Prof Athish Chattaopadhyay on Marketing Plan

Human beings are not rational. Perception is everything. Marketers thrive on the heteroginity of the humans.If you ask the question ‘What is one plus one?’ An artsy person will answer ‘One two buckle my shoe… three four shut the door…’ you ask the same question is asked to an accountant, he will say ‘What do you want it to be?’ and Ask a scientist he say ‘ It is always equals 2!’ and a Marketer will say ‘It must always be more than 2′ It could be 11 or it could be 100, but always more than 2. That is perception, rather creating the perception.

Athish encouraged us to change the product centric view to customer centric view. Then he made a case for systematic approach to marketing. And walked us through the set of questions to ask ourself to come up with a plan.

I’m going to do the exercise.

Mr S K Palekar, Eureka Forbes on Marketing and Sales

As part of Transofrming Innovation to Enterprise course offered by S P Jain Institute of Management and Research arranged by Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, to help Technology Entrepreneur Promotion Program(TePP) innovators and coordinators.

Highlights:

Key things to see are:

Idea is to start with a customer at Zero, Convert them into Aware customers( A), then into Interested customer(I), then to someone who desires the offering(D), and Ultimately create action(A). And there is After Market engagement too to worry about.

• Market Intellignece
• Segmentation
• Targeting
• Positioning.

Well then there is a 7-steps to selling.

1. Prospecting
2. Calls
3. Presentation
4. Closing
5. Transaction
6. Handholding
7. Customer Relationship Management(CRM)

The talk was illustrated with examples. And lot of them from his own long colorful carrer. It was a wonderful and eyeopening experience for me. Mr Palekar reduced Positioning to just four questions(about the product):

1. Who is your customer?
2. What is he/she doing now?
3. What is your offer?
4. How is it better?

Amazon Elastic Block Store and Opensim

The announcement of Elastic Block Store has opened the flood gates for new methods of using, distributing, and monetizing opensource software. The very nature of opensource software is that it is emergent – always getting enhanced by the community. Opensim – the opensource server side SecondLife like virtual world is no exception.

Opensim + Amazon EC2 is a made for each other pair – heavy computing and bandwidth offered by AWS is a boon for computing and bandwidth intensive OpenSim. So far, the transient nature of EC2 made it unattractive to host OpenSim in EC2 without custom engineering. Elastic Block Store changes that. Now it is possible to make the data persistent.

Venkat and I are experimenting with hosting OpenSim on EC2 + EBS. We will share the results as we progress. Along with sharing the technical nuances involved, we are planning to make it available via DevPay. Who said  there is no money to be made in OpenSource?