2023 & thereafter – Expectations for a better world than today

2022 has been a heart breaking year for many who are grieved and displaced due to the ongoing war. It has also been a year of remarkable turn around for many coming out of Covid impact.

Indian economy, in particular, has bounced back with a renewed optimism. But the effect of war and the general downtrend in economies of other leading nations is a big worry.

Social unrest is the biggest worry of all and it gives credence to the fact that wealth is not evenly distributed with rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. How do we set right this imbalance? You need not be a communist state to do it but the leaders of business, politicians and the governments must make all earnest efforts to correct it.

Hope in 2023 ( not withstanding a second Covid like scare) and the years after, we will work towards setting right the balance of power, inequality in economies and living conditions and most importantly prevailing social togetherness.

  • Greedy Politicians with their role of middle men take the sizeable chunk of people welfare fund that help them to buy votes. This breed of people have not changed in a democratic set-up like India and they roam around scot free with the courts and government agencies unable to penalise them.
  • Corporate leaders take home a huge pay that is many times the median salary of employees who are also a part of growth and profitability of the business. A leader should lay himself off first before doing that act to employees this saving many jobs.
  • Governments go about appeasing sections of society in the name of social
    justice and squander public money. Job generation is forgotten and dole-outs take centre stage. Good governance has become a rarity and it is difficult to differentiate between politicians and law makers.

Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Fear Factor – Impact on an individual’s development

From our early days of childhood, most of us have developed a sort of fear about people, events, animals and above all their own self. Can I do it? Am I good at it? I can’t do better than him.

Is it a good attribute for our personality development ?

Psychologists say fear is an underlying phenomenon that had developed in our mind over the years and is the one that holds us back from giving our best. We feared so many things in our early life – school, mathematics, darkness, Sea, mountain top etc but as we grew older they disappeared. During our teenage days, we feared the stage but the more we stepped on it, the more comfortable we became. We don’t get tested if we remain in our comfort zone for long.

We have seen people in TV game shows attempting some impossible feats and only those who had overcome fear succeed in them. It gets you a sort mental attitude that is tough to break in any adverse situation.

How do we master fear by understanding it better and turning it to get us success ?

Fear can be a challenger when we don’t get bogged down and confront it with a definite purpose and focus.

Fear acts as a motivator that lets us stay with our objective and succeed. Without fear, complacency sets in and we let our guards down to fail.

Fear kindles the curiosity in things that we dare to do or probe. A curious mind looks for the next steps to reach our goal of knowing something new and exciting. We must be curious to learn what we are afraid of and work towards negating that state of mind.

Fear is a guide too, because our purpose is over shadowed by the absence of efforts and ways to work towards a solution. Fear alerts us to be cautious and bold in our decision making whenever they are needed.

Fear lets us discover our wisdom that propels us to do successful actions. It dispels the emotional feelings attached to a proposed action and objectively evaluate the consequences of that action. Our mind thinks rationally once our wisdom takes over.

Fear lets us to discover the greatness in us other than weak spots and it is a catalyst to infuse a positive mind set to use our greatness to achieve success.

Our personality is what we consciously define because nobody else has that personality and to define it for us. It is unique to us that we shape it well. Fear, and not overconfidence, helps to define our personality to take risks, be authentic, be competitive, be rational and successful.

Remember, some of us raised our hands in our class to answer a question, however stupid the answer was. That questioning mind helped to shed our inhibitions and seek answers in our lives.

Transformations – In Individual, Organisation, Economy and Country

What is a Transformation?

Today Transformation is the buzz word but we fail to notice it has always been happening. Every value creation of a product or service is a transformation. Every individual gets transformed over the years. Every economy is is grown tapping into the energies and growths of individuals and business organisations. Every country makes attempt to develop into a formidable one with the strengths of its people and economy.

An economic transformation always involves individuals’ transformations, product transformations, service transformations and value creations that are experienced and felt by the people. It is just that today it happens in a digital era and we call them Digital
Transformations.

A self transformation adds value to an individual like learning a new art or sport, learning a new area of business or changing our attitude towards people and life. We don’t grow without transformations. Timid, introvert individuals turn most eloquent and participative. Aggressive, self centred persons turn most understanding and pragmatic.

Likewise businesses don’t grow if they don’t want to improve and transform by creating values to their businesses and its partners – employees, vendors, customers and other-stake holders. Everybody gets the value in an inclusive growth model.

Successful organisations have tremendously grown over the years and if you look at their growth records it is the values that they had created over the years that are well accepted and appreciated by their customers. Very rarely single product companies have survived in a competitive world and if they did, it is the variations on their product mix that have helped them to keep pace with the growth and volumes.

In this journey of transformation,

– an individual takes help of an agent in parents, elders and mentors.

– Organisations employ leaders to help them create values.

– Governments gets the help of both people and businesses to deliver a good governance and to improve the economy of country and its people.

Transformation is a rolling cycle wheel to keep us always moving forward. The moment it stops we are drowned by sorrows, miseries and poverty. We have seen how some countries in this last few decades have reached this state that got them into deep debts by not creating economic values. Leadership is an important tool in the time of crisis and economic turmoil. Let us identify and strengthen those leaders toward a path of progress and prosperity.

PTO – Peeling The Onion

In a figurative speech or in a negative connotation, we have heard “peeling the onion” means dwelling deeper and deeper into a cause or an event or exposing the true characteristics of a person. It is like the ‘turning a page over’ or simply PTO that we are used to while reading a book or novel. We are keen to know what remains at the end. This is the general nature of human mind to be curious all the time to know what are the next steps and how do we move forward.

An onion gets rotten if we allow it too long in the basket. We peel it layer by layer until it is good to be cut and used. Sometime it is so rotten that we cannot even use it for any good. Humans wear multiple layers of skin as we grow old, but our basic characteristics that were formed at our cognitive years of learning and growing do not change entirely during our life time.

The skin of innocence that we wore in childhood gets shed as move into adolescence to get into another skin. This is when we form our strong likes and dislikes in worldly matters. Years pass-by, we become more matured ( rather we think we are) and start pursuing our beliefs and disbeliefs. A strong character emerges here that eventually shape up who we are and why we feel we are less important or more important than others. Just like an onion turning rotten is a slow process, these strong beliefs and disbeliefs turn dormant in our inner self and reflect our true character. We expose this character to others in our words and actions and those in turn invite positive and negative actions from them. Conflicts in views and actions often the result of conflicts in characters of people involved. Wars are fought by leaders and not by people, for the right or wrong cause. Even when people do not want a war, the society or the political set-up has given their leaders that liberty to wage a war against a cause they only believe right. This belief is precisely a reflection of the true character of leaders. Similarly, societies get into turmoils due to the action and inaction of its leaders and what we see today around us is hatred towards one another or group or a religion. We have seen many of those long standing friendships or partnerships turn sour when friends or partners start seeing the rotten left over in a peeled onion. Divorces happen, siblings disagree, neighbours quarrel, team members fight with each other, political parties accuse each other and all these because the rotten stuff is exposed.

In our ancient way of education, the relationship between a Student and a Teacher was that of a knowledge giver and a knowledge seeker. A knowledge that was imparted in such a way was never aimed at creating hatred and intolerance but at creating harmony and to live a righteous path. A teacher of those times, peeled the skin of the student layer by layer to make him feel what was good for him and why it was so.

The education system that is practiced today has mostly failed in the above aspect of a student asking what and why. It is just preparing him to memorise what is taught to him by the teacher and pass an examination. There is no attempt to make a student intuitive or creative to deploy his mental, emotional, Psychic and spiritual thinking abilities. Let us bring those elements in our methods of teaching.

Artificial Intelligence – Is it something new?

AI has been there for many years and it is not something new today. Every automation effort in the last few decades was the result of AI, whether it was XL Spreadsheet formulae or the auto spell correction in MS Word or MS Project scheduling. Robots and Robotic machines are classic examples of AI but let us remember they all came out of human intelligence which is much superior to AI. The stock markets are driven by data and the algorithms have taken over the decision making patterns to make you a pauper or a billionaire. Data analysis and interpretation form the fundamental logic behind these innovations and it is still continuing in more incredible manner. In short, AI is all around with us, almost invisibly. From the applications we use for work to the devices we carry with us to how we use social media, AI is working hard to make all of our lives better.

Dicing and slicing of data is the core component of an organisation’s strategy in every industry vertical. Health care, Geology, Space, Energy and Environmental related studies are so vital to the survival of humans on the earth and more research in these areas with the help of AI/ML is of paramount importance. We are obligated to solve more complex human related problems than increasing the bottom line of a balance sheet. Global spending in these studies should be exponentially more than what we spend on Arms and weapons. Luxury should never be our aim to expand AI capability. Our lives are precious than creation of wealth. Human race will always survive with its boundary-less intelligence and accumulation of wealth for our next generations should never be a priority. Our mind is not to be occupied with a thought of how much portion I will get in a 4 quarter pizza or 8 piece pizza to determine the size of the pizza to order.

AI will surely be a mind boggling area of capability in the coming years and it will assume ascendency of unimaginable scale to create innovations and support decision making so much so that we would feel it took over our natural intelligence. The neural networks in our brain are being replicated with AI programs that it will be hard to differentiate between human thinking and machine thinking.

Crisis Marketing

No CEO or a Marketing director would want to experience a situation when their business gets into a deep trouble due to mounting customer complaints, product failures, legal issues or safety concerns. It is a do or die situation for them to resurrect the image of the brand or product and to resort to averting a major disaster that would question the very survival of the business.

Crisis Marketing is all about what a CEO should do before a crisis, during the crisis and after the crisis. Many businesses do not plan for such an event ( actually there is no need for a plan) but the marketing experts always advocate why averting a crisis needs to be built-in their strategy and communications to customers or stake holders. The crisis could happen in any phase of the business – start-up, growth or stabilisation.

Before a crisis

In the first place, It is the responsibility of every leader of the company to know all about their company, products, the market and the competition through awareness and attitude research.

  • A product should be positioned to the customers not by tall claims that it is the best and the biggest but by establishing the value it could offer to its customers in terms of benefits of the product or service. The customers must realise what’s in it for them to buy that product or service. Advertising or personal communication need to convey the benefits.
  • Paying attention to customer queries/ complaints and timely answering them creates the confidence about the company, its people and the product. A dissatisfied customer has the potential to create a feeling that the company doesn’t care for its customers and that negative feeling gets spread across the market to reach many customers through word of mouth, product reviews or ratings. Customer service team should listen to the voices of the consuming market, internal staff, distributors, dealers, regulators and the trade journals or media that cover the industry.
  • The sales materials, brochures, reports and newspaper clippings about the product must be used well to communicate to the customers and to keep the product or the service offering always on the top of the minds of customers because those would certainly help in the event of a crisis.
  • A problem always comes up un-announced and it is the responsibility of customer facing team to smell it through customer interactions, feedback or random checks.
  • Public relations through publications of articles and sponsoring a high profile event – a sports,cultural or art festival and seminars increase the good will of the customer and the buying groups.
  • Building trust is of utmost importance and the rhetoric claims or ads should not exceed credibility.

During a crisis

A crisis has hit the company and how well it is mitigated to reduce the impact of its aftermath consequences helps to keep the product and the business alive.

  • A single spokes-person must front end the team to represent the company’s position and to issue updates. CEO or Marketing Director or the company’s Lawyer must refrain from doing this act. The messaging is important and no flamboyance is needed by that spokesperson to clarify the stand of the company.
  • As a primary rule of crisis management, get the company’s side of the story out first to the customers and stake holders before someone does it from the media or competition. In this way, the narrative of the story is set and the tone will amplify the openness and candour.
  • Keeping a statement or a hand-out ready rather than being extempore, helps to avert confrontation with the audience. “Off the records” statements have the danger of mis-quoting or distorting by the critics.
  • In a crisis, more than a product it is the image of the company or brand that is likely to get a beating and hence all the good-will from the industry peers or forums should be used to minimise the impact of the crisis. Brief statistical data about the positive information need to be offered.
  • Employees may turn out to be the epicenter of the crisis and hence it is important that they are made aware of what is happening and how the crisis needs to be addressed and confidence of the customers restored. The ability of the business to survive the crisis depends on the employees’ commitment and support. Keeping them in the know of things that led to the crisis and management’s effort in mitigating its fall-outs would help them to continue to be loyal to the company.

After the crisis

It is business- as-usual like it was ‘before the crisis’ with all the do’s getting repeated.

  • The company is in a better position after having learnt the root causes of the crisis and putting in place all the necessary steps to build a better product, to know more about the customers and their expectations.
  • Marketing communications and advertising campaigns should reflect what the company thinks of its customers and what the customers think of the company. Honesty in what you say and do pays in the long run and it is an effective ingredient for success.

Crisis marketing requires a positive attitude to succeed when things go wrong. Cover ups of mistakes gets the company deeper into the mess and it becomes impossible to recover. We have seen businesses that are banished from the market and they are classic examples of crisis management taking a back seat with leaders looking for causes that created the crisis rather than preparing them to handle it and succeed. In a challenging business environment, it is absolutely important that one must know how to foresee crises and avoid them. If it had happened once, it should not repeat again when the lessons were well learnt.

Reference: Crisis Marketing: When bad things happen to good companies by Joe Marconi.

Building a Brand

In a simple language, brand building is about communicating with the brand’s customers, prospects and the influencers. What is communicated with them and how it is done is the rest of branding exercise.

The internet is inundated with articles and papers on how to build and nurture a brand but an apt definition comes from the renowned marketing gurus of the world – It is a voyage of building a corporate soul and infectiously communicating it inside and outside the company to all your partners, so that your customers truly get what your brand promises.

A brand conveys an emotion, an identity, the benefits, a social message and the ability to make the audience imagine or get assured of THE PROMISE, the product or service that it represents. A brand manager or brand custodian’s sole objective is to keep the brand always in a recall mode of the audience, which is achieved by advertising about the brand’s products or services in magazines or newspapers or technical journals. It is also done through social events like sponsoring a musical concert or a sporting event. But the most important job of a Brand Manager is to ensure either the product or service that the brand represents is in no way offends the feelings of its audience in terms of usage or inference of a message that is not socially well appreciated or accepted.

A brand is considered a winner when two crucial moments of truth happen at the hands of its customer- firstly by selecting a brand among the many that offers similar products or services and secondly by using that product or service to verify the promise made by the brand about that product or service. If the promise is not fulfilled, the customer is dissatisfied and consequently the brand earns a bad name and it is a huge challenge for the marketing persons of the company to employ methods to restore its image as a performing brand. A consistently non-performing brand quickly vanishes from the market with low sales of its products or services.

In a highly globalised environment and in a hyper competitive market, a successful brand needs to constantly establish its status as a performing brand and the communications that go out from the organisation seek to re-affirm its promise and continue to keep the positive image in the minds of the customers. Brand names or logos alone do not sustain the position of the brand in the market place. It is how well the brand is oriented or the lack of its orientation tells you if the brand is a winner or not. Brands differentiate, reduce risk and complexity, and communicate the benefits and value a product or service can provide.

Both B2C and B2B companies need to build their brands for sustenance and longevity of business. It should never be taken as a sub-sect of marketing. A brand being an asset of the organisation, it is vital that the top leader conceives a holistic approach to building a brand and ensures a strategy towards executing that approach to win more customers. Brand management is a portfolio of the Chief Executive with a senior leader of his/her team focusing independently on it. This is the first step towards successfully creating a brand. It is crucial to align brand and business strategy, and it can be effectively done if the brand is monitored and championed closely by the top management of an organization. A start-up with a VC funding has a low gestation period and hence the founder or CEO needs to focus on the messaging from Day 1 to its intended customer segment and the message needs to highlight a solution to a problem and how that solution differentiates the brand from its competitors. The faster the reach of that message, the quicker is the sales graph going up.

A good brand promises the benefits, attracts more customers by constantly communicating those benefits and creates a sense of pride among its internal and external partners. Bigger corporates get valuated on their brands by 3rd party agencies and Brand valuation is an important parameter in the performance metrics of the organisation for the stock exchanges, competitor analysis and investors.

Imbibing moral values in kids – Story telling

There is a grave concern that children get swayed by hate speeches and actions that impact them in a negative way and alter the views of their thoughts on what is right and just. This has a consequent effect on our social fabric that binds the people to live in harmony.

For generations before us, our forefathers had a method to imbibe the moral values in the minds of children and most of us did the same to our children, brothers and sisters. These moral values were about compassion, love, valour, patience and respect that shaped young minds on how they need to deal with others in society.

Story telling has been a customary habit for many generations and it was the only source of teaching moral values to young children in their formative years. The future generations, I am afraid, are going to miss this learning of what is good and bad for them and for the society. The art of story telling has died and unless the sons, daughters and grand parents make conscious efforts, we are depriving the present day toddlers of a platform which had held the moral fabric of our society for many generations. Let us strive to minimise the impact of TVs and mobiles on them.

There are story telling platforms on YouTube available and they come at a subscription. But there is no substitute to a one to one or one to many interactive conversations , which are so essential to answer whys and hows from the kids. Such conversations help to arouse the Curiosity in their minds and they tend to open up from their reticent, timid and introvert behaviour to turn into a more welcoming outlook of people and their views.