A year ago, when it was launched, it was one of the most hyped products (service) from Google. It was hailed as the next generation of communication and the big G was promoting it as everyone will move away from regular email and will use Google Wave.

Today, it was announced that Google “doesn’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”

Last December, after using it for a while, I wrote a blog post, ‘Will Google Wave really become successful?‘

One of the major faults I noted was that the service was “not engaging enough”.

One of the visitors on the post said “It’s like an Instant Messenger merged with email, but what’s new?” Another user stated “MSN does chat better, SKYPE calls better, GMAIL/Yahoo email better. So, where is Google Wave? Nowhere.”

What the above comments show is that the product didn’t have a clear positioning in consumer minds. I guess it was a positioning problem from Google’s end too. They were unclear as to what exactly was this service positioned in the overall package of Google’s services.

Integration is the name of the game in today’s technology marketplace. However, the integration needs a clear positioning. In one of his presentations at Google itself, Seth Godin discussed this issue in details, that it’s not engineering innovation, it’s how your consumers perceive your product to be, is what matters. I keep on saying that ‘success is the most successful recipe for failure’ and I guess the success of Gmail and Gtalk brought this for big G.

Many companies prior have also failed in their line extension and integration efforts. For example, in mid 1980s, Xerox diversified into financial services industry by buying insurance companies and investment banks with one of the logic being, insurance will be a good extension service which will integrate itself with the sale of the costly photo copier. However, in about 5 years time the realisation hit fair and square with Xerox losing billions of dollars overall. By the mid 90s Xerox left the financial services portfolio and re-positioned itself as a document company. The whole diversification idea by integrating an ill-positioned product and service mix boomeranged.

There are many other positioning examples which boomeranged, including the video phone which was launched in mid 1970s and never caught the wave or similarly dishwashers and microwave ovens in Asian and Latin American markets. The consumer reluctance was a results of poor positioning more than anything else in these cases. And big G is no exception to this!!!

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said it was hard to say why Wave did not strike a chord with a majority of users. “It’s a very clever product. You never know why it didn’t work.” He also said “Google will take what it has learned and apply it to something new”. I guess the biggest lesson learnt here is positioning than anything else.

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1. Will Google WAVE really become successful?

For those of you who are researching the Asian economies, this is an interesting chance to participate in the debate. The ‘Marketing in Asia Group’ (MAG) is organizing the 2011 MAG Scholar Conference in Christchurch, New Zealand.

MAG consists of more than 400 researchers from all over the world and this conference will be a good chance for others to get in touch as well as join the network.

I am chairing the track ‘cross-cultural marketing’ and if you are working on cross-cultural issues, will be more than happy to hear from you.

The call for papers is attached herewith.

2001 MAG Scholar Conference Call for Papers

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Recently, I was talking to one of my colleagues who was mis-sold his mobile phone contract. Interestingly enough, I stumbled across a research carried out by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the UK which suggested that more than 9% of all consumers were mis-sold products or services in recent past.

Mis-selling

Several questions emerged in my mind:
1. If mis-selling is so prevalent, what actions are we taking to avoid such things from happening?
2. How and what do we define as mis-selling?
3. If the salesperson (in retail setting where they are selling 100s of products) is unaware about certain attributes of the product or service, is it really mis-selling?
4. When you got aware that you were mis-sold, what actions did you take personally?
5. What factors affected your actions?
6. Was the total monetary impact important for your action (for example, if the mis-selling required you to pay a small amount to rectify the problem did you complain)?
7. What kind of complain did you do?
8. Did the supplier agree that you were mis-sold?
9. Did you think about the legal option? If so, did you take that option? If you did not take it, why not?

I would really be interested in knowing your stories of how you were mis-sold a product or service. Please share.

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Image by cdnbusiness via Flickr

Today, I went to London for a research visit and while sitting in the train for about 90 minutes I counted the number of handbags I could see and identify for fun. I was not scanning everywhere in the boggy but I was just looking at the people whom I can see directly and those who were passing down the isle. I counted 39 handbags in that period of time. The train stopped at only 3 stations in between and I had to change once, so, I guess there was not much movement but 39 still seems a hefty number.

My next objective was to identify which of these handbags could I identify and classify as luxury. Now, this is extremely subjective measure as I have relatively little knowledge of handbags however, I saw 9 LVMH and 5 Gucci handbags (so easy to identify). This is whopping 23% of all handbags I observed as LVMH and 13% of all handbags to be Gucci. By the way, I saw one Berkin handbag while walking near Canary Wharf.

If an LVMH of Gucci executive looked at it, I believe they will be extremely happy however, this made me worried. The penetration of these brands in mass market is amazing on the positive side. However, the question which arose in my mind was “if most people can have it, is it luxury?”

Would love to:

1. hear from you all about your own experiences of travel and spotting handbags too.

2. Moreover, I would really like to know how do you feel when someone else has got the same ‘luxury’ item you have got?

Waiting to hear from you all…

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Came across this fabulous poem by Taylor Mali on What do teachers make? The poet puts it in words so beautifully, I could not resist putting it on my website. Enjoy…

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As the Christmas vacation nears to its end and the new year beacons I had the privilege to observe, give and receive quite a few gifts. In my case though, I was mostly on the giving end of the pleasure.

While the wrapping paper was being bought and later removed from the gifts I had given or received, one question came up. Does packaging really matter? The first thing I did was to start looking at the literature available in the area and know what, there is hardly much available. A very ripe area for research indeed.

Have you thought about similar line of questioning? What is your thought about it? How would you react to a creative vs. non-creative packaging? Will it really affect your purchase decision? Why?

Lets debate.

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Call me a cynic, but I have been using Google wave since last 4 weeks and one of the things I find is, IT’S NOT ENGAGING ENOUGH. There you go, I said it.

I don’t find any compelling reason for using it. One can argue that, you don’t have all your friends using it, however, in my case approximately 60 other friends are using it. And most of them can be put in as innovators or early adaptors in terms of technology products.

I guess Google tried to create that initial buzz which gave it tremendous success with Gmail and several other application by making it invitation only however, I don’t see the engagement. I was amazed how quickly I changed to Gmail from Yahoo and Hotmail as my main webmail.

Do you really see Google WAVE as future of communication as Google suggested or is it really proving the old saying ‘Success is the most successful recipe for failure’… What’s your opinion?

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1. Waving Good bye to Google Wave: Lessons in positioning

Since last year at my school the buzz in the marketing department is around the 37th EMAC conference we are hosting next year. Dr. Keith Perks, a colleague and a very good friend of is the conference chair. The title for the conference is “Marketing Landscapes: A Pause for Thought”.

The theme was put forward because “marketing has come under increasing scrutiny by scholars, practitioners, governments, and pressure groups in the past decade. Leading scholars in the field have held special forums to debate what is perceived as a decline in the status of marketing as a discipline, and its position in the corporate hierarchy from a central role in strategy making to a lower order functional role. Influential non-governmental organisations and governments are bringing marketing to task over its perceived and real lack of concern for ethical and socially responsible behaviour. Marketing academics have been accused of disengaging with the corporate world and their research as becoming increasingly irrelevant to the practice of marketing.”

The theme of the conference was developed “to examine the marketing landscape, to continue the debate, and assess if we have over specialised the discipline into ‘silos’ and narrowed our perspectives resulting in a failure to look at the bigger picture. Marketing has broadened in the last three decades of the 20th century adding to the complexity and diversity of the field. The questions to be raised at the 2008 conference are: Have we gone too far? Do we need a single universal paradigm or multiple paradigms? How can we reconnect with the corporate world? How does marketing respond to its critics?”

How true this is when we start looking at the field of marketing and the largely esoteric research being carried out by experts across the world. I was reading an article published by Rust and others in Journal of Marketing in 2004 titled “Measuring Marketing Productivity: Current Knowledge and Future directions”.

The authors identified three major challenges facing us in the field of marketing.

1. Relating marketing activities to long-term effects

2. Seperation of individual marketing activities from other actions

3. Use of purely financial methods to measure marketing performance which has proved inadequate for justifying marketing investments and therefore, the need for non-financial marketing measurements.

These are tough challenges in front of marketing scholars however, there are still no definitive answers for the same. Furthermore, there are questions as to how the marketing actions add to the value of the firm. Few studies are available but their generalizability is questionable.

Strategic questions which emerge for marketing presently are:

• Why does linking marketing assets to capitalization matters? Can these assets be leveraged to provide strategic options?
• What is marketing’s contribution in managing core business processes or is it going to become a tactical silo dealing largely with advertising (this is what laypersons think about marketing, isn’t it)?
  
• Most times we have seen reactive esoteric models of marketing which attempt to measure customer behaviour. However, the need is there to measure the behaviour pro-actively as to how customers will respond to a certain marketing action.
  
• Most companies manage multiple brands and interesting enough we are still to see research in the field of marketing which addresses issues related to the same comprehensively.
• We don’t have a guideline on how much resources to spend on each marketing alternative to get maximized impact (results). What we have presently are the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) models which measure CLV but don’t provide strategic answers to above questions.
  
• One to One marketing, Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) have become buzzwords, however we don’t have models which can predict individual customer beahaviour and therefore, what we really have aggregate models which at best provide general answers and not customized solutions as most claim.
  
• There are very few customer level longitudinal data based studies in marketing. Almost all studies are based on cross-sectional research. The limitations of this method are known however, not much has been done in this regard.
  
• Much work remains to understand how competition and environment influence firm value.
  

The above mentioned issues highlight two important things according to me.

1. There is a lot to be done in the field of marketing, if marketing has to gain any respect in the world of management.
2. We by ourselves will have to put an end to the esoteric cross-sectional research at some point in time as it fails to answer questions which really matter to managers.

We will have to find answers to the above questions soon if marketing is to regain its once respected position in the field of management.

Rust, Roland T.; Ambler, Tim; Carpenter, Gregory S.; Kumar, V.; Srivastava, Rajendra K. (2004), “Measuring Marketing Productivity: Current Knowledge and Future Directions,” Journal of Marketing, 68 (4), 76-90.

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