Rapid Commoditization Of Complex Solutions Calls

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Ques. Please share the marketing strategy of any one company (including rural marketing) working under any of the following industries- Automobile, banking, chemical, cement, defense services, electronics, engineering, health, fashion, IT software/ IT hardware, small scale industry and khadi & village industry, textile and tourism industry.

Ans. Marketing strategy is a process that can allow an organization to concentrate its resources on the optimal opportunities with the goals of increasing sales and achieving a sustainable competitive advantage. Marketing strategy includes all basic and long-term activities in the field of marketing that deal with the analysis of the strategic initial situation of a company and the formulation, evaluation and selection of market-oriented strategies and therefore contributes to the goals of the company and its marketing objectives. Marketing strategies serve as the fundamental underpinning of marketing plans designed to fill market needs and reach marketing objectives. Plans and objectives are generally tested for measurable results. Commonly, marketing strategies are developed as multi-year plans, with a tactical plan detailing specific actions to be accomplished in the current year. Time horizons covered by the marketing plan vary by company, by industry, and by nation, however, time horizons are becoming shorter as the speed of change in the environment increases. Marketing strategies are dynamic and interactive. They are partially planned and partially unplanned. Marketing strategy involves careful scanning of the internal and external environments. Internal environmental factors include the marketing mix, plus performance analysis and strategic constraints. External environmental factors include customer analysis, competitor analysis, market analysis, as well as evaluation of any elements of the technological, economic, cultural or political/legal environment likely to impact success. A key component of marketing strategy is often to keep marketing in line with a company's overarching mission statement. Fluctuating customer requirements and competitive forces are putting more pressure on marketing and are demanding superior sales and marketing strategy and tactical execution. The cycle time from product creation, to product launch, for a winning go-to-market strategy, leaves no margin for error.

The rapid commoditization of complex solutions calls for concise marketing strategy and timely execution, yet many companies are finding their best sales and marketing strategies are highly-diluted by the time they reach the customer.

International business machines Corporation (IBM) http://stockwatch.in/files/IBM.jpg

International Business Machines Corporation (or IBM) is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation, with headquarters in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and markets computer hardware and software, and offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. The company was founded in 1911 as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) through a merger of three companies: the Tabulating Machine Company, the International Time Recording Company, and the Computing Scale Company. CTR adopted the name International Business Machines in 1924, using a name previously designated to CTR's subsidiary in Canada and later South America. Security analysts nicknamed IBM Big Blue in recognition of IBM's common use of blue in products, packaging, and logo. In 2012, Fortune ranked IBM the #2 largest U.S. firm in terms of number of employees (433,362), the #4 largest in terms of market capitalization, the #9 most profitable, and the #19 largest firm in terms of revenue. Globally, the company was ranked the #31 largest in terms of revenue by Forbes for 2011. Other rankings for 2011/2012 include #1 company for leaders (Fortune), #1 green company worldwide (Newsweek), #2 best global brand (Interbrand), #2 most respected company (Barron's), #5 most admired company (Fortune), and #18 most innovative company (Fast Company). IBM has 12 research laboratories worldwide and, as of 2013, has held the record for most patents generated by a company for 20 consecutive years. Its employees have garnered five Nobel Prizes, six Turing Awards; ten National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science. Famous inventions by IBM include the automated teller machine (ATM), the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the Universal Product Code (UPC), the financial swap, SABRE airline reservation system, DRAM, and Watson artificial intelligence.

IBM India Private Limited is the Indian subsidiary of IBM. It has facilities in Bangalore, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Pune, Gurgaon, Noida,Chandigarh, Indore, Bhubaneshwar, Coimbatore and Hyderabad.Between 2003 and 2007, IBM's head count in India has grown by almost 800%, from 9,000 in 2003 to nearly 74,000 in 2007. Since 2006, IBM has been the multinational with the largest number of employees in India. IBM is very secretive about the geographic distribution of its employees. By most estimates, it has close to a third of its 4.3 lakh employees in India, and it likely has more employees here than in the US.

The IBM consulting offerings include the following integral components-

Customer centric strategy: Strategies to help you focus on customer experience and care

Channel transformation: Strategies and approaches to help implement experience and care activities across any and all applicable channels

Social media strategy: Strategies and approaches to create meaningful customer experiences and drive deeper customer relationships in the social web space

Digital brand & presence strategy: Strategies and approaches to better leverage and manage your brand in a digital, web-based world

Smarter sales & marketing: Consulting services to help you understand how to improve revenue and manage the sales and marketing organization through more intelligent, instrumented and interconnected marketing and communications activities

Marketing strategies of IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or the IBM is basically a multinational computer technology and has got hold over IT consulting services. The company has established itself as one of the selected information technology companies since 19th century. Adoption of marketing strategies for IBM has been a planned structure since 19th century and by means of these strategies it has earned enough success all over the world. With its growth in the manufacturing as well as marketing domains of computer hardware and software, it has gained the nickname of "Big Blue". On marketing grounds, IBM follows strict infrastructural services, added by hosting provisions and consulting services in various areas from mainframe computers to the persuasion of nanotechnology.

The company considers that to make marketing strategies, it is important to have appropriate decisions that can well enhance all kinds of competitive advantages and can create all kinds of new sources of value for the purpose of improving the organizational revenue growth. As declared in its official website. IBM considers that their strategy and change services target in helping their clients in transforming their economy and related businesses by the scope of identifying strategic options. This further gets added by provisions for developing strategic and planned change programs to meet the demands of their consumers.

The importance and use of information is very vital for gaining success and thus IBM in particular came up with Social Networking provisions. It is an absolute means of sharing ideas, complains and letters of appreciation in public. By means of adopting networking opportunities, IBM established its strong hold over competitive market. It is through the provision of Social Networking (SN), that IBM could establish its commitment to technology and SN mindset. The company uses its technological supports and draws new kinds of driving features. IBM is the first major IT supplier that has got potential provisions for SN in the process of changing the entire enterprise along with a credible application to address the market. By means of investments made in the SN domain, IBM has gained enough market strengths in the enterprise lineage, global services, and deep pockets and above all in gaining loyal customers. By success of SN, IBM proved to be a fine player in the domain of information networking. The proceedings have added many advantages to its organizational global services. SN for enterprises has been implemented with enough marketing strategies and this is what providing IBM with technical expertise in the field of organizational/adoption issues. The launching of more facilities related to SN is relevant to the competition of the market. The launcher came up with a new idea and launched it much before anybody can ever think of it. The second big thing to the adoption of marketing strategy is the IBM's mindset in the launching of Lotus Connection. It is an information networking process with collaboration-centric approach to SN and helps in information sharing and uninterrupted workflow. By few minutes of exploration anybody can well get hold over its functionalities. IBM kept it easy and user friendly; the basics of marketing strategies. When it comes to the use of information system in IBM, the adoption of unique kind of marketing strategies is predominant. The basic approach is in being innovative ad adopting something that is very user friendly and easy for the customer to adopt. Complicacies in the same field can lead to failure of the same. This is the reason that IBM lays emphasis over making it simple, easy and sharing more than the consumer can expect. Once there is a kind of trust and sense of being facilitated gets into the consumer, he hardly will opt for any other company and this is what IBM believes to the core. Application of innovative ideas in the field of information sharing units can be of great risk, but under the marketing strategy of IBM, this risk has been taken again and again with enough success.

The measurement of strategic effectiveness in an organizational strategy can be discovered through SWOT analysis. This is a structure that figure out strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a particular company. Under this, we can evaluate a company on the basis of three key success criteria. These are marked as following-

Suitability can be assessed to identify the factors that will support the strategies.

Feasibility is all about the adoption of executing the strategy into practical field.

Acceptability is something that will determine the reactions that the organization will receive by the execution of the strategies.

At IBM there is enough encouragement for creative marketing tactics. Anybody within the organization can attain these tactics. The application of SWOT model proves that IBM has got enough potentiality to gain well crafted assessment about itself. Its main strength lies in identifying its weaknesses. The approaches are all very professional and the marketing persuasions are well structured as per the organizational structure. As per the declarations made by the official site of IBM, the basic marketing strategy in relation to organizational strategy adopted by IBM is more concerned about the proceedings led by HRM. The perspectives of organizational dealings are strategically adopted to meet the demands of HRM.

The typical business culture of IBM is customer centric and for that they make their HR department feel the responsibility. It has been marked that on traditional ground many IBM executives along with aspiring general managers are selected for the purpose of improving sales force and market oriented projects. It can be well marked as Samuel J. Palmisano, the current CEO of IBM; initially joined the company in the position of a salesman.

In global context, IBM has proved to sustain in the most difficult situations. It has overcome the recent twists and turns led by 'bricks-and-clicks'. Despite the fact that this marketing strategy adopted by IBM was considered to be an early lead by the field of Internet pure plays. However amidst all the hurdles IBM is now achieving milestones through the advantages forwarded by brick-and-click enterprises. It is through this enterprise that IBM can be considered as a big player in terms of getting hold over the global marketing plans. Its formulizations are inclusive of creating a global brand blueprint. It is a mode that usually gets expressed locally and after attaining some success approaches on global grounds. IBM always follows the process of establishing central framework and then architects the relevant consumer experiences to gain consistency with the brand.

IBM always concentrates in gaining single view from its consumers and that helps in assessing the risk factors of global marketing strategies. In order to meet the diversified point of views, IBM follows the structure noted below-

Process of analyzing the context of 'when', 'where' and 'how' the appropriate and relevant customer data can be collected. This is an approach that is done under the provision of practical market survey.

The means to create absolute governance framework with special attentions led over management policies and overall practices. These are the sources that are collected through the purpose of encouraging customer centricity added by the scope to safeguard customer privacy.

Approaches led by institute consistent processes for target customer is the next step. In this process the relationship led by the management across all the domains of sales and provided services of the organization are scrutinized professionally.

Ann Rubin, Director of Advertising at IBM, credits their CEO, Sam Palmisano, with shaping the Smarter Planet strategy that has reshaped everything that the company does. This is the company's brand and the essence of the services that it provides to its customers. According to Rubin, the strategy states the difficulties that exist around the world and in individual organizations, captures the business opportunity, brings the creative together and mobilizes employees to deliver. Smarter Planet expresses three "I"s. The world is and needs to best leverage the ways it is instrumented, interconnected and intelligent- all to create progress: operational changes and improvements to the way business, government and all institutions operate. When rolling out this strategy, IBM's global branding team had to enable 50 countries. They built a strategy and training and went on the road to guide colleagues on how sales personnel will speak with their customers in their country in a way that is relevant to customers of that country. They held 3 day workshops to teach employees how to talk about and implement the brand. All IBM local market organizations worldwide have the ability to create their own sales and public relations communications if they choose provided they meet three criteria: They 1) look like, 2) sound like, 3) perform like IBM. IBM published a series of "OpAds" to launch the strategy in the Wall Street Journal. Each spoke to thought leaders (at major companies and organizations) to get them thinking about ways that their systems could be better. Examples used in these ads and throughout IBM's marketing have ranged from traffic and healthcare to food and water. In every advertising country, IBM regional offices were asked to translate and change some of the examples to local references, while keeping global examples and perceptive. Since the word "smart" did not have the same implication every language, especially in some emerging markets, appropriate words, concepts and messages were selected to introduce the company in an appropriate approach.

 

IBM and e-business strategies

The motive of any electronic business is to achieve consumer demands through internet networking. This is a provision that can collect more consumers all over the world with very minimum investment. It is an exclusive means adopted through the dealings related to information and communication technologies. In case of IBM the role of e-business is very strong. Through e-business strategies, IBM is enabling itself to all kinds of external activities and is applying determined relationships for respective business dealings, with individuals, diversified groups and all other corporate. According to 'Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?’ a book by a former CEO of IBM, Louis Gerstner (2003), the approach of IBM for "e-Business strategies are handled under IBM's marketing provisions and under specialized internet teams since 1996. It is through its e-business strategies that IBM is able to link its internal as well as external data processing systems with more efficiencies and flexibilities. E-business helped IBM in coming much closer to its consumers and that builds the bridge of reliability and consumer loyalty to the brand. The proceedings led by IBM for the development and implementation of e-business are more strategic and led concentration over diversified functions occurring through electronic capabilities.IBM is also a part of the entire value chain proceeding for more profitable dominance over the local as well as global market. There are some predominant sectors where the e-business strategies are applied to gain more trust and money from the consumer. These activities are noted below-

Electronic purchasing.

Supply chain management.

Processing orders electronically.

Handling customer service.

These proceedings are adding special technical standards in the e-business structure of IBM. It is also utilizing e-business strategies to exchange of data between its partners and associate companies. As a matter of fact the e-business strategies of IBM are not much different from the other marketing strategies. The basic difference however depends over the expansion of management for sending and receiving contracts from the consumer. It is under this strategic implementation that IBM has adopted many local dealers to be a part of its services. These dealers are of course selected through some professional modes. The reputations of these dealers are marked by IBM first before offering the partnership. In terms of services for each product sold through e-business, IBM provides appropriate training to all those people who are a part of this structure. With strategic planning IBM is also into the dealings related to integrated intra and inter firm business proceedings.

It can be well concluded that the marketing strategies adopted by IBM are very much structured on the basis of trust-based marketing strategies. It is through this theoretical approach that IBM has established itself very strongly, amidst burgeoning and very unpredictable online as well as global marketplace. IBM concentrates in providing its consumer every possible facility that he demands and that too with very balanced services. It is more about having the trust of every single consumer, rather than having lots of them without the trust. The products and services provided by IBM can guarantee their utility to the customer's satisfaction. In a nutshell, IBM has got professional and the courage to take a risk for innovative ideas. It explores the consumer's domain through proper hold over the local and global proceedings.

IBM WILL DEVELOP A COMPUTER THAT WORKS AS A HUMAN BRAIN

IBM is carrying out a project focused on developing a computer that would work as a brain, so it can solve problems by considering the real context in which the things are happening. This type of technology is called "Cognitive computing", and it will require the combined work of neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists and psychologists. In order to develop the project, some researchers from Stanford University, Cornell University and the University of California-Merced are collaborating. Besides, the project is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that has invested $4.9 million. ‘The mind has an amazing ability to integrate ambiguous information across the senses, and it can effortlessly create the categories of time, space, object, and interrelationship from the sensory data’, said Dharmendra Modha, a researcher at IBM who is leading the collaboration. "There are no computers that can even remotely approach the remarkable feats the mind performs", said Modha. ‘The key idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behavior of the brain’.

Rural marketing of IBM

Smart Rural Aggregation Platform (SRAP) for building Smarter Village is one of the eleven top projects selected worldwide for award of IBM Centennial Grant of US$ 100 K by IBM CC & CA under IBM100 Celebration of Service in July 2011. This project aims at building smarter villages for economic and social development of rural community in India. The concept of SRAP was evolved under Rural Outreach initiative of IBM India strategy that was given impetus by CC & CA funding and support to bring this dream project into reality in collaboration with Drishtee Foundation a non-profit organization based in Northern part of India. The launch of project generated tremendous enthusiasm among IBM and ODC community to participate in this wonderful journey towards rural transformation. More than 20 ODC volunteers contributed to architect and develop the technology platform and software application while there were 30 others (including 14 top talent BTLRs) engaged in areas such as business analysis, market research, project management, operations, process development and communications. IGA AHE AP/India made their huge contribution to community service by offering their hardware /software to host SRAP application. Current status - SRAP has been launched in a cluster of five villages near the state capital of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh India on 23rd June 2012. The application can be accessed by villager users through a Rural Entrepreneur's computer terminal. SRAP provides a platform-as-a-service that will enable service model with sustainable & scalability. Drishtee plays the key role of Aggregator that provides service delivery and connects urban and rural market using SRAP. Currently it focuses on the following two service areas-

a) Agriculture advisory & extension services to address the needs of farmers & find possible innovative solutions to increase income of the farmers.

b) Livelihood generation services, both for wage employment & self employment that helps increase income generation opportunities in a rural house hold.

c) Market linkage to farmers and rural entrepreneurs to link up with buyers market in the cities to sell their produce at better prices.

In subsequent phase, additional services such as setting up supply chain for FMCG, e-governance services, micro financing etc. in identified villages in a few districts.