Unprecedented times to your business? Bring Basics Back

Know Your Customer:

Existing customers, CRM Data, demography study, your Google analytics data, competitors traffic analysis, keywords that are driving traffic, your competitors, open-source data information like business / vertical reports, GDP, Industry YOY growth, etc.

Integrate, then slice and dice. You will know your customer. Build your analytics division, move your data to cloud and mobility. Take decisions on the go and enhance your customer experience.

4P's - Product, Price, Place & Promotion:

Borrowing the thought from Neil H.Borden, the 4Ps is one of the early concepts you study in business school. Simple to score marks during exams but not often followed by organizations at the execution level.

It's an excellent time for business to introspect on 4p's to align themselves with the competitive market ecosystem. Companies who have incredible budgets, campaign teams, at times, fail to help the product a market fit.

I'm not sure how many remember the Chinese brand "LeEco" marketing campaigns in India, but still, they failed. The glory days of Housing.com launching a massive INR 120 CR campaign on its hay days but again was unable to surge Indians to use housing.com for their real housing needs. As simple as it sounds to memorize, it is challenging to get 4P's right with every business.

Urgency:

There is no better time to fail quickly than today. The quicker we fail, the faster we move on to find the right approach. One of the biggest bottlenecks which we observed with companies we work is that stakeholders take too much time to make a decision. The meaning for agile stays only with the textbook and never sees limelight in marketing functions due to fear of failures, what if's and obsession to 100% perfection, which they will never arrive at.

We understand the process and the rest, but today's time demands quick decision making (of-course quality decisions) ability and building a sense of urgency in execution. This could be a significant game-changer to help your business move ahead.

Lead With Empathy:

Put people before profits, the customer before sales. It's ok to advice your customer to go for a low margin/value product or service if that makes sense to his business. The year 2020 is a challenging year for companies and human beings, but not necessarily, it should harm the human spirit of togetherness and kindness.

Given that the whole world is in a mess, but we need to understand that we are all in it together. Your employees, customers and their families are entirely dependent on every decision that business managers take. We have the responsibility of protecting them and lead through these tough times. Margins are not as crucial as humankind.