Not the first to market – but the best to market.
Conventional wisdom talks about each of these companies having a “first mover advantage”. To the best of my knowledge – that isn’t true about many of these brands.
Amazon was not the world’s first e-bookshop. Yahoo wasn’t the first portal. Google wasn’t the first search engine.
But each of these were the best to execute against consumer needs in each of these niches. Each of these understood, better than anybody else, what users wanted from their product – and offered it better than anybody else.
Amazon understood the importance of consumer delight earlier and better than anybody else. And built their entire business around having happy customers and making them come back to buy more. With over 35 million buyers today and a repurchase rate in excess of 65%, they’ve built a position that is incredibly hard to attack.

Yahoo understood before anybody else that consumers wanted a fast, comprehensive guide to the websites out there. So they optimized their site for speed: its page file sizes are still almost half that of other portals like Excite or Lycos, and hence load quicker. So, in any given five minutes of surfing, a user will see twice as many pages of Yahoo as he’ll see elsewhere. Further, they used opinionated reviewers to rate sites objectively, rather than give in to a “Your Ad Here” Yellow Pages mentality. Users like that.
Google understands one thing really well. All that its users want is fast, comprehensive search. And there’s an amazing amount of technology behind the world’s simplest-looking website to do just that.
The same rules work in the offline world.

Ask yourself, frankly, is there anything unique about your product, service or offering that people will talk about it by themselves. Will your spouse recommend it to his or her friends? Will journalists clamour to write about it?

This lesson applies equally well to brick-and-mortar products. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have heard of the revolutionary scooter, variously called “IT” or “Ginger” that was launched by a company called Segway. Their spend on advertising? Zero. Is there a lesson here for the Bajaj’s and Hero Hondas to learn?
How come we all seem to know of the latest phones from Nokia, even when they aren’t launched in India? What built the frenzied usage of SMS at all our fingertips? What builds buzz about the odd ‘hot’ movie every six months or so that makes people line up to see it – is it because of millions of dollars of marketing spend? Not really.

You may have set aside tens of crores of rupees for marketing. But I would recommend putting some of it and a lot of time instead into creating a product that will generate its own ‘buzz’. Think about it, at a time when most cars are being discounted in India, there’s a month-long waitlist for the Fiat Palio – and it’s not because Sachin is the brand ambassador.

Everything’s global.
Yeah, yeah, you’ll tell me. Amazon and Yahoo and Google are American and global. What can we do from here in India?
The world has changed. Just like your browser doesn’t go through passport control every time you go to Yahoo or Hotmail, the world’s geographical borders are rapidly vanishing. ICQ is the world’s most popular instant messenger. ICQ started in Israel. Alumni.net is the leading alumni registry worldwide. And no, it didn’t start in Silicon Valley, but in Manila, Philippines.
Nothing – except your vision and imagination – stops you from being the world leader in your field. Today, I advice a lot of companies on products and marketing – and the first thing I push them to do is to see if they can create a product that creates its own word of mouth worldwide.
It isn’t easy. We come from a background where Indian industry has mainly been about copying what’s already been done elsewhere, abroad. Original thought is not really something that our culture supports and encourages. But hopefully, slowly, all that is changing.

Using ‘buzz’ as a medium.
It’s not enough to innovate on the product development front to make yourself successful. Every tale of successful innovation is matched by one of some inventor dying penniless.
Part of being successful in the new economy is understanding the pathways of ‘buzz’ – of whom to talk to so your message will spread to as many of the ‘right’ people as fast as possible.

Enough books have been written about harnessing the power of word of mouth and ‘buzz’. ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ and ‘The Tipping Point’ are two of the more interesting ones. At the root of it though, is the fact that there is no ‘one standard way’ of generating buzz. Indeed, if there was, somebody would have a fixed rate card for it already, like TV channels and newspapers do.

The point to remember is that, often, getting the word across to a selected one hundred people can be much more effective than having an ad that beams to one hundred million people. One of the more useful viruses to have come out in the last couple of years has been the art of viral marketing, learn it well – and it’ll hold you in good stead in whatever you do.

It’ll cost you more to innovate less.
Just like the online world provides many examples worth learning from, it is also littered with the corpses of companies that got it wrong.
Among the prominent victims: Toys.com in the US, Boo.com in the UK and our very own Indya.com. All firms that chose to believe in spending heavily to promote absolutely me-too products and offerings – indeed they believed there was no other option.

The global nature of the Internet is equally unforgiving here. It seems to be saying to you “If you NEED to advertise, you need to die.”
It does take significant assets to build a world leader. But these are more intellectual than monetary. Here’s hoping a new generation of Indian businesses and marketers realizes and acts on that.

Mahesh is a business consultant and investor who heads Passionfund. Apart from funding and guiding Webdunia, Indiaproperties, iVast and Geodesic, he has consulted with Channel [v], Worldspace, MTV and others. Mahesh helped launch Yahoo!, Amazon.com, MSN and other brands at a Silicon Valley-based firm. Prior to this, Mahesh spent 12 years with Grey and Ogilvy, handling brands like Pepsi, Microsoft, Lipton and The Economist across Asia. He can be reached at mahesh@passionfund.com

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