing scenario

Currently in India, the national economy and marketplace are undergoing rapid changes and transformation. A large number of reasons could be attributed to these changes. One of the reasons in these changes in the Indian Market Scenario is Globalization, and the subsequent and resulting explosive growth of global trade and the international competition.

The other reason for these changes in the Indian Market Scenario is the technological change. This is an important factor because the technological competitiveness is making, not only the Indian market, but also the global marketplace cutthroat.

In the Indian Marketing Scenario, the market success goes to those companies that are best matched to the current environmental imperatives. Those companies that can deliver what the people want and can delight the Indian customers are the market leaders.

Today the companies are operating in such a marketplace where survival of the fittest is the law. In order to win, the companies are coming out with various new and evolving strategies because the Indian market is also changing very fast. It is to capture the Indian market, that the Indian and the Multi National Companies are using all of their resources.

The Indian market is no longer a sellers market. The winner is the one who provides value for money. A large number of companies have huge idle capacities, as they have wrongly calculated the market size and installed huge capacities. This has further contributed to converting the Indian market into a buyers market.

The Indian Marketing Scenario is one of the biggest consumer markets and that is precisely the reason why India has attracted several MNC’s. These large Multi National Companies have realized that to succeed in the Indian market-place they need to hire Indian representative who are much more aware of the Indian economic, political, legal and social realities. In the Indian Marketing Scenario, it is the MADE FOR INDIA marketing strategies that work

Managing To Succeed :After more than a decade of growing his family's business, one entrepreneur copes with the collapsing economy.

Like many business owners, I've never operated in a bad economy. Since trading in my reporter's notebook in 1996 after a 10-year career with Business , I caught the lucky break of only operating during good economic times. Undoubtedly our family-run plastic packaging manufacturer benefited. Over the last 12 years, we've increased sales to more than $60 million, up from $18 million when I joined, which had been the company high-water mark since its founding by my father and three partners in 1963.

Looks like my luck has run out. Today, like almost every businessperson on the planet, I'm acquainting myself with a scary new reality: a collapsing economy. Deflation threatens to undermine our margins, thanks to the sudden collapse of petrochemical prices in the late fall. Plastic, a byproduct of natural gas, plunged, sticking us with overpriced inventory while customers demanded price cuts. Some of those same customers suddenly began to pay beyond terms. Just two years ago, our average customer paid us in 21 days. Today, that has stretched out to 30 days. One customer basically hasn't paid us in five months. And though we've been cozy with our bank for years, they recently tried to renegotiate our credit line. No wonder I'm drinking a glass of wine with dinner, a practice I cut out several years ago in a bid to trim my midsection.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm worrying unnecessarily. Our sales continue to increase, up 10 percent since our fiscal year began Sept. 1. The market for our product—packaging for the produce industry—has historically been recessionproof. "People have to eat, after all," my father likes to say. As if to confirm his wisdom, our backlog stands nearly 35 percent fatter this year compared to last, thanks in part to new products designed to keep produce fresher longer. Add to that the addiction many Americans have to the convenience of packaged salads, one of our strongest sectors, and I should be feeling pretty secure, even with the economic turbulence.

But it's hard to feel secure when even industry veterans say they've never seen anything like this recession. Take food consumption. It's falling for the first time in years, and the fresh-salad market isn't bucking the trend. Industry groups figure salad sales will either stagnate or decline this year, an unprecedented development in an industry used to double-digit growth. If my customers look like they're starting to suffer, I have to ask, how long until it hits us?

Obviously, the early-warning signs have already flashed. Forget how fast sales are growing. I'm increasingly worried about getting paid. Rather than merely glancing over the report that tracks how quickly customers are paying, as I would have prior to last summer, today I go through the report line by line, demanding explanations from our finance department for any invoice unpaid after 45 days. Our bookkeeper has responded by peppering delinquent accounts with calls—one customer recently threatened to fire us after paying an overdue invoice—but we can't take chances. In fact, late last year, we fired a customer who hadn't paid on time in months. When they finally did pay, we refused further orders. Not worth the risk.

Deflationary pressures have spooked me, as well. Talk about whiplash: last summer, the price of raw plastic hit an all-time high. Then prices collapsed. One major tracking service says plastic prices fell 30 percent in November alone. Hearing news like this, our customers, under pressure to cut prices themselves by the major grocery chains, began demanding we fork over the savings. Only we were saddled with a large inventory built as a hedge against hurricane-related supply disruptions. So any cost cuts actually just came out of our margins. Now, rivals who've fallen into financial trouble are compounding matters by cutting prices further.

The Boom From The Bottom : Isolated from world trends, India's aspiring middle will help it grow through the credit storm.

Though it may not look it on the ground at times, India is one of the few bright spots in a global economy with decidedly dim prospects in 2009. It is forecast to grow at 5 to 6 percent this year—which is more than it averaged in the 1990s. Yes, its stock market has crashed, unemployment is spiking, swaths of the real-estate market have more than a passing resemblance to Miami Beach and it now turns out that Satyam Computer Services—one of the country's top five IT companies—has been cooking its books. But a one-off incident of fraud in the flagship IT sector won't knock the country off the rails. India boasts an unlikely growth driver all its own: legions of poor whose incomes have risen just enough in recent years to create powerful demands for basic goods and services.

The rise of India's aspiring middle—a group that lives above the poverty line but hasn't yet attained true membership in modern consumer society—is hardly a new story. But what's surprising is the resilience of this cohort, and the extent to which it has counterbalanced the global credit crisis and the slump in the global export economy of which India is a key player. In part, this is a consequence of New Delhi's past failures; policymakers were never able to make India the export powerhouse that China has become over the past three decades, so now they don't rely nearly as heavily on growth driven by demand from foreign markets.

The idea that Indian backwardness is a plus may sound absurd. But it is always easier to grow from a poor base, so the fact that India is not yet a major economy is an advantage in a downturn. Such a large population subsisting at so low an economic base is a powerful economic driver if it can be mobilized—and for India this group is proving resilient to the prevailing headwinds in the global economy. "It's kind of a self-sustaining process," says Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poor's. "There's a huge underpenetration of most commodities and services, and you have enough people at the bottom experiencing enough of an increase in income to sustain growth."

So even as middle-class consumption wanes in India—signified by a sharp drop in auto sales, airline travel and fine-restaurant dining since mid-2008—demand for basic goods and services remains strong thanks to aspiring consumers, many still tied to the farms, who spend their rupees on essentials like soap, medicine and the shoes and clothing that they wear to work. As Gokarn puts it: "If you go back to the economic textbooks, they will tell you that the poorer you are, the stronger your propensity to consume."

The contrast with China, Asia's other economic giant, is stark. Domestic demand makes up three quarters of the Indian economy, compared with less than half for China, which is "why, relative to East Asian economies, India is somewhat insulated from the global trade slowdown," says Shankar Acharya, a former chief economic adviser to the government. Another Indian mainstay—agricultural growth—should remain steady this year, and the services sector, which now accounts for about 55 percent of India's GDP, is expected to be "more resilient" than manufacturing, says Acharya. And despite the financial crisis, the nation's IT sector managed to grow some 20 percent in 2008, according to India's National Association of Software and Services Companies, and IT firms have already extended 100,000 job offers for 2009. "China has been highly focused on the export market, while Indian businesses have been highly focused on the domestic market, and their exports have been incidental," says Saumitra Chaudhuri, chief economist at ICRA, an Indian creditratings agency affiliated with Moody's. That makes India, more than China, a master of its own destiny.

The biggest risk to India in 2009 at this point may not be the global economy but domestic politics. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance will see its term expire in May, and India's election rules mean that he can no longer enact any significant policies—a measure adopted to prevent incumbents from stacking the deck with populist sops. That means as much as five months of paralysis, precisely when speedy, creative action is the order of the day. Moreover, though the nemesis of Singh's Congress party—the Bharatiya Janata Party—mostly favors similar policies, a change in government would likely result in some further slowing of infrastructure projects that are already running behind schedule. And elections in India can be tricky. In the last one, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance lost despite rapid economic growth, because poor voters rejected the BJP's campaign claims of an "India Shining."

With the light bulb flickering, Singh's Congress may face an even bigger challenge winning them over. The poor don't care how much faster than other nations India is growing, only whether their lives are better than they were five years ago.