I often wondered why we don’t have a lot more marketing managers in service sector firms. Don't they want to understand the needs and wants of their customers or the pulse of the market or the trends of the industry. Initially, thought it as more of the stage of evolution of the industry. While the manufacturing industry has evolved for more than a century, the service industry, especially TMT (Tech, Media and Telecom) have been in existence for less than three decades. However, it turned out to be much deeper than I thought.

Every marketers aim is to bring in new customers, grow their lifetime value and convert them into brand advocates who can influence their network to become new customers. However, today’s constantly-connected world of digital, social and mobile has changed the way customers behave— and, consequently, how brands need to speak to their customers and prospects. As brands evolve, they’re learning that engagement is the critical next step. If they’ve not already started, brands are starting to shift from an era of mass marketing and advertising—where we talk at people for a single moment in time—to an era of engagement marketing where we begin to take time to learn more about our customers on a personal, individual level and engage with them over a lifetime. And it is this engagement level where service sector brands have taken a leapfrogged growth over conventional products firms.

Engagement marketing is more than a series of transactions or click-through rates, it means building a real individual relationship, floor by floor, continuously over time, seamlessly across all of the channels and devices they use. It means paying attention to your customer and observing what they do, learning what they like, learning what they don’t like and guiding a journey that helps them get where they want to go. Your approach and enthusiasm for your relationships with customers should channel the same approach and feelings you have when interacting with a friend in your personal life. In a B2B scenario, engagement marketing is way easier to implement as you have limited number of customers, easier accessibility to their preferences and a dedicated team, however, when the channel is your soul medium of client interaction, then chances are that your customer will see you as a friend that is difficult to get a hold of, or is always talking about themselves, or is always stereotyping you based on just a few facts? So, plain-jane customer segmentation approach may not work.

So how to initiate customer engagement for your brand and the answer is simple; direct interactions with clients. While other departments can also provide insight, nothing is quite as valuable as direct feedback from customers using your products. Brands can now better track these insights and interactions across multiple channels thanks to the growth of marketing technology.

I think, ultimately, this will become the new basis of competition. It used to be that firms competed on price—then, they competed on brand awareness—then, they started competing on experience (think, “my visit to Big Bazaar today”). But, now as customers increasingly want companies to get to know them and continue to advance the relationship, they will choose brands (and more specifically, people at those brands) that engage with them most effectively. Those companies will win, and the others will lose.

Just my 2 cents.

In late 2011, my entrepreneurial spirits were on stanazalol with levels higher than Ben Johnson. I was looking to start my first business. I had completed a very ambitious and demanding new product development project at one of the world’s largest security services firm and I was confident that with my pseudo intellectual abilities were just the thing that corporate India was waiting for.

The SMAC(Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) wave was on and with the advent of smartphone across sectors in India it got me thinking about ideas for apps. Educational Reforms is a subject I’m passionate about, so I came up with a concept for using web and Phones for creating a marketplace of proprietary materials developed by Indian teachers. I talked to some distinguished personnel from the teaching community to vet the idea, built a financial model, mocked up the product and even registered the domain name seeksha.com (Indian Flavor)

There was only one problem. Major problem, although teachers seemed excited by the idea but none of them were keen on buying proprietary material from others, one because most of the stuff was available free online and second it was somewhat demeaning for them to use the stuff developed by one of their contempories. So I shelved the idea. I also shelved 3 other equally ambitious, but challenging-to-execute ideas (that I won’t be disclosing right now – maybe I’ll start them some day in the future…). And instead, I went a “safer” route, joining boutique research start-up Corporate Knowledge Partners, CKP. The goal wasn’t to change the world, but to create modest cash flow by capturing business research in the SME category. For about a year, CKP remained very profitable and the talented team there executed well against more illustrious research firms.

We hit our goals, but didn’t change the world, and I watched as the vision for Seeksha was implemented by a company named teacherspayteacher, which has gone on to reinvent the way teachers use educational content marketplace. 

I’m thrilled at the success of teacherspayteachers, both because it validates the vision I had and because it’s a service which is used globally. And while part of me still regrets not pursuing Seeksha, I’m not at all convinced I could have executed as well as taecherspayteachers, plus the fact that I was in India and the market is more developed in western countries makes me believe that maybe my assessment about its viability was correct.

Not moving forward with Seeksha taught me that launching a business with modest goals is just as hard as launching one with great ambitions, and that I do my best when building big, world-changing products and ideas. 

Lesson: If you have a big idea, pursue it. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for learning that first-hand.

I started this blog to express my honest views of whether traditional branding concepts are relevant in India(especially in the B2B space) or Indian market requires a specific skill which cant be taught and is an art, mastered by traditional business families.

Before going on the reasons - in future posts - let me just convey my opinion. HELL YEAH, traditional branding concepts are alive and kicking in Indian business space. However, the world of marketing and PR has changed so much in the last few years. It's no longer an option to rely on traditional means of advertising and communications to get out your message. In fact, you are no longer in control of your message.

For anyone trying to grow a business, trying to communicate with customers, it's time to embrace digital marketing. This means letting go and reaching out using new strategies, tools, tactics and technologies. It's not about announcements, broadcasts, or controlled messages. It's a conversation. And how do you start this conversation?

First steps in customer engagement: A great conversation begins by having something to share that's interesting, engaging,provocative. Next, you need to be responsive and remain alert as these conversations emerge, spread, and evolve. Whether you start such conversations yourself, or not, you need to participate in them. Start one, find one, change one, just be part of the conversation.