Is black money causing lack of good customer experience?

To my understanding a lot of black money today is deployed in buying real estates in India which is making the cost of real estate more expensive than what it should be based on the usual demand and supply curve.

Is this causing bad customer experience in retailing? Because of high realty cost are retailers compromising on parking space, number of check- out counters, space between aisles, number of support staff, saving cost on air conditioning to pay for high realty cost? etc etc and boy is this helping online retailing beyond its reasonable share?

Why even Reliance can't beat Flipkart now!!

Not sure if Reliance is planning to launch online store like Flipkart but here is my Perspective if they are planning one.

Reliance can put in 10 times the money what Flipkart has spent to build itself but it would be near impossible for them to capture higher market share (better yet Indian mind share.... a trust worthy image of Flipkart in our mind).

Possible reason:

1. Flipkart has this huge first-comer-advantage
2. Online retailing in India to most of us means Flipkart (mind share)
3. Their service, from whatever I have seen is impeccable. And because of which they have earned our trust (mind share)
4. And they seem to understand that they have to continue the pursuit to get more and more mind share and at a quicker rate than before (and I believe a large part of the money they have raised would be spent on that)

Their competitors are trying all sorts of marketing stunts (free vouchers, selling below cost to build user base, crazy repeated ads on TV, 100s of offers) but I doubt its working effectively.

But there is one way Reliance can beat them
If Flipkart screws up its service, that would build trust deficit for others to overtake them ( I hope they won't let that happen).

Another company which has huge Indian mind share is Cadbury Diary milk (“kuch meetha ho jaye”), makes it very difficult for competitors to outperform them. When I say Diary milk what comes to your mind “Premium Quality”, “Happiness”, “Licking your fingers J” , “Proposing a girl” , “Everybody love it”, “Apt for all celebrations”, “Good choice for a gift” ......... see they got your mind share.

Cannibalizing

Recently attended BPO summit at Gurgaon and everyone was talking about moving away from FTE or hourly based billing to Outcome-Based-Model......not an easy thing to do. But as the labor arbitrage benefits are shrinking and more and more competition is coming in from countries like Philippines, Indonesia, China etc who are able to offer labor at par with India or cheaper in most cases....your number one USP cannot be labor cost. Indian BPO industry has to find its USP around knowing business processes better than anyone else, owning domain intensive IT enabled platforms and high quality resources (pre-trained). Yes introducing outcome-based-model seems like Cannibalizing revenue but if not done we would anyway lose out to cheaper economies than India and probably to those who are newly entering into this industry and offering outcome-based-model as a differentiator as opposed to conventional model. The choice is ours, take the risk to protect long-term sustainability or slowly but surely get ready to lose.

Outside-In approach - Sales

Outside-In approach - Sales
It's about what your prospect wants than what you can offer
It's about what the prospect thinks is the right price to pay than what it cost you
It's about connecting with their aspirations and needs not yours
It's about their perceived value gain than your value proposition
It's about your alignment with them than theirs with yours
It's about their trade-off and opportunity cost not yours
It's about their convenience and urgency not yours
It's about their emotions/desire/interest/stress not yours
It's about their business competition not yours
Think Outside-In.

Flute

Watching this man trying to sell flute at the railway station, wondering if his sales is going well? A flute is a difficult thing to learn and you would have had some experience playing it....after a while you get disengaged with it....reason? you couldn’t play the music you wanted to or it is producing sounds which you didn’t intent to. Now when someone is selling you the flute, you probably won’t buy because you know you would get disengaged with it soon. Neither would you try to buy for your kids, friends etc for the same reason. (Though you might have bought it the very first time)

Trying to sell something to masses which is difficult to use may not go well!! Imagine you have to learn 10 key strokes or better yet 10 gestures to operate Angry birds!!

Differentiator

Differentiating is an act of capturing prospect's mind by showcasing something unique about your product or service. Everybody talks about differentiating in marketing and in sales, yet very few companies are successful in it, why? 

To build your differentiator, you need

- Profound understanding of your target customers and their needs + aspirations (depth & breadth)

- Quitting many things to focus on few

- Withstanding tough time when others would quit (less competition)

- Willingness to Invest Time, Energy and Money on features/services which no one is offering today

- Striving to be the best in the world (killing mediocrity)

- Ability to connect the dots forward

- Embrace Creativity & Fun at work

- A leader who can pull all of these together

Do you or your company have these?

Dip

Almost done with reading Seth Godin's Dip, which initially got me confused if I was quitting on a Dip or Cul-de-sac, then realized that I had changed roles in my career always when I had crossed the Dip and was on a career high!! Feels good!!

This book is about knowing when you are in a Dip, Cul-de-sac (deadend) or facing the fall from a cliff (either in your career or business). Pretty good read.

Btw, I sent a note today to Seth Godin asking how he manages to write blogs every single day and with such deep thoughts.... and I asked him for a tip. And his response to me was "start.... don't stop....keep going". Simple solution....yet difficult to be consistent in it :)