Will Marketing mix innovation in DTH market create value?

Innovation and disruption are very generic concepts. Innovations in marketing is very frequent phenomenon. The recent verdict of TRAI has disrupted pricing of DTH and DPOs. According to new regime all the Distribution platform operators and Direct to home subscribers have to disclose the MRP of their service offers. In past regime all the DTH and DPOs were selling bundle of TV channels at a price without customer say on what  TV channels he wish to watch. New regime has asked all the Operators to tell the price and empowered customers to pick and choose the TV channels for their subscription fee. All the DTH operators and Cable service operators have to submit a subscription report on every 7^th, 14th, 21^st and 28^th of the month.

According to Crisil report, the new tariff regime will increase the bills of every TV household by 25-30%. TRAI explained and denied the fact of the report saying the report is written on unrealistic measures. The reason for revision of tariff scheme is that a single TV household may not be interested to subscribe all the regional language channels like Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Kenned and Hindi. But cable operators have further bundled the TV channels and designed the pricing of bundled product in such a way that customer will sure buy a package which must be a little bit higher than the previous one.

Actually TV entertainment is very popular in India and entertainment has never been a price sensitive service. So many of the big players are looking micro markets as a big opportunity where competition is negligible and product is insensitive to price.  

The source of entertainment in rural areas are very limited. Either TATA sky or some free channels are available for entertainment. Although reach of smartphones and internet connectivity has further changed the scenario. Most of the cable operators and DTH subscribers are confined to cities and big towns but towns with population less than 1 lakh or 50000 do not have such options. It is a big market which is still virgin. Why most of the players have not entered into such a huge market base in our country? The answer is very simple i.e. low ROI. Because of low per household subscription fee; distribution channel can’t be multilayered. So big corporations are not able to penetrate. But the firms have capacity to expand foresee it as early bird advantage.

Dr. Shubhendra Singh Parihar

(Author is Professor of marketing and Marketing Consultant.)

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Small businesses can invest in digital advertising to create local Brands

The importance of marketing communication can’t be rule out by any business. Either it is big or small one. Scaled up businesses don’t have budget problem whereas smaller one struggle to invest in advertising and even scare of entering into it. Today in internet age, there are multiple options one can select to communicate and advertise with their target audiences.

Hyperlocal businesses are benefiting from such internet options. These options are listed below.

E-mail marketing

SEO and Google AdWords

Mobile marketing

Social media marketing- Instagram, twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

Blogs – blogspot.com, wordpress.com

The return on email marketing campaign are very good. But normally small business owners do not understand the importance of such email marketing campaigns.

Social media is another cost free alternative for media and PR activities. These platform do not require money to invest but a regular time investment is needed to build communities for taking benefit in future.

Brand advocacy is important for small businesses like big businesses. Brand recall can be done with word-of-mouth. Social media, mobile marketing are such platforms to create brand recall.

SEO is another tool to increase traffic in your website. Even a little regular investment fetch handsome benefits. Blogs are total free of cost thing to do. But need to post useful content for creating a trustworthiness among audience.

In a nutshell all internet media tools do not lock a big capital and risk is minimum. The only thing is needed a focused regular approach and a little bit controlled investment alternatingly. This approach will not lock much money and bring in quantum of benefits in two to three years of time

Authored by- Dr. Shubhendra Parihar

Digital marketing strategy- Are we on right track?

It is certain that future will belong to those who will hit the digital space early and invest a portion of their advertising budget in online options of marketing communication.

The new CODE (content, omnichannel, data and experience) of marketing has to be unlocked. How this code can be unlocked is a question of million dollar.

How to unlock this code does not lies in collecting data, inferiority of tools or vendor selection; perhaps a strong analytics program is the key for measurement planning.

First step is to understand the objective of your business. The objective could be to increase revenue, capture more leads, increasing web site traffic, creating awareness and engaging target audience etc.

The second step would be to define KPIs (key performance indicators). After defining KPIs the next step will be defining performance targets to achieve objectives in a given time frame.

Suppose the objective is to generate leads, so we need to capture leads. How can we do this? We can increase signup for free sites keeping in mind a fix number of signup per day or month as timeframe.

To nurture these leads we need to increase whitepaper downloads.

The most important aspect is we need to have a through measurement plan to achieve set objective. We need to engage our audience whosesoever they are online or offline. We need to improve their overall experience with the brand and it is possible only when we ensure our presence everywhere. Research reveals that customer are spending more to buy experience not to buy a utility alone.

So unlocking the new marketing code we need to develop content which we can spread across using omnichannel and collecting and analyzing data for improvising customer experience.

Dr. Shubhendra Parihar

(Dr. Shubhendra is a Management Analyst and faculty of marketing discipline)