Celebrating Social Business Week by Connecting CMOs and CIOs

I was recently asked for my 2012 digital predictions and here is what I shared:

We will start seeing marketing and IT come together on key initiatives to drive significantly higher ROI of both marketing and IT budgets. Marketing and IT will go into business together and the successful alliances in the market will financially enable more strategic risk taking by CMOs. Both roles will collectively wield more influence in the boardroom, than individually and if played well, they will become the left and right hands of the CEO and define the long term business strategy for the company. CMOs will become the voice of the customer; will come out looking like heroes; because IT initiatives with strong business alignment and sponsorship are inevitably successful!

Celebrating Smarter Commerce Week with 13 Must Read Tips

Last week I had the pleasure of moderating a CMO panel in Bangalore with two distinguished CMOs, K Ramakrishnan (Ramki), President, Marketing, Café Coffee Day and Ravi Prakash Vora, Vice President, Marketing, Flipkart.com. With Amazon and Starbucks both entering the Indian market this year, its interesting times for these Indian retailers and e-tailers. I also attended the Internet Retail Expo where we heard from industry experts like Mahesh Murthy and Ambareesh Murthy (no relation to each other) who concurred that successful commerce ventures will focus on delighting customers, not ones that play the valuation game.

Agreed. We all know Indian customers have always been demanding (as they should be, after all, they were the ones that fueled the India Inc. growth story thanks to their relentless pursuit for the best deal). But with income levels going up and more options available, the desi customer not only wants the best deal, but wants it delivered to their home, when they want it, with a unquestioning return policy, where you happily take anything back, just because they don't like it. Oh, and do make sure you molly coddle them with some discount vouchers for their next purchase. Seriously? Oh wait, that's me too! 100% satisfaction demanded, every time.

So what are poor retailers to do? Flashy stores or websites, more advertising, cute and likeable facebook campaigns, exclusive sounding loyalty programs, killer sales? I think we have seen it all. And these retailers are folding up, or holding on with their bare nails.

There is actually a correct and responsible way to conduct commerce. We call it Smarter Commerce - a strategic approach that places the customer at the center of your business operations. And having done this for years and helped retailers (along with banks, telcos and others) become smart and therefore successful, we have a few tips. I chatted with our Smarter Commerce expert, Sridhar Hari (@commerce2dot0) and asked him to educate me so that I could share these with you:

If you are a pure play online retailer, here is what you need to care about:

1. Highly effective marketing campaigns that leverage deep consumer insights from both offline and online behavior.
2. Provide information needed to make the decision making process easier for consumers. In other words, empower them thru product comparisons, social media integration, virtually unlimited catalog etc.
3. Highly targeted cross sell and upsell that are highly personalized and enhance customer loyalty but more importantly, protect margins
4. Effective fulfillment of orders through supplier and vendor collaboration, having a global inventory visibility and order orchestration to deliver on time every time
5. Top notch services such as payment,s returns, exchanges and other value added services like installation or design services that are handled on a common integrated platform

In a nutshell, you acquire customers at the lowest cost. And if haven't thought through these 5 things, don't bother chasing new customers, let alone your next round of funding.

If you are a brick and mortar retailer, you need to care about ALL of the above PLUS:

1. Cross channel strategies to drive traffic into store
2. Buy online pickup in store or return in store
3. Providing a website like rich information at the point of sale

So some advise for the new kids on the block who are giddy about this space. Before you get caught up in the frenzy and ruin it for everyone else, here are some collective wisdom from some really smart people who have been there and done that:

1. Crawl, walk and run
2. Start with a solid foundation that can support multiple business models and can scale
3. Get the basics right and then build features over a period of time
4. Know your customer and focus on what's important for them to transact online
5. Fulfillment of goods in a timely manner is key. Backend processes such as warehousing, inventory management, logistics, sourcing are critical

A few things that you can do next:

• If you have questions about Smarter Commerce, leave a comment or tweet me and I'll hook you up!
• We have some Smarter Commerce experts visiting Mumbai February 9th evening and as my blog reader, you are invited! But you must register before you show up.
• Check out this video tutorial on Smarter Commerce
• You can also follow Smarter Commerce on Twitter

Get Smart and Good Luck!

MNP is Cute but not Smart...

Like many of you, I have been following the IPL for several weeks now and given how fast paced the matches are, you aren't always sure who will be declared Man of the Match or, in American Lingo, Most Valuable Player (MVP). Just this morning they talked about the "best buys" of the IPL and it's great to see that ROI is coming into play in cricket, not just crazy money being spent through auctions. ROI has been a critical measurement for marketing initiatives too, but there is still a long way to go on how we or whether we measure the success of new product launches and campaigns.
Let's take the mobile number portability (MNP) campaigns that the telcos spent billions on earlier this year. I have to say, as an observer of the campaign, I was pretty excited about the promise of MNP. In fact, when my mom was looking to replace an old phone, I suggested she move to a new service at the same time because, according to all the advertising, it was as simple as an SMS. I completed the requisite paperwork and paid the fees to someone who even came to my office and gave me a receipt. I was promised that my new SIM card would be delivered in days. It has been over 2 months now and there is no SIM card in sight. I have visited 3 different stores and spoken to about 4 customer service reps - some can see my request in the system other can't, some say they have put in a new request and give me a commitment on a delivery date -which comes and goes. And the saga goes on...In the meantime, I bought a brand new connection from a 3rd provider. Of course I have no hope to recoup the fees I paid either.
I've given up on promise on MNP - but that is not the reason why I tell this story. It's more from the perspective that its easy for companies to spend billions on "cute marketing" isn't "smarter commerce" what is more important? I think most people would agree that we need to be able to FULFILL on the demand we create through campaigns quickly and effectively to result in revenue and ROI from the campaigns.

But fulfillment is like a "best buy" of the IPL - few seem to think of it as a strategic asset until people start complaining! Its time to give fulfillment it due and its rightful place as "MVP", especially for MNP! How would you do it?