Couple of days back, I covered Moser Baer’s creative way of using cycle carts to expand it’s distribution channel in tier 2 and 3 cities; and now, Indian auto cos are working with the postal department to leverage latter’s nationwide network, in order to increase the dealerships (especially in rural areas).
Banks, Insurance companies and other financial institutions have already partnered with postal department to increase the penetration.
The department of posts is currently exploring business propositions whereby Tata Motors and TVS will be in a position to increase their car dealership in rural areas. These Companies have proposed to tap Tier-II and Tier-III cities by using the postal network – FE
And that makes me wonder why are startups not taking the alternate route to increase distribution and awareness? A standard answer would be that the tech startups have not yet reached the urban landscape – so why waste time and energy in rural sector?
Well, I still believe that the entire ‘local’ marketing flavor is still not exploited completely and we aren’t creative enough to pick our brains.
For e.g. when Mouthshut started advertising on the back side of auto, everybody followed. But since then, everybody seems to be doing the same old thing and what seemed like a creative idea has been turned into a bad commoditized pitch.
Aside, most of the startups I talk to really have no plans to market their product/service – they are too busy coding and in one of those romantic times, expect a viral campaign (to seed by itself) that will put them in the ‘success” trajectory.
And it won’t be wrong to say that most of the geeky/tech startups hate marketeers and the word “marketing” puts them off.
What do you think?
Didn’t Deccan try to sell Air tickets via Post Offices sometime back? I dont think it flew (oh the pun!)
Ashish,
To a certain extent I agree that for the tech geek community marketing, business development, sales are some kind of bad words to use
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But having said that I think there are a couple of other reasons why I feel this is not happening:
1. Usually most of the new start-ups don’t lay too much stress on strong revenue models. The general tendency is to build / try and grow and then figure out the revenues along the way. Personally I have nothing against it and there have been success stories to support this model, but I think this in some way restricts the way we think
2. Collecting bills/payments in an Indian environment is never easy, unless you are a big well know brand or you have something that people pay in advance to consume. Things maybe improving but certain old habits are never easy to change. Sometimes even the biggies have collection issues, so imagine if you are a start up and you are depending on these to grow and sustain. Its never an easy proposition, therefore the start-ups try and avoid getting into this loop early in their business.
Its not only startups who are lacking behind fro obvious reasons, show me an exemplary work done from the servicing industry folks also towards empowering Rural, Indian Govt or anything for the matter.
If we go 10 Kms outside bangalore , people simply dont recognize Google, Microsoft, or Infosys also fro the matter its been only ITC, TATA,Reliance,BATA.the target spectrum for tech companies is limited!
I shall give you a simple example: If you browse through Google Maps you don’t see Mysore been Mapped or crawled
Long way to go India Inc!!!!!
judging by the job opportunities, that seems true
I do totally agree! I was toying with the idea of a startup offering marketing/online consulting to Indian Dot com statups & your post speaks exactly to it! Having been in advt/mrtg for the last 4 yrs- i do feel startups of today currently lack mktg skills & can leverage significantly from it.
As much as a product is perfect, people need to know abt it!
Im currently at Microsofts Online Advt division in NYC ( Search, MSN, facebook, XBox) for the past 2 years & before that was at Saatchi & Saatchi NY. I did write a blog, while i was at school in Wharton – http://adidea.blogspot.com , but thats my only web presence & much much long ago!
Those startups who feel marketing is a challenge , are most welcome to reach me! (and even help validate this idea of mine!)
- sharadl@microsoft.com
Guys
the idea behind this post is for startups to think out of box and get creative (yet cheap) ways to market their product.
The point I am trying to make is that if biggies, who are supposed to be f**king bureaucratic and lazy are willing to take the bet, why can’t startups?
I have couple of ideas which I will share in the next post!
btw – sri, i completely disagree with ur statement – maybe u aren’t following what servicing cos. etc are doing..
As someone truly said, words like Business Dev,Mktg,Sales,Advt etc are unknown/unnecessary to the many ‘techies’ of established companies,leave aside the start ups. Unfortunately not many realize that its Business that drives Technology and not the other way around.