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Journal of Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

IIM Bangalore offers Degree-Granting Programmes, a Diploma Programme, Certificate Programmes and Executive Education Programmes and specialised courses in areas such as entrepreneurship and public policy.

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Creative Marketing for IT Firms

Volume 20, Number 1 Article by Y L R Moorthi March, 2008

Creative Marketing for IT Firms: Academic Perspective :

Creative marketing, the application of innovative thinking to marketing problems, is particularly important in IT where the markets change rapidly. In an academic perspective on the subject, IIMB’s Prof YLR Moorthi sums up the sequential implementation of creative marketing in IT under four themes: creativity — identifying a creative idea; nurturing — preserving the idea till it reaches the market; organising — enabling the processes that take it to the market; and delivery — achieving the desired results from the market.

Discussing the practical implications of the themes was a panel of experts invited by IIMB Management Review. The ultimate test of the creativity of an idea, according to Sanjay Anandaram, Managing Director, JumpStartUp Fund Advisors, is whether the market accepts it. In assessing the viability of a creative idea a venture capitalist would consider what market needs the proposed product fulfils, its scalability and cost effectiveness, and the credibility of the team. Further, the unique competitive advantage and the business model would be considered in assessing risk. For Nagendra Venkaswamy, CEO, Juniper Networks India, coming from an operations perspective, the key to creative ideas is to engage customers effectively, especially the more adventurous ones who modify your offerings, make innovative change requests and use your product for new applications. Companies must use the ‘voice of the customer’ to learn about their own products and about their customer’s business. Online forums are effective ways to interact with customers and harvest synergies.

Given the proliferation of products in today’s markets, all vying for the same customer, and the low entry barriers, particularly in the Internet space, creativity is absolutely essential, according to Omprakash Subbarao, Head – Consulting, Yahoo! Software Development India. Innovation is essential in marketing particularly in the areas of product leadership, customer intimacy, operational excellence, and category renewal. The ‘social media’ on the Internet, which includes online experiences such as social search, online communities and blogging, and the metaverse or the virtual world beyond the Internet, are other areas which creative marketing can explore.

With software being easy to replicate, how would companies recover the costs of developing software and what would the locus of creativity be for the technologist? While software can be protected from being replicated through copyrights and patents, and by establishing the software platform as a de facto standard, Indian IT companies do it through rapid innovation and by being open to the requirement churn in software, as Dr G Venkatesh, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer, Sasken, pointed out. Open source software, an Internet platform which allows several people irrespective of their location to work together, and the movement towards SaaS or software as a service, would provide opportunities for small Indian IT companies to be innovative.

Raghunath Thali, Director – Global Eco System & Partner Group, SAP India, illustrated how an innovative idea in creative marketing works, by citing IBM’s successful campaign of gifting PCs during the festive season, targeted at the Indian diaspora in the US. Presenting the ‘big firm’ perspective, Vivek Marla, Vice President and Head, Oracle Solution Services, spoke on the formal and informal techniques of idea generation in big firms, the transformation of the idea and its being taken to market. Since ‘early to market’ is very critical, pilot marketing, beta product rollout and working with proof of concept with select customers are ways of staying in the race.

The crucial questions of when and how to take a product to market, the modularisation of IT services, spotting and rewarding an innovative idea and the need for firms to be flexible in this area, and what innovation means in the IT industry, were discussed by the panel.

A Teaching Plan is available to subscribers

Reprint No 08107a&b