By Jaisurya Das
The Indian start-up has good tidings ahead..What with the three-year IT holiday, it’s pretty much a breeze now. Kudos to the PM for this bold step that finally recognises the need to give a baby a fair chance to survive in this viciously competitive world.
To be honest, I regret the fact that I set up my consulting firm as early as 2003. This would have been the right time as the sops and tax holidays would have made a world of difference.
These initiatives will give new entrants an opportunity to build a corpus over these 36 months and re-invest the same to scale up. This is exactly what is needed. Spot on!
Quite recently, I met up with a few promoters of start-ups and spent time discussing the challenges of the business.
I found most of them to be technology professionals who were deeply concerned about the look-and-feel of their product. In this case, they were all start-ups with apps in the offing.
One or two were outstanding ideas, and the others were all ideas that one of the constituent partners had. Some researched, some with nothing save the idea that they believed in.
Amazing algorithms, and highly friendly UI means the world today for most of these young entrepreneurs. Rightly so since it will enable a smooth experience for the users but how are they going to build an audience? What will be the average customer acquisition cost?
And how would you retain them, and at what cost?
Have you given thought to how you will build a sustainable audience I asked. Â I see little prep having been done in this area. Much is about a dream, an idea, an innovation but a great idea really means nothing unless you have a sustained audience to accept, and believe in it..
This is probably why you need effective marketing and brand-building. Deeper understanding of audience behaviour is critical. It’s pretty much akin to the solar system ; You can’t work in the penumbra of the mind. This takes a holistic ownership of the umbra of the brain.
Cognitive understanding is the future. There is no point having future ready technology if you don’t understand what the future audience is going to be like. That would be much like admiring the frills and missing the skirt!
Stick to your core competence and deliver a great product. Let the rest be taken care of by others, who have their onions right, when it’s about making your potential customer tick.
Marketing isn’t as easy as it may seem to the naked eye. Neither is brand-building. It takes incisive analysis of behavioural psychology to be a sound marketing professional in today’s world.
So, while the technology is perfected, it’s critical that this is backed with the right kind of direction in marketing coupled with exclusive focus on a crystal clear brand road-map.  You ought to know where you’re headed after all!
While forecasting in business may have been done to death, prediction of audience ‘needs and wants’ may still be relevant. Yes, the metrics will change and it will no longer by about demographics and psychographics; The only scale of measurement would be the complexity of each individual’s / cluster’s neural networks and the way neurons respond to different stimuli.
Social media, for instance, is a great example of how people of similar age cohorts, respond differently to stimuli be it in the form of images, posts or just an incident. We know little, despite being privy to so much of life through timelines and the like.
The generations of tomorrow will practically store nothing, and will use only short-term memory recall as a method to move on in life. Their RAM will work at breakneck speed, processing rapidly all that is thrown at them. They will however only retain a minuscule portion if at all, and that too only if it is relevant to their immediate life.
The rest will be insignificant.
The challenge will be to package marketing messages into small nano capsules that can travel fast, process real quick and yet be relevant in the context of the time.
Deciphering this maze requires a completely different approach and process. This is where the magic of neuromarketing will step in. Start-ups and the like will have an advantage since they possess an open mind and are willing to take the chance of adopting measures that do not necessarily conform to existing paradigms.
The older brick and mortar firms most often believe that their existing think tank is all-pervading and has the depth to adapt to any change in the audience. Strong think tanks’s am sure, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are future ready.
The future is about the human brain. Accept it.
Jaisurya Das, maverick and marketing evangelist, says he eats, sleeps and makes love to brands. His consulting interventions are aimed at making brands powerful and sustainable. The views expressed in this column are his now. Jaisurya Das is also Contributing Editor and writes an online counselling feature on MxM every Thursday