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| “My first message is not to think of marketing as a functional expertise. Marketing is a mindset. Mindset means you have to think in terms of customers and segmentation. Thinking is independent of context.” |
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are still the same. You still have to position the product, look at the kind of people, anticipate what they would look for, and what you can give them. As economies are in transition – and if I am a Marketing professor – I would still teach the same concepts. But I won’t teach a case on Citibank credit cards, because that may be irrelevant for them because there is no credit card there. Now, people talk about micro files. You have to bring the examples which are relevant to the context today but also give few examples of the future.
According to me, the context in the developed economies will not be entrepreneurial but the mindset will be. For economies in transition, not only do you need to have an entrepreneurial mindset but you also have limited resources. To me, entrepreneurship means that you have to go beyond boundaries to get your work done albeit bureaucracy is stopping you. Because, in an entrepreneurial world, there is no bureaucracy, to start with.
Mobile penetration is significant even in villages, and to a large extent people have started using mobile for the promotion of the product, branding, etc. Is there any learning coming out of all this? Do you think there is any major theoretical contribution emerging from these economies from this context?
There is a big difference here. Text messaging is so popular in
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India and it is virtually non-existent in the US. Why? First, the penetration of cell phones may be high in the US. The use of mobile phones is very limited as compared to countries like China and India. So, how do we keep in touch in the US? We go for the alternate technology, which is the Blackberry. People find that Blackberry is more convenient than text messages, because one not only gets messages sent through email but can also send emails to others. Now for that system to work, other person also has to have a Blackberry. The penetration of this product is higher in the US as compared to Indian context.
Now about the missed call concept in India. India is a country where the incoming calls are free. In the US, if you make a missed call, you are charged the moment the computer accepts that call. And that is the reason people in India give missed calls because they know that nobody is going to be charged. In the US, both the caller, and the receiver pays. Here, in India, only the caller pays. Secondly, they might say: ‘for you it is free and for me it is money; so you call me.’ But the real brilliance here is that you have communicated without communication. In developing countries or economies in transition, rather than focus on product innovation, we need to focus on processing. A missed call to me is a process innovation. I believe that there are two new innovations that will happen in economies in transition: one is ‘process |
