Kotler Update

Philip Kotler was recently in India. He did an interview with Economic Times and Im noting some points I found interesting.

4Ps was updated to include People in the 21st century. This includes your own back office and frontline people, infact anyone involved in the entire sales and support process (CCDV - elaborated below). 'Our strength is our people' is probably the greatest corporate cliche of all time!

He chose the 4 'P's because his own name begins with a 'P'. He said it jokingly but I wont be surprised if it were true. This would support my hypothesis that great people have a 'me first' thought process!

The new Marketing framework is CCDV - Creating, Communicating and Delivering Value. Lets take Tata Indicom Broadband in Bangalore as a case here. The opinions hereon have nothing to do with Kotler, they are mine!

Tata Indicom Created value by ofering a broadband service at a competitive price with freebies like Static IP, Router, No hidden charges. So far so good.

They advertised like crazy and managed to contract with big residential complexes. They have Shankar Mahadevan doing a breathles jingle and billboards all over the place. Value Communicated!

But when it came to delivery - they fell flat on their face. People who applied for broadband connections - who would be impatient by default - were made to wait more than two months without any communication about the application status from the company, let alone actual installation and activation. Most people get frustrated and cancel. Those who get the connection are annoyed by the delay and then appaled by the poor service standard.

Therefore, they lose out to Airtel in this market and Reliance in CDMA telephony.

This is quite typical of companies in India. Nice ideas, lot of bureacracy and talk, little action. Nobody wants to put in the real effort and get their hands dirty. Thats why China kicks our ass in manufacturing. I hope im part of the generation that changes that!