Ideas have no meaning unless executed, success or failure is secondary.

Most of the times, owners and managers are carried away by the high profile, power packed motivational speeches by management gurus and the books and articles authored by those who share the success stories of the famous and successful people. Here, the fundamentals and contexts are often missing. What happened in some western country is entirely different and implementing these ideas surely invites failures.

 Geography and demography of countries and even regions and cities of a country are different. Take for example, the AC Bus services to take and drop in Mumbai has a fundamental pitfall in a sense that Mumbai is long, has few parallel roads that controls the traffic upwards and down i.e. from North to South Mumbai in the morning and other way in the evening. The density of traffic is one way any time. This leads to 50% operating efficiency leading to profitability of the project. Whereas the same idea works well in cities which have ring roads and geography is extended all sides and not just north-south. The above fact was discussed by me with the VP of the company who started this private service in Mumbai way back in 90s.

Same is true while considering the pricing of product. A client of mine, a fortune company from USA, when decided to start looking for India as a market and marketing to companies in India, an industrial product, the manager of South East Asia priced it same as prevailing in Singapore and other countries in Asia except China. The customer mapping clearly indicated that buyers are located in North in NCR, industrial township near Hyderabad and on the out skirts of Chennai (Madras than), the cost of traveling to and fro to attend an enquiry is much more and several times when compared to marketing in Singapore and alike countries. Immediately this practical issue was sorted out and re-pricing was done to run the business profitability. Today, company has completed more than twelve years In India.

Owners of small and medium size businesses must understand that just following the success stories and charged by the motivation talks of trainers and speakers won’t lead them to any success, on the contrary more often they spend out of ‘josh’ and later loose ‘the hosh’.  

Be practical. Get reality checked done on your idea management for marketing from the experts in marketing and not management in general.

(To know more about the author please visit: www.ashwinmerchant.com The author can be contacted at ashwin.merchant@yahoo.com)