JAGSOM, a prestigious b-school located in the silicon city of Bangalore, has the pride of 25 years of experience and has been grooming students to become Industry ready professionals with T shaped – unique curriculum. The Cultural Committee is again back with one more event Ethnic Day which was held on 6th October 2021 in JAGSOM Bangalore campus. The event starts with the lightning of the auspicious lamp followed by a short speech by our Cultural Committee course coordinator (COCO) Drishty Sharma.
Ethnic Day was celebrated to show that our college has ‘Unity in Diversity’ where students come from a variety of places, regions and states with different cultures. To showcase these regions and states and to know more about our culture, we have organized this ETHNIC DAY.
Post lightning of the lamp and speech, we had a song performance of 2 different regions. The event continued to a solo dance performance followed by a Ramp Walk. The event concluded by best ethnic dress competition to know how much we know about our culture and festivals.
Relationship marketing is one aspect of CRM that focuses on building long term relationship with the customers that may yield to free word of mouth promotions, lowering the cost and increasing the revenue of a company. The ultimate aim is to bring back the customer in future, once he has made the first purchase.
Companies are using all sort of solutions these days to make the relationship with customer, long lasting. Unfortunately, the companies are not able to build so. Rather, they fall in trouble of dis-satisfaction. Customers do not delight in the way the companies try to convince them, by confusing them with more products, introducing many new features of electronic gadgets, lots of invitation to participate in frequently reward program and so on. The ultimate aim of Relationship marketing is to build the epitome of Customer satisfaction.
The more the companies try to offer reward program for the customers, the more they make their relationship with customer worse. Company needs to think and figure out how and why are they undermining their best efforts, as well as how things can be brought back on the track.
Seeing through the eyes of customer:
Companies policy of making one on one relationship with customer seem to be useless because very less consumers agrees for the same. If companies take too many steps to build one on one relationship, the consumer stops taking heed of you. Simply paying discounts/money to consumer can also never give long term relationship.
There should be a balance between ‘give and get’ for a healthy relationship. The data taken by company from any consumer must not be repeated to build trust. And the information taken out from consumer must be respected. If any customer has availed any particular service in the past, then that doesn’t necessarily mean that the customer would want the same, even if they liked it earlier. It depends on the present condition of the customer. Not understanding this would result in weakening the relationship.
Companies should not only rely on designing relationship/loyalty programs for those who generates more revenue. In such case, other consumers would feel left out and this may back fire the company.
Sometimes the company adopts any strategy and think that it will solve the problem of consumer but many a time it creates more problem. For example, too many solutions for any one problem many lead to confusion for customers. Also, a sense of freedom of choice should be provided to customer to bind commitment and trust.
It is wiser to understand that sometimes technology designed to reduce the work, ends up increasing the work load. So, it is essential to understand the needs of consumer. Consumer develop ‘purchase & consumer’ rules. Instead of accepting the advances (which you as a company think that you are helping your customer, you end up providing them to arm themselves to fight back.
Regaining Trust:
In 1985, psychologists Michael Argyle and Monica Hinderson defined universal rules of friendship:
Provide emotional support
Respect privacy
Preserve confidences
Tolerant of other friendship
In light of relationship marketing, companies hardly provide commitments to any of the above-mentioned rules.
How to then regain the trust of customers?
To start with, we can think of new products extension. Research states that most of the product extensions are not proper because the managers were not able to explain and understand what will resonate with customers and what not? We must eliminate or reduce the features while introducing new products that frustrates or overwhelms consumers. For example, P & G has standardized its new products formulae and packaging, reduced number of promotions and coupons, pruned marginal brands and cut back on dizzying array of new product bunches. While executing, company must think that are these initiatives undertaken with genuine concerns for consumer’s emotional well-being?
The next step is to respect the private information of customers. To build long term relationship, make sure that customer should not suspect you even once. Company must not ask sensitive information from customer, repeatedly, unless it is put for use.
Finally, the relationship goals should be practical and based on foundation of genuine-ness. Company must avoid fluff, fake promises and bad languages etc. The main aim should be honest commercial intent of doing business by convincing them that it is a good deal.
Attaining Intimacy:
The above three points, even if honestly followed, the company still faces trouble in making long term relationship. True intimacy is the key to rewarding relationship. To attain that, one must understand the consumer behavior. That is how does the consumer uses your product on day to day lives.
The company can’t rely only on the rating of customer on satisfaction scale. There are two major dimensions company must attend if they want true intimacy:
Product satisfaction and life satisfaction
Only data collection is not enough to understand the discontent of consumer but to get into the heads of consumer, marketer needs to turn on the tools of ethnography and phenomenology. Video tapes and photography are also reporting tools.
Some of the underutilized data can be used to find the clear picture of customer responses. For example, customer service hotlines may give actual picture of consumer response but unfortunately, they are not being used properly.
There are also external sources of the company that is readily available to provide information. For example, Ad agencies can be a good source of trend analysis.
To understand the consumers effectively, the company personnel are required to go on the field. Not only the researchers but also the senior managers, middle level managers or else engineers etc.
Only data can’t provide us required information about customer’s psyche. To be truly effective, one must understand philosophy, communications, psychology and religious studies. Understanding emotional part of consumers is very critical to overall analysis.
Conclusion:
Marketers are the boundary line between the customers and the company. Marketers must understand the needs of consumer and act accordingly. That is, they provide the company, customer’s point of view. But these days, both the roles are not being played effectively that puts Relationship marketing in danger.
To build relationship, company often takes many muddled steps that makes relationship even worse. So, the company must understand true meaning of relationship and delivers, on the principles on which it was founded.
JAGSOM chronicles in its 5th episode talked on the topic “Will automation take away jobs?”. Our panel consisted of Mr. Amit Sood, Senior Director, Sales, Automation Anywhere along with Prof. Soumya Choudhary, Associate Professor and area chair- Finance at JAGSOM. The webinar was hosted by a student at our institute, Miss. Kritika Goel.
The show was kicked by our guest Mr. Sood with his viewpoint on the topic where he stated that automation is a very wide topic where people generally relate it to IoT and robots. In current world automation is not only about typical robots but is now more focused on Robotic Process Automation commonly referred as RPA in the industry for software automation. Talking about how the overall job scenario will be affected he stated that there will be short term job losses. Another point that was reflected during the discussion was that if we go back in time and see when computers were introduced and later when ERP or cloud computing came into play, there was a lot of automation of manual tasks. Even in the past these processes were a part of automation and did in fact had some job losses or change in roles. Now in the current landscape the technology has become even more sophisticated than before. In essence certain skills and products became obsolete as new technology came into to play giving rise to certain new roles as well as some roles becoming redundant.
New jobs that came into play due to the technological advances are like developers and project managers with a completely different set of responsibility. These managers are now working on a completely different set of activities and requires a specific set of specialized skills. Pointing out the high-level executives of the company on the CXO level the discussion also shed a light how these individuals are now focused on how to automate processes.
How the students or new professionals will be affected due to these changes, the panelists came to a consensus that ff you have the new age skills market will pay you as has been the trend in the past with advent of innovative solution to address the ever-changing pains of the stakeholders. Even with the technological advances one thing that will be there is the relationship with the customer and one of the most critical roles is business development role in RPA. If the client trusts your solution and if it will help them, you still must focus on developing the business relationship with them.
One should make sure that you are enjoying what you are doing and apart from this, are you able to deliver what the customer is expecting from you. Empathizing with the customer to understand what the customer expects from you is still essential. You have to ask the question; how does your offering is able to cater the pain points of the customer? For instance, automation is becoming simpler day by day and not just coding it, automation is shifting more toward ease of dragging and dropping the blocks of the processes you want to be automated. Processes like onboarding are getting simpler and more efficient by reducing the employee touch points when joining a new company.
Design thinking and entrepreneurship are complementary to each other and are now linked with automation. The functional thing is still where your core skills come in play and one should have a growth mindset about what functional area you want to excel in. For a student to approach a task from the perspective of a veteran the design thinking mindset would help them imagine the solution better. Design thinking can be viewed as a tool and components like customer journey map would help imagine the building blocks better which will enable the individual to create better solution.
Ending the discussion, it was concluded that MBAs should have an appreciation of all the upcoming technologies and will make you more aware to apply tools in your domain, maybe not on the first day but for sure down the line.
“If I had 60 minutes to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes defining it, and 5 minutes solving it.” – Albert Einstein
On 27th and 28th January, close to 180 students divided into 31 distinct groups at Jagdish Sheth School of Management (JAGSOM) had got the opportunity to showcase their Design Thinking projects at the two-day boot-camp which was organized on-campus. The Innovation & Incubation committee at JAGSOM in coordination with the Cocos of Design Thinking groups and support from the PGP office coordinated this two-day boot-camp. The respective projects had been pitched to our distinguished panel who also administered the session- Dr. Kamalika Chakraborty, Faculty at JAGSOM and Mr. Rohit Swarup, Founder and Director at Xplora Design Skool & Futurz Xplored.
The core idea behind setting up this boot-camp was to fine tune the projects on which students had worked for couple of months and ensure that every team is on par for the Innovation Day, scheduled on 6th March 2021, where the projects will be presented to an external jury. The boot-camp was preceded by submission of a consolidated project report, coffee table book and an audio-visual film on the course journey. Each team was expected to pitch their project for 5 minutes along with a thematic display of the same. The panel reviewed the efforts so far and the guided the students towards a better outcome and intuitive interpretation of the projects.
Overall, it was an incredible effort put together by the batch and the respective teams got some insightful feedbacks which they are expected to incorporate for the final pitch to the jury. The teams are looking forward to the D-day scheduled on 6th March 2021 and preparations for the same is in full throttle.
Gone are the days when every company used to hire only celebrities for endorsing their products or service. Some companies today have stopped giving big cheques to celebrity for ads and they have started realising the importance of real customers in the advertisement. When a real customer promotes the product today, it creates a bigger impact on other customer minds.
Today all the service sectors business focuses a lot on reviews and ratings. SWIGGY, Zomato, Uber are few of the companies which are focusing a lot on reviews. It is a review only which makes a restaurant big or small in SWIGGY. If a restaurant is having good reviews, only then I can think of ordering from that restaurant.
Today Marketing has become more transparent as a company knows whatever they are promising in the advertisement they have to fulfil that promise otherwise the customer is ready to write bad complaints and negative review against the product on social media.
Digital Advertisement has changed the traditional way of advertising through celebrity. Several YouTubers who are common people like us have become a new favourite of companies for promoting the brands because a customer can relate with that person that he is also living the same standard of living like us.
I have one simple question for those who are reading this article – whom will you trust, a big celebrity who is advertising the product or 100 reviews given by common people like you when you will buy a product. I think today you will trust reviews.
Today Artificial Intelligence and analytics have completely changed the marketing business. Suppose if you are searching for a product on e-commerce websites, the websites will show you similar types of products next time you visit the website as now they know which types of product you are searching for. Analytics has a major role in advertising today as the marketer knows how many times you visited the site, which product you purchased and based on that behaviour it will also recommend you similar products to buy.
Today there is a big scope in Marketing and lots of students are building their career in Marketing. But to be successful in this field you need to have the right set of skills to deal with new generation of marketing – one of that skill is how you can use the customer for the benefit of the brand. What you need in this field is to select the right business school which can nurture you in the right direction.
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