Of Twitter & It's emotions

Twitter posted an YoY growth of 48% and a $710 million revenue last quarter. Despite the seemingly stellar performance, Twitter got a lot of flak from media and other online pundits.

The reason: A flat MAU (Monthly active users) overall and a negative growth if one excludes the SMS users.

Problems with Twitter 

Many product experts & online gurus have written about the chink in twitter's armory & how they can overcome it. You can read about them here, here & here. The key takeaway from all of these blogs:

1. Confusing, intimidating and a scary product experience. This is the reason we see so many new signups followed by long periods of inactivity. 
2. Lack of effective measures to tackle threats & abuses
3. Lack of ego massage. Remember people literally start with zero followers, and find hard to build their follower base and eventually give up. 

Not the go-to channel for advertisers

Apart from the above mentioned problems, twitter does not compare favorably as a platform of choice for wide section of advertisers. Many (including me) see twitter as a platform for getting 'real time news & updates'. The nature of the product suits certain kinds of businesses and categories very well like news channels, businesses in service sector and personal technology products among others. 

But for many others, the necessity or need to give 'real time' information to their customers is not paramount. For instance, a consumer goods company may choose to use twitter as a broadcast medium as opposed to a communication medium.  

Inconsistent product experience

However, the core problem with Twitter has been the inconsistent product experience. I have been an avid user of Twitter since 2012 and I am addicted to the platform. I primarily see it as a source of quick, authentic, useful information & discussions. As a customer, everyone needs a consistent product experience. I wouldn't patronize or recommend a super-classy restaurant that has turned into a filthy highway joint.  Same is the case with twitter.

I would go on & classify the different kind of emotions/experiences with Twitter into the following buckets:

• Being informed: I share a lot of useful stuff on twitter. Links, tweets pertaining to things like marketing, content, advertising, trivia, hacks etc and I follow people who share similar things. I enjoy the process of finding stuff real time.

• Entertainment: There is lot of pun, humor around twitter which instantly puts a smile on my face. It comes as a welcome break in your hectic day. 

• Hopeful: I feel a lot more hopeful when I see positive initiatives from government agencies (Railways, MEA), NGO's (Chennai floods, Nepal earthquake, Mumbai rains). The spirit of individuals & celebrities was something very heartening to see. 

• Motivated: Quotes & insights from marketing gurus, startup founders , success stories are all sources of motivation. 

• And then there are certain days, when there is so much negativity by political parties, fans of actors over downright stupid issues (at least in India). Off late, tweets of this genre has dominated my timeline. "Influencers" with motivated intent make sure they bombard your timeline with tweets that are negative, and has overdose of a "brand messages".

As you had seen from the above example, the dominant feeling of using a product changes drastically during the course of a single day. If the dominant feeling is more negative or intimidating, one tends to stay away from the platform for most part of the day.

A quick poll on the various emotions a user go through on twitter has been enumerated here which pretty much testifies the pre-dominant feeling of using twitter for an average Indian user.

The onus of keeping the time-line clean, positive and buzzing with latest stuff squarely lies with the user. He/she has to follow the right people, be part of the 'right' lists, and be smart about who they want to be followed by. I feel that's too much of an effort from the user side. 

Sense this: You will still able to see tweets/posts of a person, his tweets will still be visible to you if the tweet is RT'ed by a person you follow. The whole point of avoiding negativity and consuming information "I want" goes for a toss. 

So, what problem of connectivity is twitter solving?

Final thoughts:

The strong and visceral emotions can take a toll on most of the people, including regular users. What chance will a newbie have if they are put off the bile on their very first day on twitter? Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have their own short comings, but split personality & unpredictability is not one among them!

Your take?

Platform oriented businesses- What are the branding challenges?

Off-late, there has been rise in the number of 'platform oriented businesses'. Zomato, Ola, Uber, AirBnB are a few businesses who have emerged as unicorns from the 'Platform' oriented model. No, I am not going to talk about their success stories and how they have created a 'niche' for themselves. The article is going to analyse unique characteristics of platforms, and challenges from a branding perspective.

How is a platform different from a linear business?

Before we get any further, let's get the difference between a platform & linear companies straight.  A platform is a business model that ensures exchange of values (owned or created on the platform) between two or more user groups.  Uber, Twitter, Facebook, AirBnB are all examples of such platforms.

On the other hand a linear business creates & owns the value it provides to its consumers. PizzaHut, Hilton Group etc are examples of linear business models.  These businesses control every aspect of the end-user's experience.

With differences laid out, how is branding for 'platforms' unique and challenging?

1. A platform has less or no control over the user experience

The challenge is self-explanatory. Any major platform oriented business does not own or control the user experience. For instance, AirBnb- World's largest market place for vacation rentals does not own a SINGLE hotel or room. Unlike a hotel chain that controls 100% of the user experience (from booking to check-out), AirBnB probably controls 5-10% of the consumer experience.

Like any platform business, the brand persona is created  through users interaction with each other. Dosen't that give you jitters as a brand manager? But dosent seem like Midenhall- CMO of AirBnb is massively bothered.

A quick look at his Linkedin profile reveals how he sees AirBnb- 'World's first community driven super-brand'.  This shows that more than 90% of the AirBnB is dictated & controlled by its users and not the corporate leadership. This can be viewed as a benefit of the platform business model- Externalised brand building. Linear brands try to 'crowdsource' or 'get inspiration' for marketing stories. In a platform, the stories between two humans are stronger than the story of singular human/product/service.

Successful brands have emulated this to overcome the lack of control over user experience.  So build your story.

2. A platform is more momentary in nature

A platform is not an easy business to establish & run. The focus should always be on recruiting producers & consumers to solve each others problem, and ensure that they stick to your platform.  However, platforms are very very dynamic in nature. They are built on moments when everything clicks.

Product- market fit is one such example. Players like  Ola, Uber experienced product-market fit because the product enabled people to easily 'book a car' for committing and drivers benefited from the process of 'automated' revenue & incentives. Whilst Uber initially invested heavily on building technology, on-boarding drivers & consumers, it benefited from massive scalability thereafter.

So, now to the main question! How does disrutption and scalability make branding for platforms unique?

• A platform brand must always start with utility-driven brand positioning.

• The second challenge comes from the fact that any platform will go through three stages of branding within first 10 years of inception (elaborated below) and is evolutionary in nature. This is in complete contrast to what happens for a linear brand, where the positioning is always focussed on just getting 'being aspirational'. 

As seen from a lot successful platforms, there are three stages to platform branding to overcome the 'momentary' nature of platforms.

• Utility-  Any platform has to be disruptive. Introduce new  behvaiour among its users & suppliers (Remember how Zomato changed food discovery among consumers & hoteliers).  This phase of branding usually focusses on convincing users about the value of the platform,  and how to unlock best value, and opportunities  for its suppliers. 'Zomato' did this brilliantly helping users discover new restaurants at the push of a button, "Uber" did an exceptional job of having a private driver for all our commuting purpose, with just a couple of clicks. Both these platforms were vert utility focussed and provided just ONE thing that the user wanted. The problem they were solving was incorporated into their branding strategy! How cool!

• Incubation- This stage, the startups have reached a stage where they need to start thinking like a traditional brand.  All successful platform brands like Google, Amazon etc had a big incubation period, before they built a successful brand positioning.  When Google started out, it was all utility focussed, and offered an alternative to Yahoo search. Google then entered a period of incubation (or product innovation) and came up with awesome stuff like Gmail, Youtube (acquisition), Maps, Adwords which enhanced its core product- Search engine.  The incubation has paid off & how! Currently Google positions itself as 'Organizing world's information'. 

• Aspirational - The final phase of getting a successful platform branding is to become aspirational (After a massively successful incubation). Things like purpose of existence (Mission), Road map etc should be very clear. A good example for this is Facebook's positioning. It started out as a platform for "connecting" friends, and now is on a mission to "Connecting & empowering people around the world" through Facebook. All their initiatives like messenger, Free basics, etc are aimed to deliver this. 

 3.  Platforms have different interaction models based on platform types

Just like products, the  customer interacts differently with different platforms. Some platforms are purely transactional, some are purely for engagement purpose, and some are for utility purpose. The interaction model of each platform will determine how it starts to brand itself in stage-1.

Any other challenges you think needs to included? Feel free to comment in! 

Verbifying brand names: The good and the bad

We all FaceTime/Skype but we generally don't Facebook or Youtube. Similarly we Google & don't Bing (at least not me :D) The usage of 'Google it' subliminally cues the market leadership of Google.

So, why are some popular brands used in our daily conversations as verbs and other are not? Is it really a good idea to 'Verbify' a brand (Remember, not everyone is Google :P). Many may think that it's an ultimate compliment for a brand to be used as a verb and demonstrates the personal connection between the consumer & the company. However the 'intellectual attorneys' contend that using a brand name this way risks the 'Genricide', meaning losing the legal power to trademark.

Some prominent brand names that have been verbified:

Bikni: Trademark previously owned by the creator of Bikni- Louis Reard.

Xerox: A company that first introduced photo-copying machines in 1949, became synonyms to the word 'Photo-copy'. There are many reasons why Xerox lost it's market share to competitors, but they invested millions of dollars in fruitless campaigns to persuade people not to use Xerox as verb. Xerox did win the battle (Not in India though ) but lost the market!

FedEx: A US- phenomenon to indicate sending parcels via courier.

Photoshop: A software by adobe. But many people use it to indicate any modification of images.

Escalator: Product of Otis, which owned the trademark previously. 

Harpic: A substitute used to refer to toilet cleaners. The trademark is owned by Reckitt Benckiser Group plc

From what we have seen from the above examples, some brands have become so 'Genricized' that we no longer associate them as brand names in our mind. From the example of Google, it would be safe to say that brand name as verb in a virtual monopoly situation actually beneficial.  However, Google has repeatedly warned people against using their trademark as a verb, for if google becomes synonyms to 'search' (which it already has) Microsoft could advertise "Use Bing for all your complicated googling" :P. 

When the verbification happens in a segment consisting of many small players, there is no benefit  as seen with cases of Xerox & Bikni.  The verb usage doesn't really matter, as the brand name connotation has well & truly disappeared, indicating that the branding managers did not do enough to protect their trademark from becoming generic. 

Any more examples of beneficial or detrimental brand names as verbs? 

Marketing gurus- Has the bubble bust?

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, when I decided to update my LinkedIn and expand my connections.  I also saw a few profiles (or rather stalked) and found a plethora of creative and never heard before designations like

•       Startup Enthusiast
•       Design Ninja
•       Marketing guru
•       Growth hacker/Growth marketer
•      Creative superhero among others.

Most of these designations are related to digital marketing. The digital world has expanded and more people are coming online than ever before, leading to exponential increase in digital marketing. But only a select few actually know what they are doing in social media or other search networks.

I often draw parallels between digital marketing & teenage sex. Everyone knows a little bit about it, very few have tried everything, but everyone talks like an expert.

One such upcoming breed are the ‘digital marketing gurus’ who claim to know everything about this industry. But do we have too many of them? Let me show you results of some generic keywords

Digital marketing jobs India	3,40,00,000 results (0.48 sec)
Digital marketing agency India	1,07,00,000 results (0.32 sec)
Digital Marketing Professionals India	1,09,00,000 results (0.32 seconds)
Digital Marketing experts India	About 56,60,000 results (0.40 seconds)

Some observation from the above data:

• For every job, there are three digital marketing professionals. i.e. ratio of professionals to available jobs is 1:3
• This is a gem. The number of agencies in India is almost equal to the number of digital marketing professionals.

•  Every second digital marketing professional is an expert. i.e professional to expert ratio is ~2:1

As I said earlier, there are more people talking about digital marketing than the number of people actually practicing it.  With the IT sector reaching maturity, digital marketing is definitely going to be the next big job spinner in India.  The aim I feel should be create more doers. I would consider this done, only if the professionals to job ratio is reverse of what it is now and the professionals to expert ratio is a bit widens a bit. 

Let your work do the talking, not your ‘creative’ designations.

P.S: I am a digital marketing professional, just learning the tricks of the trade now :P. Far from even being the G in guru. ;)

Are we trivializing the meaning of rape?

Words and phrases like most teen cultural expressions come and go out of fashion.  Certain phrases we use in our ‘casual conversations’ might leave our previous generation (or the slightly older ones from the current gen) a bit perplexed even though they might be harmless.

One such fad off late has been the use of the word ‘rape’ to describe negative stuff like defeats, injury etc. or to represent positive things like beating, winning among others.  How often have we heard this-

• “ I am gonna be raped tomorrow”
• “My team will rape the opponents”
• “Oh, I just raped the economics exam. Fuck yeah”.
• “Team A got raped by Team B”.

And every time I hear this, it startles me as to why the word rape has been  tossed around to describe such small things, as if it's a joke? How can one team winning over the other be equated to rape? There is nothing cool about rape and committing such heinous crime. Imagine how a victim of sexual assault ( might be one near you as well) would feel hearing the word being thrown so casually in our daily conversations. To use rape so ‘casually’ to describe simple things trivializes its actual meaning. One of my friends pointed out, the use of ‘rape’ in casual conversations is accompanied by laughter. Have we forgotten the devastation of the act, and the vulnerability of the men and women who face it?

Rape is not the only word to be used  in this context. Kill, murder,  have undergone this, and with the current usage, its not long before ‘rape’ will  be used to describe petty things.

Let me try to dissect this for you.

• 97 women are raped in India everyday.
• Of all the rape cases that have been reported, nearly 14,000 victims include minors as victims.
• Nearly 77% of the rape convicts have not seen jail even once in their life. They are still roaming scott free among us. 

These are just the cream of chilling facts about rape. Many foreigners, label our society and hence our country as the rape capital. By using this word so casually, we seemingly appear to approve of sexual violence against men and women.  And as I pointed out earlier, diluting the meaning of such words. 

Will you be using the word so casually if it was someone you know who was subjected to rape? Probably not. Enough said. 

Do I have a solution for this? Sadly no. As a start, I ask my friends from not using it so casually. Secondly, I try to spread awareness and talk to people regarding the trauma people go through post this. And finally, share this stuff on all possible platforms I can.

Are you considering changing yourself after this? If yes Great. If not, I don't know what will.

Open to suggestions and comments. 

My President- A Rocket Scientist

APJ is no more. This tribute post is dedicated to one of the greatest Indians to have ever lived. I am just going to pen down what ever I feel. I will start with one of his recent tweets, which truly defined him

Remember. . "I can do it we can do it india will do it."

— APJ Abdul Kalam (@APJAbdulKalam) June 20, 2015

You know what a great human being he was, when WhatsApp groups that have been inactive for an eternity suddenly becomes active, informing the passing away of this great man.

One thing that every APJ fan can be proud of, he passed away doing something that he loved: Teaching and inspiring young minds.

Born in small town in southern part of Tamil Nadu, he was always far ahead of his times. At a time when many in the country where skeptical, he openly supported the Kudankulam nuclear power plant project.He ignited minds, inspired young & old alike.

In a country where parents don't trust their kids to do small things, he believed in us to make India a super power by 2020.

So many people in my timeline (Twitter & FB) are talking about their experience of meeting Kalam, spending time, and sharing their pictures with him. Just goes to show how accessible he was. He literally made the office of president accessible to the general public.

Well, I don't know what else to add. The man who ushered Indian on a remarkable journey is no more. I sincerely hope we make his Vision 2020 a reality.


One of my favourite speech he made at the EU parliament (Just the highlights).

RIP Sir. Jai Hind.