Jakarta Diary: Part I

As I sit on the 17th floor of our high-rise apartment, one of the innumerable towers that form the incredible Jakarta skyline, I am amazed by several things about this beautiful country.

The first thing that strikes you when you land in the simplistic Jakarta airport (once you clear the long slow-moving immigration queue), is the traffic, if you are lucky you could get from the airport to the city in half hour and if you are a bit unlucky it could easily take two hours. I had the experience of doing both. The irony is, there is a huge patch in the middle of every major road in the city which could easily be converted into 1.5 lanes if not two. But No-Jakartans would not do that. Instead the roads are lined with trees almost infinitely. My father says that if a tree falls in a road due to some reason, they replace it with a new tree almost every time within the same week. These are not sort of “we-too-are-green” kind of trees that I have seen in some other cities. They are all very well maintained, lush green. It is humbling to see a country so resolutely adopting to be green in spite of all the troubles that it brings with it!

If you have any liking at all for observing people from a different culture, Indonesians offer a remarkable case study in contrasting microcosms living in harmony. An Indonesian friend remarked to my father-“Our religion is Islam, but our culture is Hindu”. This is visible in the innumerable statues of Hindu Gods and Goddesses on the streets of the city. This contrast extends beyond religious beliefs into their economic conditions as well. On one side of our apartment is the striking skyline that stretches across Jakarta, standing as a shining example of a nation that has boldly ridden the free market tide (and has had serious scars to show for it-check the conversion rates of Jakarta’s currency-Rupiah), one that has successfully attracted foreign investment and managed to raise standards of living for a major section of the society. If I just walk across the room, the window opens up to a different sight-a huge slum with people living in dilapidation. Of course an enormous wall separates the apartment from the slum serving as a grim reminder to the barriers these unfortunate people have to scale to improve their quality of life.

That being said, Indonesians, even the ones I saw in the slums are among the very few people who I am truly jealous of, the reason in the next post.

A Dream for An Awakening

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122867595766686077.html?mod=article-outset-box

Will the middle class truly create the next revolution? The most frustrating aspect is that, even if we all get together and decide that we will change the country tomorrow, I cannot think of even one good leader who has the potential to be at the helm of that change. 

May be this time change will be more organic, more bottom up...without glorifying any leader in particular, having a self-policing public that does not need a charismatic leader, but makes sure that anyone who is elected will be forced to perform well..

Pipe dream? Maybe. But every change in the world started off as a distant dream, didn't it?

Marketing 3.0

Marketing, recently got a lot easier, all you need to have is an internet connection and a little creativity and you can expect to market almost anything. You could upload video demonstrations of your product on Youtube, create Facebook and MySpace communities around your product, create snazzy viral marketing campaigns that almost cost nothing.

TV Radio and the Internet:

However, Marketing also just got a helluva lot harder than ever before! Rewind 15 years, all you had was TV and radio advertising. If you were a large corporation, you had to create kick-ass commercials and you could get noticed. Otherwise you had the option of Direct Marketing, where you could mail out solicited/unsolicited advertisements to a large population and reap rewards (a response rate of 3% is considered exceedingly good in direct marketing). People even got a little smarter and started targeting their marketing efforts, by figuring out the demographics of consumers, by analyzing their buying patterns and so on. 

Even 5 years back, when the Internet era dawned, all companies had to worry about was how to add this new marketing channel to the existing portfolio, how much to allocate to it and where to advertise. It was still all about advertisements. 

Forward to 2008: 

Then suddenly something happened in the websphere, sites like Youtube became a craze, social networking became a simple way of life for a majority of the population. Web communities became a powerful driving force in many product categories (remember Jeff Jarvis's blog entries on bad Dell customer service that brought the company to its knees forcing them to act).

This is a new era of Marketing, and Marketers used to the old ways of life are not going to be successful here. Again, as is the case with any systemic change, this is also an opportunity. Companies that re-learn their basics and re-invent themselves will survive while others will perish. Here is a fantastic article that talks about the changes and how companies can do well in the new environment:  

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122792310060465901.html

The key takeaways from the article:

1. Consumer attention is the most valuable resource in marketing today, get creative in ways to get their attention and utilize it to the fullest for the fleeeting moment when you have it.

2. Do not fear the "cloud" or online communities, instead getting involved with them and even nurturing them can lead to better product design, quicker customer feedback and in the end, much better customer loyalty. Some companies are directly leveraging such communities in product design, market research and in user-generated advertising content!  

3. Pay special attention to niche communities related to your product categories. "When they're efficiently targeted, they can be highly responsive, lucrative and loyal".

4. The days of insanely successful memes are almost over, instead create intelligent "bemes" that customers will readily accept and share with others. "The best online marketing now takes place among people who know and trust each other".

5. Finally, stop thinking about Internet as an extension to your brick-and-morter operations. Instead think of the online and offline shopping experience as part of the same consumer experience continuum. Rethink the synergies between the two. Build a complete shopping experience, not just a website and a store.

Life is Beautiful...

...when you discover a gem of a mail from a dear old friend in your mailbox while idly browsing through it. 

Here is the piece, a beautiful read...

http://azhearing.com/three-days-to-see.htm

His comments on it at that time..."Wishing that i become open enough to experience everything that life has got to offer . :-)". 

It seems so easy that it would be almost dumb not to be that way, and yet, I never seem to get it. To conclude again with his words this time three years later...

"Oh dear ones unless you taste it you don't know what it is   :-)

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Being so near yet so far .... waiting ... waiting ...as if they have got a eternity ahead of them ...."