DNA, January 22, 2010

Mumbai: Within a single year, 16 women in Hubli are making and selling designer wear in Amsterdam. The transition was scripted by Moniek van Erven from Holland.

It happened by chance that Erven after graduating with a degree in economics and finance, came to India to do voluntary work for Mann Desi Mahila Microcredit Bank in Mhaswad village in Maharashtra.

The position focused on providing incubation, marketing and giving legal advice to women who had entrepreneurial ideas, but lacked education to setup their venture.

Apart from unavailability of infrastructure and technical facilities in their village, Erven also realised that these destitute women were yearning for a dignified life. All of them had different stories of struggle against forced marriage, abusive and alcoholic husbands and were coping against early widowhood. But they had different dreams for their daughters and wanted to give them a decent life.

This was the turning point for Erven to decide what she wanted to do in life. She knew that women had basic sewing skills and a desire to improve their economic condition. With all this in mind, she started Satara Foundation with the aim to produce fashion apparel. The first part of Van Erven’s venture was entirely self-financed.

Her grandmother had recently passed away and left her a small inheritance, which she used to fund her travel and buy fabrics. But the experiment was a big disaster since the product was not good.

Her intention was to inculcate entrepreneurship among these women and so Mann Desi Mahila Micro-Credit Bank also come to help these women. Van Erven realised that it was not enough to establish the Satara Foundation as fashion brand in the foreign market.

Erven realised she required some modern machines and someone to train the women to use such machines to tailor fashion apparel. Roping in a famous designer didn’t suit her. She wanted these women bond with their trainers and create fashion wear.

In this journey Amsterdam Fashion Institute become partners with Satara Foundation and send two designers and production managers to oversee the collections twice a year. In Holland, management students worked on positioning the product and doing the marketing.

For the Indian market, Satara Foundation recently announced its collaboration with Clearwater Consulting, a Mumbai-based marketing consultancy firm, which will represent the organisation to create a marketing platform for the products in India.

Clearwater Consulting will provide support to Satara Foundation to successfully showcase their latest collection in the Indian market.

Saurabh Shroff, founder of Clearwater Consulting said, “Satara Foundation is not just an organisation with goodwill, but also a group of highly capable individuals supported by organisations such as the Amsterdam Fashion Institute and Mann Deshi Foundation.”

Moniek has received awards and recognition in Netherlands for her Indian initiative. Since every fashion collection comes with a theme. Satara Fashion has drawn inspiration from khadi cloth which embodies ideas of freedom, autonomy, truth and closeness to nature.

Embroidery forms an integral part of the collection. In every garment there is a Hindi letter is tagged that represents the initials of the woman who made that garment. Customers can follow that sign on their website (satarafashion.com).

Satara Foundation has recently received an award from the United Nations.

Says Saurabh Shroff, Co-founder and CEO at SalesManGoes, “In India, neither a pure-play online solution for sales management nor an expensive senior management can work for SMEs. So the solution lies in an affordable and standardised sales management system that combines utilisation of technology and management of on-site challenges hands on. Simply put, it is like your own sales manager, running on proven systems and technology without you having to invest in any of that.”

SalesManGoes is powered by a proprietary model, developed internally. The platform will not only address immediate challenges of achieving optimum sales but will also build capacity and skill for business owners and their teams.

SalesManGoes will roll out its commercial operations in all major cities of India, starting with Mumbai in January 2010.

“SalesManGoes will bring world class sales management practices right inside the thick of Indian SMEs, which are the backbone of our economy”, Saurabh adds.

According to Prashant Bhaskar, early investor in SalesManGoes, “The model addresses key pain points felt by most of SME business owners in their pursuit of growth. Once implemented successfully in Mumbai, replication across India will be rapid”

As published on indiainfoline.com

This does not sound very surprising if you look at some fundamental stuff that companies do, or should do, in a slowdown. Any company that engages in consolidating its market share and focuses on long term goals during a slowdown, is actually taking a step forward rather than cutting back.

So what type of companies will come out stronger? What do you need to do so that your business too improves with improving market conditions? Here’s my list;

Value proposition – Additional value offered to customers, rather than discounting price, will not only keep them motivated to be loyal but also help in retaining your margins and increasing your goodwill.

Costs vs. efficiency – Most of the focus is obviously on cutting costs, but there is a real danger of losing your competitive edge if you stop or marginalize activities that affect your customers’ overall experience. Many companies that stop marketing completely are at a risk of losing their ground; the focus should rather be on improving marketing efficiency.

Engagement with customers – Only your customers can tell you if they are, and how much they are likely to use your product or service. Market conditions for you will improve only when your customers’ confidence improves, so discuss these broader issues with them.

Efficiency analysis – Review various business functions and run marketing analytics to fill holes that may be causing leaks in your resource pool.

Manage relationships – It is very important that your vendors do not run out of business and your employees don’t lose motivation during trying times. You will need them to gain momentum once the markets are looking up.

R&D and innovation – Some amount of resources can be moved to research and innovation. For instance, you may not spend so much on sales and promotion and instead channel some of these resources to develop new capabilities or improve on existing ones.

In early days of evolution, marketing was largely based on thumb rules, with very little or no information gathering and analysis. Little attention must have been paid to practices that are in use today, such as understanding customer behavior and market trends.

Over the years, however, this has changed. Specific marketing objectives, not limited to only sales growth, have been identified and are collectively known as business development. And the advancement in information technology and the emergence of new media platforms is making marketing increasingly measurable.

Does that mean all marketers today know how well their marketing efforts are working?

I would say most do not. Most marketers put little effort in market intelligence and customer engagement, especially when business is booming. And when there is a slowdown, many just stop marketing completely. I say not because it is worthless to spend on marketing in a slowdown, but because they don’t know how or what of marketing helps in a slowdown. Studies have shown that companies that continue some marketing efforts during a slowdown, have better chances of a quick recovery in the turnaround.

You go to the west, especially United States, and you will find marketers spending considerable efforts on market research, gathering consumer insights and ‘marketing analytics’.

Marketing analytics is fast becoming integral to marketing planning and management in today’s information driven business environment. However, opinions differ as there are those who argue that marketing analytics applies mathematics to understand human behavior, which can’t be accurate.

So what is marketing analytics?

Simply put, it is a system of understanding what you are doing and how well you are doing it.

The origins of marketing analytics can be traced to Web Analytics. Tools such as Google Analytics help track usage of a company’s website such as which pages are visited, how much time is spent on the site etc. Other tools track performance of online marketing such as email or banner campaigns with statistics on how many mails are opened, click through rates, etc.

Google captures a huge amount of data on how users use their search engine. They developed tools to give them various behavioral statistics about their users such as which content was most searched for, where are majority of their users located, what are the most popular search terms and so on. This helps them optimize their advertising revenue. It has worked for them, proof is in the fact that Google continues to grow and even pay heavy employee bonuses while the world struggles to get back on its feet.

These technologies and underlying theories are now being implemented across the board for marketers to understand overall marketing effectiveness. What marketing activities are working? Which markets are they working in? What is your product’s perceived value? Is it priced appropriately? Are you targeting the right market segments? Are you spending too much or too less? These are some of the questions that marketing analytics can answer. And these are important questions that businesses need to ask themselves from time to time.

How do you go about answering them?

Marketing often becomes challenging for businesses, especially small businesses, to understand and evaluate in entirety. Many businesses are happy to know if sales grew after an advertising or promotion campaign. There is little or no information to evaluate the underlying marketing strategies and plans.

This is changing as technology firms now offer a range of marketing analytics technologies to decipher market data. Relevant solutions can be identified depending on your business requirement.

Then there are consulting firms that are developing analytical services. For instance, Clearwater Consulting is working on developing models that can evaluate performance of activities for lead generation and advertising and further to evaluate return on marketing investment. Many marketers are and will be looking at ways to understand crucial long term implications on identity and lifespan of a brand.

Marketing analytics can give a holistic picture for sustainability of your brand and business development; however, what to read is always up to the marketer!

It’s great to have a niche product to sell, for you can plan targeted campaigns and precise messages. Reaching out to a wider audience… now that is a real challenge! Take for instance the telecom industry, or insurance, or consumer goods… You cannot get away without spending top $ if you are to create any impact in the market.

Competition has forced marketers to move from creating simple & clear messages, highlighting real benefits & value that their products create… these days it’s about creating messages that hook the audience, at times even coarse them into paying attention!

The marketing buzzword these days – ‘innovative’; it’s mostly about doing the same things differently, using relatively newer communication platforms.

So what’s next? I say Social Change! Think about it, there is an endless supply of social problems, especially in India… poverty, crime, disease, health care, education, energy… everything is a challenge here. Take one of these issues, create a small sample base, resolve their issue and harp about it everywhere… you found a potential solution to a real problem, you helped some people and you got to talk about it…

But was the money well spent in marketing terms?

If your objective was to be heard and talked about… yes

If your objective was to create goodwill… yes

If your objective was to create new customers… yes

If your objective was to create loyalty among existing ones… yes

Besides, your story is worth carrying, so many in the media will… think of the potential savings on media spends

Although, this can’t be a short term strategy, but a directional change… towards creating a framework of ideas for sustainable business and social development.

Idea Cellular’s ‘what an Idea Sirji’ campaign is an example, but not a good one… it’s just an advertising campaign, a pointer to future direction? maybe… no real value created so far!

But there are others… many entrepreneurs are building businesses & products for social change. Be it clean energy, or affordable day to day solutions for the rural and poor, everything is being done… Aiming to be a social entrepreneur is an almost definite success story, right from the start.

And what is the marketing strategy there? Have a good heart and common sense!

Saurabh Shroff

Even in a booming economy start ups fail and market shares change. Better product delivery, creative & cost effective communication and innovation in business management by competitors will create an improved overall customer experience… and customer loyalties will shift.

The key is to have strong business fundamentals, clear business vision and an enduring focus on achieving the goals outlined. A well defined long term business vision inspires efficient business management and complete costumer care, regardless the market conditions and creates an environment that is insulated from externalities such as the current recession. To think, this recession is also an outcome of consistent, systematic pursuit of short term goals by some of the largest institutions in the world.

Although, the impact of recession affects all businesses no matter how they are managed, it is minimal on businesses who have been doing smart things in innovative ways, even in good market conditions.

Continuous creation of real value, regardless of short term impact, is the only real sustainable business model.

Saurabh Shroff

‘THE CRISIS OF CREDIT VISUALIZED’.

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