As India moves rapidly on digitization, I expect a few trends to catch up – the foremost being the explosion of e-wallet, Biometric authentication standardization, Digitally enabled co-operative societies and Usage of Digital Marketing by new-age consumer goods and FMCG-brands to overtake traditional Brands in terms of reach and consideration.
India has always been a consumption-oriented economy, versus export-oriented economies like China. I really don’t see a big locally-serviced consumption mix in the next 10 years. Indian middle class is exploding – and so are consumption patterns. Indians look forward to better quality of goods and services, where currently we lack either expertise or capabilities.
For our diaspora to innovate upon existing line of products and services in order to deliver locally, we need to have the right eco-system for companies to fail repeatedly – and restart fast. The culture of supporting fast-learning failures is something that we are still learning to get into. We also require the red tape from government be removed for innovative business models to emerge – virtually cutting through the 80’s era license raj – we’re better than before, but still not there yet.
Lenovo’s biggest inroads are into increasing our capabilities to analyze customer information to respond faster to their needs and service them better. It includes a significant investment in the field of datacenters – in-memory processing all the way down to employing big data to go through millions of customer sentiments every second. Worldwide, Lenovo has created a group that invests in smart future – start-ups that work on the bleeding edge of consumer focused technology. I strongly believe future of technology belongs to strong Partnerships. We’re rapidly partnering with the disruptors in the Silicon Valley to bring the next generation solutions which will host tomorrow’s IoT or Big Data Analytics. Lenovo’s success mantra is the ingrained culture of replaying the board – always analyzing our moves versus competition’s counter-moves, and learnings based on the analysis. Determine what to replicate in the future, what behaviours to start, stop and continue. The simplicity of the behaviour in itself is the biggest driver to some of our key moves in this space. I would call out the biggest achievements attributable to marketing in FY15/16 are
• The growth of our market-share in SMB – where we created disruptive industry-first partner programs like Lenovo Ka Sikandar and Lenovo Connect and we tied up with new-age start-ups like Qwikcilver, and PayTM to solve re-occurring partner pain-points.
• Successfully integrating Datacenter Group Marketing into the organization and increase awareness levels with customers by 300% YoY, through innovative and focused customer-reach – through direct and bleeding-edge digital marketing campaigns.â€
