There are some who use the words hype and marketing to describe the success story of Gujarat. I would beg to differ because all of us need to back up whatever we do with packaging and marketing. Without these important functions, very little of what anyone does has any value irrespective of merit. Merit is of course necessary but packaging and marketing are functions that needs to be highly respected. The most important function of marketing is providing information. If a customer has no idea of what you are offering there is no way you are going to get him/her to buy it. In governance one needs to set objectives, value systems and specific details of programs. The second function of marketing is explaining to the customer what are benefits of what you are offering and how the customer will gain in terms of efficiency, performance, cost savings, superior customer support and overall satisfaction. . Then comes product differentiation. The consumer is faced with a host of choices. How should the customer decide? We have provide sufficient information to the customer on how what you are offering DIFFERS from other choices facing the customer - so that confusion is removed. For example our product EDUSPOT is the ONLY PRODUCT in the world that is able to record student questions effectively. This is a vital differentiating factor because the recording of the live student question is the vital difference between PRERECORDED lectures and EDUSPOT. Then comes the most vital part of marketing: PRICING. Only after several months of interacting with customers will the marketing person arrive at the pricing models based on what customers will readily buy. So we have several pricing models: 1) Full license purchase, 2) Limited license purchase. 3) Rental model. 4) Subset feature model. 5) Extended payment model. 6) Service model. So by doing the hard work of talking to several hundreds of customers, we realize that different customers have differing circumstances and one cannot have a one-price-fits all model. To arrive at these pricing models takes literally months and often years of interaction with customers. At every point the businessman has to be making firm decisions and freezing the various models as well as resist the pressure to drop the prices to clinch a sale if the price is reasonable to start with. Having done all this, the businessman then has to wait for the potential customers to arrive at buying decisions based on availability of funds Then comes the packaging. When all the models are frozen then the seller packages the product. Packaging is how the end user sees the product. It may be a website where a customer can subscribe to a service. It may be a kiosk where one can buy a physical product like milk either in bottles or plastic bags etc. With Marketing and Packaging comes the sale and then comes after sales support. All these are as necessary in business as in governance. So any entity that hopes to offer genuine governance has to put in all the hard effort above to be able to deliver satisfactory governance. What has happened over the last few years of misrule especially at the center is that there is no evidence of all this hard work - whereas in Gujarat, there is. This all shows that Modijis being a businessman has certainly aided in delivering good governance. So what the critics call hype is extremely necessary and important part of governance. Those who have seen EDUSPOT demos will observe that we attempt to do the demo EXACTLY at the agreed time and date and almost 100% of our demos are successful given decent bandwidth availability at customer site. All this requires great deal of practice and hard work. We see evidence of this in Gujarat and certainly not in the center. So, as a businessman, I should say - the so called hype of Gujarat is good and necessary business practice and governance. It is not perfect - nothing ever is - but as a work in progress it is worthy of emulation by other states and the center.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 01:42:59 +0000