B-Factor

Early this morning,
I heard a bell ringing,
Deep inside my heart
I always hear this aloud

I opened my heart,
just wanted to know what.
All I cld see is
u, u and only u

It took years for me
to realize that u are in
it took years for me
to hear that ring

But when i heard,
the rest is history
the rest is love
and the rest is my life

I feel like a kid in your arm,
always seeking your cuddle.
I feel lost in your charm,
ur voice grow sweeter than fiddle.

I cannot promise a better life for you,
but one thing i can promise,
it will be THE best life,
you have ever lived.

All I need is your love,
all i need is your support.
Stand with me, I will bring this world at your feet
Live with me, to know how much I love you.

This post is the outcome of a conversation which I had with a branding agent during my train journey.

Branding is a process by which a product or a service is made popular among the target audience. If you have an organization and when you go for branding, there are so many key points which you need to focus on, of course all branding agents will take care of that, but inspite of that sometimes the whole process of branding will yield you only half of what that is expected. Where is it going wrong, the main problem lies here, corporates fail to notice and concentrate on minor areas.

When I was involved in conversation with that branding agent,I asked him one simple question, “Where this whole process of branding starts?” His answer was not a surprising one and this is the answer you can hear from any agent, it is market.But the saddest part is, IT IS NOT. The first and the foremost target audience should be your employees. Off late, I have been seeing so many people, who are discontented with their employers may it be Microsoft or some 4 computer IT concern in our locality. When I take interviews,I would ask one question to everyone, “What is the reason for the change?”, most people say that they want to work in cutting edge technologies and some will say that they this is my dream company, which i always wanted to work with. But it is obvious that they are givng sugar coated answers. If you can contemplate, you can easily grasp the reason lying behind. I have hardly heard any candidate expressing his gratitude to his previous employer or talking good things about there, they always complain, either about the facilities or about the politics there. This will create a negative impact in the society and other among other customers. This will smash all your branding strategies.

How many employers think that their customers are their best ambassadors? how many of them are even aware of that, in my point of view, I would say that, they are wasting their wonderful resources. Thou Sachin says that Reynolds is the best pen in this world, if my friend says that it is not lasting for long, I will not buy, thou my friend may be wrong, but still I will take his word unless otherwise another friend comes and says it is really fine. So your 6 crore costing advertisement goes waste, because a customer who buys that 6 rs pen has more influence on me. So it is best if you can spend in fixing up those gaps rather than trying to make big leaps. I am not against those branding processes, but that should be the second move. If your employee is satisfied with you, then you can satisfy the market.

There is always some gap between the management and the employees, that is not a healthy gap. Take this example, how many of us say that it is my company, it is my client, may be we will tell a third person, but not to ourself. Talking about leadership, leadership is not in the post you hold, but it is in the work you do. You may be a CEO or a normal finance clerk. I would rather call it as ownership, I read an online ownership survey results, which says 69% of the employees lack ownership in their job. Unless employer cultivates that ownership in every employee, this will be very difficult.

There are so many ways, easy ways with which you can make your employee say “It is my company”. To put it in a better way, I will call it “Sense of Belonging”, make them feel you are there for them and lay on your back and see the results, it will be amazing. Employee satisfaction is the major move in branding, man to man communication is more effective than media to man communication.

One word from your employee is more than a 100k internet marketing or a paper one.

Here, I remember the words of Mahatma Gandhi,”You must be the change you wish to see in the world”. Dont get puzzled, where Mahatma Gandhi comes in picture when we are talking about Branding and Leadership, had you read his autobiography you could have learnt so much about that. So when you are going for branding, start with you, your employee and see the results. Change the way you look at branding, it is not external, it is internal, purely internal.After this conversation, he told that he will modify his POA(Proposal of Agenda) and added this in it.

Google Analytics announced some new features and upgrades last night at the eMetrics. The new Google Analytics update includes so many new features like Site Search details, outbound link analysis, improved UI reports etc. For more on this, read allaboutseo

You would have seen this is many movies, including the latest Bond film and even in Akshay’s new add for Thums-up. For a long time I have been wondering whether is this an art or a free form. Then I found out, it is called as Parkour, wikipedia defines this as

“Parkour  is an activity with the aim of moving from one point to another as efficiently and quickly as possible, using principally the abilities of the human body.”

People say, it gives a lot of courage and confidence. Everyone of us would have involved ourselves in some kind of parkour activity, mostly while crossing the medians ;). But so much there, now i am seriously looking for Parkour clubs in chennai. Help me out, if you can ;?

One of my Friend told this funny thing, Here it is.

1. Go to IE
2. Type Airtel and press Ctrl + Enter
3. See what happens

You will be taken to Vodafone So what is behind.

Later I noticed that this is not only with IE, infact it has nothing with IE. It is nothing but Airtel.com which is a spanish site. Vodafone has acquired this service provider there. Anyways, it makes sense in India, not anywhere

Yesterday, I went to Mobile Store, the new mobile retail outlet in Chennai with my friend. It is a new shop, so the interior looks neat and sexy, but that is the only good thing you can see over there, nothing else. Believe it or not, they made us wait for 3 hours, first they told, they are out of stock, that sales guy told, he will call us once the stock comes, he told it will take just 30 min. We thought we could go and see other shops, but my friend wanted to get it from here. So we went out and came, then they told, its on the way will be there in 30 min. We waited, but its of no use, this half an hour cycle went on and on. Finally it took 2.30 hrs for them to bring the mobile. And we got the mobile, now another problem with the billing, the Bar code reader couldn’t recognize the price, then again we waited. Finally it recognized, and when we gave the credit card, second big headache, their machine, i think they would have got it for seconds, it was some 5 years old and it couldnt even connect to the server. Those guys tried all sorts of stunts, but it failed, then atlast somehow it was successful and we got the mobile.

It was a pathetic experience, I have never seen such a poor customer care anywhere. S, I guess you got what I am going to say. Yep, DONT GO