Leadership for the 21st Century

The corporate world of today can be likened to an ocean, vast, impenetrable, and increasingly dynamic, susceptible to sudden squalls that can throw everything into flux. To successfully thrive in such an environment requires something special from the man at the helm. Nothing emphasises this better than the stories of two very different and yet, similarly successful men, embracing the leadership paradigm demanded by the world today.

The first is Ratan Tata, a man that needs no introduction. The head of one of the largest business conglomerates in the world, it takes something out of the ordinary for someone to have led the firm from out of the shadows of the legendary JRD into the world conquering behemoth of today. Credit it to his Harvard education, his experience, or simply his heritage; his is nonetheless the triumph of a charismatic and intellectual leader, one whose much proclaimed adherence to ethics, both business and moral, serve as an example to those within and without the boundaries of the firm.
On the other hand, we have one of India’s most successful entrepreneurs, Raghav Bahl, the Founder and Editor of the Network18 media group, whose tale of creating a billion dollar giant in the span of a decade is rapidly becoming the stuff of legend. A similarly charismatic and intellectual leader, his aim has been one that can be considered to be the opposite to that of the afore-mentioned Tata, that of bringing the world to India, a goal which he is increasingly seeing fulfilled.

But what is it that ties these two men together as leaders for the modern age? Is it their actions, a combine of strategic genius and a knack for seizing the moment? Or is it their thought, the product of a willingness to adapt, careful deliberations, on-the-spot brilliance and a tendency to keep an eye on the big picture? Or is their character as men of steel, built on foundations of integrity, ethics and self-effacing humility, along with an almost complete rejection of that which fells even the greatest of us all, hubris?

But more than their successes, one must learn from their failures, for it is then when the true strength of the leader is tested. Be it the fallout of the Tata Nano fiasco or the decision to hand over the reins to another, each has shown the strength of character to recognize their own shortcomings and act upon them accordingly. It is this that one believes is the hallmark of a true leader, for to acknowledge one’s own errors is a difficult thing, one which many that bear the mantle of leader often fail to do.

In addition, the subscription of both these men to the Open Source Leadership model, where people are nurtured across layers by opening them to power and authority associated with leadership, only serves to confirm their belief in empowering those that follow them, a practice that is reaping ever increasing benefits world over and is one that requires a not inconsiderable leap of faith in the strength of one’s own people.
Ultimately, these remain but stories of successes in the corporate world, and ones whose replication may be well nigh impossible for the coming decades. But they have a common thread, a core tale of leadership that unites them with each other and many other such tales of victory over the increasing dynamic business world of today. And it is this thread that each of us must seize and take to heart if we are to become leaders for the 21st Century.

Marketing and Social Media - An Imperfect match

If you say that you build your business Facebook page and your branded Twitter account just to socialise, then let’s face it, you are lying, because you wanted it to help with marketing. As more people flock to social media sites every day, a roadblock is developing that is obstructing a company’s ability to achieve their goals: people on social media are there to enjoy and share, not for your business message. They may understand based upon their experience with television, print, and radio that advertising is a necessary part of the delivery of traditional media entertainment, but they are not ready to accept “a word from our sponsors” as readily in social media as they are elsewhere.

Advertising and marketing are different. The banner ads that you know are there go unnoticed by the masses. People don’t see ads, but in many cases they accept them because they know that these ads help websites stay afloat and pay their bills. Marketing on social media involves messaging and entering into the general conversation. If you message is all about marketing, then your audience will be slim.

Scratch the word “marketing” from your social media vocabulary and mindset and you will be more successful at achieving your marketing goals than you could ever imagine.

Fans, Followers, and Subscribers

If a tree falls in and forest and nobody is there to hear it, did it really make a sound? If you send a Tweet and nobody is following you, did you really tweet at all?

The first and biggest reason to take “marketing” out of your social media vocabulary is that you will not be able to grow (and in many cases, you will shrink) if your messages are geared around the marketing mindset. Building a following is about being interesting. It’s about giving people a reason to follow you. If they wanted marketing messages, they would just go to your website.

They want to get something from you that they do not get elsewhere.
Converse with people. Talk to them about them. Offer value and resources that only you can offer well and do so in a way that is not touting your own expertise.

Algorithmically Speaking…

Beyond the arbitrary decisions that people make about you and that you make about your message, there is an algorithmic reason to remove “marketing” from your mindset. Social media sites (Facebook in particular but most of them to some extent) have an algorithm that helps determine how much exposure your messages receive.

The more that people like what you’re saying, the more exposure you and your messages will receive. As a result, it’s important that you try to be as interesting and informative as possible. The marketing will come (below) but first you must think outside of marketing to make your converting messages work.

There are different formulas that you can use, but one that is easiest to apply is the 3 to 1 rule. On Facebook or Twitter, post 3 conversational, interesting updates to your page that have no purpose other than to create engagement. They can be questions, interesting links (not to your site), or general statements. Once you have 3 conversational pieces, go for a converting message. It should still be interesting, but its goal is to convert in some way.

Converting can be to get people to click through to your website, to know about an event coming up, or to perform a task such as answer a question about your business.

The algorithm exposes messages based upon your history, particularly your recent history. If you create conversational content that people like and/or comment on, the exposure of these messages will go up (and hopefully create more engagement as a result). The default view on the Facebook News Feed is “Top News” which is presented to users in order of relevance, their history, and the engagement that their friends are having. The more engagement, the higher and longer the updates will appear on their News Feed.

This carries over. In other words, by creating engagement on 3 messages, that 4th message (the converting message) will also be exposed well.
By thinking about marketing and only posting what is relevant to advancing your business, you will actually get less exposure to your messages. Fewer people (if any) will like your updates and as a result your updates will not be seen by nearly as many people. The effects are dramatic – in many cases we’ve seen, exposure to any given message can increase over ten-fold based upon being interesting and engaging most of the time.

Marketing without Marketing

It takes a certain level of creativity to truly take advantage of a mindset that doesn’t include marketing. It isn’t that we don’t want to use social media as a marketing tool. It’s that we want the marketing tool to be effective. If all you’re doing is using it as a broadcasting tool for your marketing messages, you will not get enough engagement to make those messages visible to many.

Remove the mindset. Remove the word “marketing” from your vocabulary. If you approach social media from these perspectives, you will begin to naturally expose your brand and marketing messages much more effectively:

• Entertain – While many would like to avoid this aspect, it’s the easiest way to get engagement. This doesn’t mean that you have to post funny cat videos every day. It means that in some of your status updates, your goal should be to make people laugh or smile. People like to laugh and smile and will like the messages that make them do it.

• Inform – You’re an expert at something. If you weren’t you probably wouldn’t be running a business. Use this knowledge to help people learn about what you know. A Realtor could post about things to look for in a house that usually gets missed until after they buy. A car dealership could post tips about getting better gas mileage. A blog can discuss their niche without having it attached to a blog post link.

• Opine – One of the things that many businesses, particular local businesses, avoid is expressing opinions about local or relevant issues. Despite the inferred risk, having polarizing opinions can lead to a much more robust level of engagement. People may agree or disagree with what you say, but if they comment, they’re helping to expose your updates.

• Let Loose – We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: look at Skittles. Yes, it’s entertaining, but it’s also more. It’s unique. It’s well-thought out. They have created a personality so offbeat that people tell their friends that HAVE to follow them. Everything they post gets mad exposure.

Social media is not hard. Marketing on it is, but only when you don’t have the right mindset. If you start by taking marketing out of the mix, you’ll be able to improve your marketing results.

- Ankush Garg
IIM Rohtak

Talent Management: A New Frontier?

In their seminal work The War for Talent, McKinsey and Co. coined a name for the latest battleground for seizing competitive advantage amongst companies, that of the acquisition and retention of the best talent available, through any means necessary. At the time, the Dotcom Bubble was in its growth stage, attracting any and everybody from the investment banks and the management consultancies to their small offices and big dreams. The bursting of the bubble has changed nothing, in effect, it has actually made the war for talent even worse. This erosion of the best and brightest from firms regarded as bastions of the best talent pools resulted in an unprecedented empowerment of talent, enabling a paradigm shift from loyalist to more mercenary tendencies, as well as throwing most conventional management theory into a tizzy.

The quest for competitive advantage has often been likened to a war without weapons, no holds barred and without mercy. In this vein, it is not uncommon to see managerial cadres within companies quoting military manuals like the Art of War and De Re Militari as a priest would the Bible. And this is where the War for Talent has confounded both theorists and practitioners. For each such work generally makes one assumption: that the army is loyal, and only the morale of the troops is to be maintained to ensure the highest performance on the field. No one anticipated such a scenario where the troops and in some cases, even the generals themselves, would desert the army for a more lucrative option on the side of a rival. Nothing reinforces this point more than the case of Shikha Sharma, who left ICICI to head Axis Bank in 2009 after losing out to Chanda Kochhar in the race to become the new MD of ICICI. While this particular case is an extreme, the migration of middle management from one firm to another, often taking their project teams with them, is a very real and proliferating problem, causing major losses to firms, especially in terms of investments on training of the fled talent.

It is for this reason that Human Resources, essentially a support department, is now undergoing a transition to Talent Management, a strategic form focusing on functional integration that is taking an increasingly prominent role in forming and, at times, even dictating competitive strategy for firms. But this is unfamiliar territory, with most managers left at a loss due to the absence of precedent, both in literature, as well as in practice, of tactics and methods that can achieve a significant degree of success in stemming this particular tide. Most are, as of now, improvising and, at the same time, putting more and more effort into research into suitable models and practices that can be adopted by firms in order to retain the best of their talent and simultaneously preventing an unnecessary bloating of organizational structures.

It is imperative, however, that in making this transition, firms do not forget the emphasis on the alignment with the company strategy, an emphasis that should serve to ensure that only the “right” people inhabit the firm, a classification that does not necessarily include the “best” available talent and should also result in a not insignificant streamlining of firms in terms of their human capital base. IBM, in particular, has gone a long way in developing a basic framework highlighting the various aspects of such a process, placing the maximum emphasis on “best-fit” practices, a method of managing the available talent pool by mapping them on a performance-potential curve, thus serving to objectively identify both the present as well as the future worth of the employee to the firm. This form of mapping also serves a dual purpose of determining the appropriate course of action the management, whether it be in the form of additional training, role switching, or simply an increase in the individual’s compensation.

Apart from this, firms are concentrating considerable effort, through conventional practices derived from extensive studies on organisational behaviour, on creating an environment and culture conducive to the the promotion and, more importantly, the retention of a highly efficient and satisfied talent pool.

Interestingly enough, the war for talent has had a fascinating side effect in the empowerment of the employee, putting them in a position, for the first time, to dictate terms to their superiors as well as creating a considerable reduction in the power of the employer over the “right” employee. Communism has long since been declared a failure but perhaps we are well on the way to achieving what one may consider a capitalist version of Marx’s Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

The “Provenance Paradox” and How it determines India Inc.’s Brand Positioning

In his rather thoughtful article titled “Why you aren’t buying Venezualan chocolates” (HBR January 2011), Professor Rohit Deshpande describes how organizations from developing countries are grappling with the brand image (and the resulting negative connotations) bestowed upon them by their country of origin. He terms the phenomenon as “The Provenance Paradox”, the paradox in question probably referring to how the country of origin determines the authenticity of the product.

It’s a phenomenon so natural; its escapes notice of even the most unbiased customer. As soon as he notices the ubiquitous “Made In ___”, certain pre-conceived notions surface in the consumers mind which hamper his rational decision making based on features and perceived value. Such behavior, though irrational on further analysis, seems at the moment perfectly reasonable from behind the veil of “experience”. And battling this mindset will be the biggest challenge the marketers of tomorrow will face.

A case in point from the Indian context would be that of the Indian IT industry. Indian behemoths like Infosys and TCS, despite employing near 1.5 lakh software engineers each, still don’t attract top dollar billing (or anywhere near it!) when compared to the West’s giants like IBM and Accenture. Deliberately pursuing a low cost strategy is one thing, but the figures point to a bigger challenge. Industry analysts attribute this startling gap to the “BPO” image of India’s software industry.

Another example would be of the Indian healthcare industry. Indian super and multi specialty hospitals have been accredited by various global agencies (NHS of UK and the US based Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organisations). Its high success rate and on par competence with global standards is reflected in the following figures:

» Indian specialists have performed over 500,000 major surgeries and over a million other surgical procedures including cardio-thoracic, neurological and cancer surgeries, with success rates at par with international standards.

» The success rate in the 43,000 cardiac surgeries till 2002 was 98.5 per cent

» India's success in 110 bone marrow transplants is 80 per cent.

» The success rate in 6,000 renal transplants is 95 per cent.

DS Brar, CEO and MD, Ranbaxy recalled how a CEO of a global pharma company kept him waiting for over 6 hours before granting an audience. That was largely how global companies treated brands from India those days. And it is only recently that the world discovered that it could get quality service at lower prices. Of course, the healthcare industry still has a long way to go when compared to global Medicare hubs like Singapore. Thus the vicious cycle continues, low prices affirming the low quality belief.

However, there are certain strategies that Indian firms employ to counter this bias. The first of course is flaunting your country of origin; Historically, Indian customers are thought to be very price sensitive. Thus Indian companies were thought to be low on price and thus quality. But slowly this misconception is fading as the globe realizes Indians are notorious value-for-money seekers. This image gives Indian companies the perfect platform to differentiate them as providing good quality at lower prices. An example of this approach can be found in most companies strategies when they move to global markets. Hero Honda, Bajaj and Tata have started gaining acceptance in international markets for their quality products. Indian service sector too has started transforming its work profile from being low quality BPOs to high quality Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) centers. Apollo proudly introduced itself as an Indian tyre maker. The Apollo brand capitalized, rather than downplay, its provenance claiming, ‘We are Indian, we make tyres for the worst roads in the world; if they’re good enough for an Indian taxi, they’ll be more than good enough for German autobahnen’ However the risks of this strategy include a long and tedious payoff period as well as an unwavering focus on brand management. But if companies still go down this route, a focus on intellectual property and innovation will lead to a stronger “Brand India”.

The second strategy employed by Indian firms is that of downplaying your country of origin; A Bose and a Hotmail were products of an Indian mind, but created and grown elsewhere. Tata Ceramics, who make bone china tableware products which are then sold overseas by luxury brands such as Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, Spode, Dunoon, Villeroy & Boch and Richard Ginori, have no plans to develop their own brand abroad. Countless other examples spring to mind of Indian companies being mere unbranded suppliers to global brands in diverse industries such as shoes, food, clothes, chemicals, engineering etc. The obvious risks associated with pursuing this strategy are lack of long term growth and appearing inauthentic.

To conclude, Indian companies looking towards a global growth strategy will definitely face this dilemma: what is the best way to overcome provenance paradox? Unfortunately, there is no set answer. How a firm choose its marketing strategy depends on its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats; moreover, these need to correspond to external changes in the political, economic, social and technological environment. Hence, a SWOT and PEST analysis should identify the best strategy for a given firm in a given situation. But, if I were to choose which strategy I respect the most, Apollo’s strategy of capitalizing and enhancing Brand India will be the one most likely to reap holistic gains in the future.

- Abhimanyu Sahai
IIM Rohtak

The Anatomy of an Online Marketing Campaign

World over, marketers are increasingly focusing their attentions on tapping the potential of the internet as a tool to achieve substantial market penetration in a far more effective manner, both in terms of cost as well as reach, than conventional modes of communicating value. This is also indicative of a paradigm shift in marketing, with the online campaign often integrating all aspects of a standard marketing drive with a direct distribution channel, something that is greatly beyond the scope from the traditional role online media has played in serving simply as an agent to increase what marketers term top of mind association with a particular product.

On analysis, most such successful campaigns can be seen to have three common components, each of which, in fulfilling its own individual role, complements and enhances the whole. The first part is the product website. Serving as the principal and one-stop source of information about the product, the website often contains data on the product, its benefits, features and variants, sources for support software and after-sales service, a link to the direct distribution channel for immediate purchase, and some information on the company itself. An increasing trend these days is to create individual websites, as opposed to sub-sites of a larger company website, for products, possibly in an effort to make them as distinct and easily accessible as possible. Also, the increased penetration of broadband technology has ensured that these websites are usually rich in multimedia content, highlighting product demos, advertisements, and, in some cases, user-created feedback videos.

The second part, something that it shares in common with traditional marketing campaigns, is the advertisement. Additionally, these are also observed in two distinct formats. The first is the conventional video advertisement, aired through multimedia platforms such as Youtube, and are usually used to highlight augmented product features along with the brand personality, something that has proven eminently successful in the cases of Apple and Vodafone. Often produced by advertising powerhouses such as Ogilvy & Mather, these videos are usually the fulcrum of the campaign, and their acceptance by the market is generally considered to be the litmus test for the success and sustainability of any such enterprise.

The other format of online advertisements, and the one that arguably could be considered to be a support to the previous one, is the small textual advertisement that finds itself on various websites, either in the form of pop-ups or hyperlinked images. It is important to note that while these advertisements are usually the least successful in actual terms of click through conversion, they are nevertheless required to maintain a consistent presence on websites low on outside multimedia content but high on unique hits like various sports websites and popular blogs.

The third component of a successful online campaign, and the one that is increasingly becoming the most crucial aspect in achieving a high degree of market penetration, is the viral component. While the efficacy of viral marketing has been much debated over the past couple of years, it needs to be seen as a single component of a larger marketing plan, that aims, principally, at creating a greater degree of top of mind association through proliferation and visibility, but communicates only a very limited part of the value promise itself. Primarily geared towards harnessing the potential of social networks such as the highly popular Facebook, viral content is based on the principle of user customized advertisements.

This principle essentially deals with addressing the esteem needs of the target market through the creation of images and videos that can be personalized by users to insert names and images of their own choosing to replace those of the models in the original creation in order to achieve a limited form of celebrity or brand association. While an extremely potent tool in any effort to achieve top of mind association, the success of the viral content is heavily dependent on the creativity of the manner in which augmented product features and/or brand personality are highlighted, the ease of customization and, most importantly, the visual attractiveness of the customized content. The last factor, as the champions of highly successful viral campaigns at Nikon and Apple will affirm, is the sole reason for a campaign to truly become viral, as the attractiveness of the final user customized content is what will encourage an increasing number of people to share and customize for themselves as well.

It can thus be seen that the success and sustainability of any online marketing campaign depends upon a combination these three elements, a combination that can be viewed in the form of a pyramid, with the first two components forming and providing strength to the foundation of the campaign, and the third, the viral component, forming the apex, the height of which can be considered a determinant of how far the product campaign can penetrate into the target market. It can also be seen that the absence of any of the two foundation elements destabilizes the pyramid, while the lack of a viral component severely limits the campaigns ability to penetrate beyond levels that can be achieved through conventional formats.

An excellent example of a firm that conducted a highly successful online marketing campaign is that of Apple for its iPod range of products. The website was designed to perfection, giving all the required product and support information, coupled with reams of multimedia content emphasizing the brand identity associated with the product. The advertisements, mostly made available online through various video streaming services, served as an extremely effective and innovative mode of communicating the brand personality and product value, while at the same time reinforcing the premium and exclusive nature of the product. But what truly created a buzz for the product was the viral campaign launched by Apple, creating dozens of easily customizable silhouetted images of people perceived to be a part of the stereotypically “cool crowd” wearing the distinct white earphones of the iPod. These images soon spread through the numerous web-communities, with each community customizing the images to appeal to their own sensibilities. This resulted in a level of market penetration, in terms of brand recall and top of mind association, that the marketers at Apple could not even have imagined. The success of the campaign also brought to light the sheer impact that a well-designed viral campaign could have on an integrated online marketing effort.

It is imperative to note that even the most well designed campaigns, like any other traditional marketing endeavour, may be rendered a complete failure due to an inability of the product to fulfil the value promise, or to match competitive forces. A case in point here is that of the Tata Nano. A campaign that well and truly integrated all the above components in appropriate measures, and even including the distribution channel to the extent that it was actually possible to book the car online, was considered an utter failure due to issues with the actual product being unable to match the value promise communicated by the firm.

However, aside from this particular caveat which all such endeavours are subject to, online campaigns have displayed the potential to far outstrip the traditional marketing campaign format, in terms of the penetration, cost effectiveness, and the sustainability of the campaign.