Posts

In Conversation with: Sairee Chahal

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Hello everyone, Today we bring an interview with  Sairee Chahal, Found er & CEO of SHEROES . Sairee has many, many accomplishments to her credit and is leading and inspiring countless women. Read more to learn about Sairee's advice & recommendations to young entrepreneurs. Excerpts from an email interview with Sairee. Question 1: What led you to start your entrepreneurial journey? I have been an entrepreneur more than once and have also been on the corporate side, with its own trappings of success and career ladder. However, one does realise the need to address what looks like a reducing peer group as you grow into your career. SHEROES was set up with the view of converting the talk about diversity into the action We all know the figures, the data, the gender and women at work debate but how do we bring out solutions. SHEROES.in is a step in that direction. The response has been great and we are very early into this. This

Tête-à-Tête: Yekemi Otaru

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Hello everyone, Today we bring an interview with Yekemi Otaru, powerhouse entrepreneur, author of The Smart Sceptic's Guide to Social Media in Organisations (Rethink Press, 2016) and the Managing Director of YO! Marketing®, a strategic marketing agency working with engineering, technology and advanced manufacturing companies. Read more to learn about Yekemi's advice to young entrepreneurs and recommendations to marketers. Excerpts from an email interview with Yekemi. Sumedha: What led you to start your entrepreneurial journey? Yekemi:  I was fortunate in my early career to work in large corporate organisations. These organisations offered great training programs and exposure to interesting projects. However, I began to find that the corporate environment was quite risk-averse and limited in allowing employees try new ideas. And I had, and still have a lot of ideas. This is how I started to think about entrepreneurship . Sume dha : Would you like to tell

Event Marketing RoI

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And then, many a marketer has scurried away while trying to reply to this question -- "But how do we measure the RoI of this event?"   Image source:  https://goo.gl/CpCgHw Events do provide a great way to connect with prospective leads at scale, provide tremendous brand building opportunities, not to mention reconnecting with lost customers, launching new products and many more. In fact, for certain industries, event marketing is  de rigueur (think consumer goods, fashion, e-commerce, publishing). Think New York Fashion Week, Mobile World Congress, Franfurt Book Fair, the Apple Keynotes, The Consumer Electronics Show. However, are there any ways to track the RoI of an event? (This may include conferences that you attend or conduct as marketers) I risk the wrath of many marketing scientists when I say that an objective marketer is the best judge of whether the event served its objectives or not. There may be highly sophisticated models (and there

The LinkedIn BrandConnect Delhi: Sneak Peek

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Hello, namaste and hola, First, I attended the LinkedIn BrandConnect Delhi event this week (September 14). Heard everyone speak - from  Hugh Burkitt, CEO, The Marketing Society,  Jeff Weiner, CEO, LinkedIn,  Shannon Stubo, CMO and Senior Vice President, Communications,  LinkedIn amongst others. View the event details here . Second, I really wanted to do a live social media update from the event, but couldn't because I didn't manage to get the right configuration (lights, seat, angle). So here are few images from the event and few observations. Shannon Stubo, CMO and Senior Vice President,  Communications,  LinkedIn &  Jeff Weiner, CEO, LinkedIn at the Fireside Chat session @BrandConnect. Hey, is that your blogger - yes, it is! [PS: Sorry about the image resolutions] What I really liked was the idea - as marketers, given the hectic, crazy schedules that we have, there are very few events that you'd want to attend. And I marked thi

The Five Most Important Skills for a Marketer

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Image credit: Pexel 1. Data In God we trust; all others - bring data. W. Edwards Deming (the prolific American engineer, statistician, professor and author) couldn't have said it better. And data is the number one doctrine that marketers need to swear by - else decisions would be irrational, biased and ultimately detrimental to the overall state of business of the organisation. There is no dearth of data within organisations - there is dearth in accepting the usage of data in decision making. Being data driven is the fundamental weapon in any marketing professional's arsenal. It is imperative that every decision is data-led. In a study conducted by Argyle Executive Forum, in partnership with Oracle Marketing Cloud, leading CMOs across US were surveyed to understand the top challenges faced by them - and 66% indicated that further transitioning into a data driven department was one of their key 2017 objectives. Of course, apart from using data for decision ma

Event Resurrection: The Benefits' Index

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Image source:  https://www.ketchum.com/event-marketing Almost every marketing newsletter, channel, post, blog is agog with one of these following words: mobile, big data, analytics, social. So, almost at the risk of sounding Jurassic, I am writing this post about event marketing benefits. This article comes after the How Not to Go Crazy Series: event social media marketing, publicity and press for events - since I felt this was one area that should have preceded those topics, here it is. Isn't event marketing prehistoric? Well, no.  Upwards of $500 billion are spent on events globally per year (1). And that money doesn't get spent unless there is RoI. A well balanced marketing mix would comprise a fair share of online, offline and/or events. If you don't conduct events, you miss out on a lot - building on brand visibility, new product launches (remember Apple's epic product launches?) reconnecting with lost customers, getting introduced to new prospects

Customer Service: Nirvana or Necrosis?

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Hello, and that after an incredibly straight jacketed last article (I realized it later – was that me?!). Image source: http://goo.gl/Ck1P4B Today, we discuss about that component of the organizational value chain that is incredibly critical – and that can single handedly impact the end users’ perception and experience, and that can affect the profitability, credibility and the sustainability of any customer conscious organization in the long run – Customer Service. Suppose you buy a product off an internet portal, the said product doesn’t work as intended, you call up customer service. Now right there that is one function that can straight-away transform your customer experience. Post your conversation, you can leave feeling elated, dejected or angry, depending on how serious is the customer ethic within the organization. Sometimes, even with a good customer service team, you can be left feeling disappointed – but then, there are marks for trying. Even with a gr