10 reasons why IIM Fees hike is justified!

Recently there has been a lot of discussion and rants on the IIM Fee hike. I strongly feel its a welcome step and IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, IIM Kolkatta and for that matter IITs fees hike is justified. Here are 10 reasons why this fee hike is justified?

1. Best Academicians cultivate Best Businessmen
   The best professors across the continent can be brought in and retained with better salaries and they will contribute in creation of best businessmen of future!
2. Infrastructure expansion: Why do you pay higher for your home?
   Better infrastructre, more facilities, more research and more credible and authentic content can be created for the benefit of society. The inflation has increased, the prices across the board in Bangalore have risen, why on earth do you pay higher prices to buy Home? If you can expect higher salaries then this hike is definitely justified.
3. Fewer Subsidies means more capital for primary and secondary education.
   Govt. can spend on subsidising PG education and help these institutions become autonomous. More fee will bring in more funds and this can help the government inturn to focus more on primary and secondary education.
4. Education loans are more freely available.
   Today more banks are willing to give education loans, also government has urged to reduce interest rates for education loans. So it's much easier to get loans and pursue education.
5. Scholarships for needy.
   The director of IIM B Pankaj Chandra has also announced the increase in the shcolarship package to 8 Cr to help the needy pay their fees. So it will be much easier for people.
6. Brand building for IIMs – Expansion to Newer Geos + More revenue.
   The Brand IIM can be taken to the other parts of world now and you can see more IIMs opening in other parts of world expanding the IIMs realm and brand and bringing more revenue.
7. Competing in the International arena.
   It will also help in branding exercise of IIMs to take them into multicultureal multi geographic arena. You can see IIMs focussing on expanding it's presence on the international scenario.
8. Building India Inc education brand as most premium.
   Premium brands need advertising and branding not just in a local region but also in international scene. SO obviously increased funds will help in brand building exercises and taking IIMs brand to the next level in turn making BRAND INDIA INC. visible worldwide!
9. New programs can be started and better learned society.
   Newer niche programs can be started, more industry can be supported with better and newer skills. More industry partnerships can be built! This will lead to a better, knowledgable, learned society that India has.
10. More industry interaction can be brought in.
    More industry programs means more industrial revenue. Also more industries will participate in funding and expanding IIM brand to various parts of India and aborad.

This increase in fee has a overall positive effect. Student and aspirants have to be educated more by IIMs and similar society associations on why it's important and how it will be beneficial in turn for them only!

Ode to Prof Ranjan Das - IIM C | The Strategy Academy

Ode to Prof Ranjan Das The Strategy Academy

I just finished my last blog entry and saw this Google Adsense ad of The Strategy Academy on my blog. And the first thing I remembered was Prof. Ranjan Das.

Anybody who would have studied at IIM Calcutta couldn’t have missed one personality on campus: Prof. Ranjan Das.

The One man who is passionate about education and strategy, and who with his charismatic leadership has helped so many leaders worldwide to excel in there careers. He has finally fulfilled his dream of entrepreneurship and started his own college, The Strategy Academy at this age.

I remember the time when he last spoke to me addressing the class and mentioning about his new venture of the Strategy Academy where he wanted to show the world a new path of why Strategy is important and how it is relevant in today’s business. He categorically said, you need to identify and challenge the status quo and finally move ahead to the desired state.

This is a perfect example of how leaders stand by there words and how Prof. Das has converted his vision into reality.

Hats off to you sir!

What’s The Future - Series | Part - 2 - PUSH/PULL Marketing is DEAD ? And 4Rs of Marketing

PUSH Marketing is DEAD(?) PULL marketing is Dead too(?)-4Rs of Marketing

According to a recent survey on advertising messages through various media, on an average working day where you travel in the morning to your office, spend a full day in office to the time you go back and sleep after watching your favorite TV channel in the evening, you are most probably going to be targeted by approx. 3000 marketing messages.

Knowingly or not, you get subjected to these messages in forms of Billboards, Radio Jingles, TV ads, Online banners, Emails, etc. These can be friendly, unfriendly, solicited, unsolicited, relevant, irrelevant messages which you would have to go through. Almost all the marketing messages come through well crafted marketing campaigns where a huge amount of time and money is spent.

However, how many of them have the “Engagement Value” perceived for the targeted audience?

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit's survey report, of sales and marketing executives worldwide, more than 80% of the executives believe that they lost the sales because they couldn’t engage their prospect enough to get them interested to buy. While it is challenging to engage prospects in the communication process, marketers are using newer techniques on their websites like, videos and rich media to engage their audience. However, the report says 47% of respondents suggested that it’s really difficult to measure how the engagement mechanism affected the purchase behavior, among the gamut of activities in the engagement process.

If it was 1950, it would have been easier to get someone to endorse the product and broadcast the message to everyone. This PUSHing the message technique worked, when people had no clue about their personal choice of “media” and their choice of “time” to access that media. However, this pushing the message across has created the biggest challenge for the marketers of this age where we have to become over cautious to choose:
- 4 Ws of marketing

• what to market?
• whom to market?
• when to market?
• which media to market through?
not only these Ws, but also how often to market.

In today’s world, consumers are essentially the sellers too. People turn to existing customers to influence their own buying behavior. So pushing the message out is completely DEAD. Is that a conclusion? PUSH marketing is really Dead? YES and NO.
YES – You can’t expect the sales through pushing the message out.
NO – You can still expect the sales through pushing the right message out.
NO contd.: - Right message defined – So, now we know, that people are buying based on other consumer’s opinions, so let’s push the other people’s opinion crafted in the manner we want, to the consumer and help them make that buying decision. The right message is the message which has the engagement value, an existing customer’s voice and a perceived need, buying urgency and a definitive benefit in it.

Is pull marketing Dead? - Yes and NO
Yes - When everyone tries to pull the customers/prospects, then you don't know if your pull worked or not.
No - Definitely the pull marketing is the future however, customer centric behviour with the following 4 Rs approach definitely can be a great marketing strategy of Future!

A complete Paradigm Shift
4Ps --> 4 Rs
Dictating --> Listening
Researching --> Understanding through analytics
Push --> Community opinion building
Broadcasting --> Interest based Targeting

Recently I saw a presentation from Matt Langie on 4 Rs of marketing. The basic idea is as follows:

4Ps of marketing – Product, Price, Place, Promotion used to take prospects from the buying cycle moving from Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. However, in today’s world of marketing, consumers are interested in listening to the crowds or their closed group while making a buying decision.

This has lead to the New approach of consumer centric marketing or 4 Rs of marketing - Reveal, Reward, Respect and Retain

1. Reveal – Understand your prospects and customers recent traits and past history to come up with a planned, targeted, focused, need based marketing effort.

Various tactics: -
• Monitoring unique visitors
• Online engagements
o Voting
o Surveys
o Referrals
• Referrals from other websites

2. Reward – While you gather valuable information from customers it’s essential to reward them and keep them engaged to buy more, profess more and keep them delighted.
Various Tactics: -
• Reward the customers to engage them more into your brand.
• Ask for their opinions
• Appreciate them on your online forums
• Give out some special coupons
• Give out something which they are definitely looking out for. etc.

3. Respect – A very well crafted, targeted, engaging campaign over time will build respect for your Brand. This gained respect with customers is something which will help you engage with other prospects.

While you are listening to the consumers, you are hearing what they would like just apart from your products and what values do they stand for. This is something which you can leverage to further engage with audience (customers and prospects) to further enhance the adoption.

4. Retain – Stimulate interactions with products through fun and imaginative extensions of the concept.

The basic idea is keep’em engaged.

HALT.
This brings me to a basic communication concept of networking, keeping the conversation on-going and reaping the benefits over and over again. Will talk more about it later.
CONTINUE…

A 360˚ view of the visitors or interactions:
-Listen – Survey, Onsite search, Website
-Learn – Offline Data + CRM
-Act – Email, Direct mail, Behavioral targeting

Question: How customer profiling with this 360 degree approach helps?
Answer: You can build a profile of a customer with demographics; likings etc and leverage that data for targeted marketing.

Tying it back to the Idea - Give the right information to the right audience at the right time, the way the want it and how often they want it.

To be concluded...

Marketing Communication Primer – What’s The Future? - Series

Marketing Communication – What’s The Future? - Series

Today I am starting this new series on my blog on Marketing communication, What’s the future?

Premise:-

With the B-Schools still teaching 4 Ps of marketing to MBA students while preparing them for businesses, the students face a stark reality when they sit for Interviews. They realize within 2 minutes of interview, that this is not what the companies are looking for.

Wow! “I worked my ass off to learn so much about marketing in my B-School and you are telling me this is not what you are looking for?” – This could be a reality check question running in mind of any B-School passout. Well the cruel answer is “YES”.

Do we blame the education for this mismatch? “No”. Then what do we do?

This series of Marketing Communication primer is going to help all fresh graduates, Marcom professionals, Strategic Marketing Professionals and Hiring Managers to see the difference in various levels of marketing, as well as, what’s the NEXT big things in Marketing to look for.

Causes for aberration:-

The prime reason why people get confused or are not well prepared for what they are looking for in their role in marketing is the lack of understanding about the two levels of Marketing.

Two Broad Levels of Marketing:
1. Strategic Marketing attempts to determine how an organization competes against its competitors in a market place. In particular, it aims at generating a competitive advantage relative to its competitors.
2. Operational Marketing executes marketing functions to attract and keep customers and to maximize the value derived for them, as well as to satisfy the customer with prompt services and meeting the customer expectations. Operational Marketing includes the determination of the marketing mix.

It’s very important for people to understand that Strategic Marketing is a function of a Sr. Marketing Professionals where the person in charge has very well mastered the Operational Marketing.

Demystifying Strategic Marketing:- In simple words it’s the Visioning Strategy linked with the execution planning. This would require the below mentioned functions:
a) Understanding Business Objectives / Goals
-Annual X % increase in revenue of a product line
-Retention and growth of Y accounts in Z geography.
-A % market share for this service / product.
-C no of competitor accounts to be captured etc.
These are some examples of wider business goals that a CEO would have in his mind.

b) Converting these business goals into plans like:- Annual / Bi-Annual / 5 Yearly, is what a senior Marketing Professional (marketing and sales director/VP/SVP) would look at and come up with a strategic plan to support the larger business objectives.
-Identifying milestones in the plan.
-Broad annual metrics to be achieved based on sales data from past or industry averages etc. these are few examples to illustrate.

c) Execution Strategy: - This is is one of the most neglected portion from a strategic perspective. Ram Charan, Author of book, Execution, stresses on this point in his book and calls execution as an essential part of strategy.
Without a clearly defined execution strategy all this is just a Bird’s Eye-view approach to say things. A very clearly defined execution strategy and plan is something which can really make these things happen. The execution strategy might look at various activities which can support the annual plans in the previous step.
-Resources required – Hiring/Training etc
-Commission and incentive buffers / Employee benefits
-Media strategy
-IT Infrastructure
-Strategic Alliances and partnerships etc.
-Tactical challenges and solutions

d) Handover of Plans:- Communicating the plans company wide to ensure effective information dissemination etc. Continuous follow-up etc.

Demystifying Operational Marketing:- In simple words, leveraging various channels / media, to generate demand and achieve organizational objectives.

4 Ps of marketing:
In popular usage, "marketing" is the promotion of products, especially advertising and branding. However, in professional usage the term has a wider meaning which recognizes that marketing is customer centered. Products are often developed to meet the desires of groups of customers or even, in some cases, for specific customers. E. Jerome McCarthy divided marketing into four general sets of activities. His typology has become so universally recognized that his four activity sets, the Four Ps, have passed into the language.
The four Ps are:
-Product: The product aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual goods or services, and how it relates to the end-user's needs and wants. The scope of a product generally includes supporting elements such as warranties, guarantees, and support.
-Pricing: This refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including discounts. The price need not be monetary - it can simply be what is exchanged for the product or services, e.g. time, energy, psychology or attention.
-Promotion: This includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, and refers to the various methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.
-Placement or distribution refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point of sale placement or retailing. This fourth P has also sometimes been called Place, referring to the channel by which a product or services is sold (e.g. online vs. retail), which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young adults, families, business people), etc.
I am not going to focus on these 4 Ps of marketing, however, I would keep them in mind as well as showcase the Future of Marketing Communication to all.

Closing Remarks:- In my coming postings: while these 4 Ps might be the basis for operational marketing I will introduce the
-5th P of Marketing.
-4 “A”s of Marketing
-Web and Internet as Business Models of Future marketing
-Newer and Exciting Channels and Media of marketing
-New strategies for Business Development
-Strategic Advances in positioning

And more…Please share your comments to help me improve my postings.

Organization Citizenship Behavior

Organization Citizenship Behavior

“No employee in any organization is indispensable, every employee’s efforts to become indispensable brings foreword the citizenship”

In today’s competitive world we see the biggest challenge in front of a Leader would be managing and motivating people in an organization. People are one of the most important drivers of the business and no business leader can ignore this fact. People, who can be technology enablers, technology managers, sales enablers or sales managers, everyone needs to be motivated.

Another challenge faced by Leaders is to align the entire company to the business objectives. This is a major challenge posed to any Managing Director; HR Manager; Delivery Managers; as failing to align people in your company would essentially mean a Hay-wire execution which results in inability to meet business targets. This challenge of People Motivation and Alignment leads us to find out innovative techniques to achieve the same.

In my article below I run you through an innovative leadership technique which, out of my experience and interaction with business leaders from Fortune 100 companies has shown success.

Organization Citizenship Behavior or OCB is one human behavioral technique under research for improvisation in many institutions worldwide as well as tried and tested approach in many Fortune 500 companies. OCB is one way in which there is a direct involvement of the business leaders with the people in his company. There is an open communication channel and there is a clear understanding in every individual of their role in the organization.

You might wonder how come Citizenship is being talked about in respect of an organization. Essentially citizenship is considered in terms of States or Countries; however, there is a striking similarity between a state and an organization. Driven by a Leadership with values and distinct goals in mind, any state, works for the development of its citizens. In addition to providing rights to the citizen, it can motivate its citizens to contribute to there duties. Similarly, in an organization, driven by a strong leadership and distinct values one can help every individual to understand his or her roles importance in the organization and by fulfilling the basic rights of freedom of work it can drive them to go beyond there call of duty by making them the Citizens of the company.

What this leads to is, creation of a “Citizen” and not an “Employee”. Having a lot of employees in the company is not a great thing and not enough, what matters is how many citizens have been grown in the organization.

It’s a proven fact that any Citizen of the Company would perform much better than any employee. Every citizen would take decisions which are aligned with the company’s business objectives. The strategy and execution would work hand-in-hand delivering higher productivity, and increased business revenues.

I would categorize Citizenship behavior in an organization in two parts:
Self inculcated citizenship behavior
External Driven Citizenship behavior

Self inculcated citizenship behavior:

Such behavioral occurrences are due to an Individuals’ high understanding of the organization and personal belief in ideologies of the organization. The urge to get benefited on a long term basis for any individual drives them to co-operate as well as contribute. Thus drives a citizenship amongst themselves and peers to achieve long term goals and bring in long term discipline.

This behavior is not comfortably supported by an organization until the individual makes an extra effort to educate and influence others. The individual needs to communicate the same within a smaller group and hence find ambassadors to promote the same.

As an organization, starts seeing the benefits of this behavior, starts encouraging the cause and hence motivates the individual and the organization on a whole. This is the time when the individuals taking these initiatives creates a higher value for themselves in the organization and become indispensable.

External Driven Citizenship behavior:

In this kind of behavior, individuals are motivated by the management to inculcate an additional responsibility where they create enough awareness and need, to become a citizen of the organization rather than just being an employee.

Creating this culture in an organization requires additional efforts to educate all employees, to motivate them further and align them further with the company goals and objectives. To find ambassadors to promote this behavior, a strong sense of understanding is required along with a crafted communication message.

Organizations which are able to achieve such feats really have individuals working with them who are very passionate and committed. Such initiatives are then passed on from management to the employees and the employees finally become the ambassadors of the cause. This creates a lot of value for the managers. The ambassadors who practically implement such initiatives again draw enough attention from management and get recognition for the same.

Various ways which can lead to having lots of citizens in an organization can be as follows:


Leader Spending Time with Citizens
v Every Leader should spend enough time with its citizens to communicate the business goals of the organization.
v Spending time helps people understand, what is expected out of every individual, to achieve the business goals
v It gives freedom to the individuals to take creative decisions keeping in mind the business goals
v It again helps them to verify the decisions and check if they align well with the objectives
v As well as the leader should explain the importance of Contribution to the company as the next step to Learning

Citizens spending time to see the Bigger Picture
v Every citizen having understood there role in the organization should try to spend time in coming out of that frame and should try to understand the bigger picture.
v Post understanding the basic elements of there role the citizen should try to look at the importance of there role and how to improve and enhance productivity.
v Learning is a life long process, to emerge as a successful citizen there should be a focus on contributing to the company.

As an employee in an organization try to think
Am I Indispensable in this company?
If your answer is Yes try to do things which moves you closer to become a Citizen and
if your answer is No, you need to learn a lot more!