1. The transition of a product
from the initial introduction
to the growth stage, is a step,
which every marketer , ea-
gerly looks forward to , for
his product. This happens,
when the volume of product
reaches the ―Tipping Point‖.
In marketing, this is a point,
where, the innovators, have
experienced the product,
given a positive nod to it and
the early adopters and early
majority, now go and get it.
The early adopters and early
majority are larger in num-
bers and hence the sales vol-
ume picks up, drastically, This
signals the transition from
introduction to the growth
stage for the product in its
PLC. Typically the tipping
point is between 10% - 15 %
of the total market share. It
is observed that if the product
touches the tipping point, the
chances of it , making big
increases tremendously, al-
most sure.
It's the point where a critical
mass of buyers meets a pool
of sellers to create the per-
fect storm. This phenomenon
— 10% share as a tipping
point — played out in West-
ern economies. It played out
in China, where the share of
smartphones in total phone
shipments rocketed from 9%
to 59% in two years. And it's
playing out in Brazil and Rus-
sia, where the corresponding
number surged to 32% and
46%, respectively in the same
period. Will India, where
smartphones hit 10% earlier
this year, follow suit? A sus-
tained build-up is underway to
add charge to that figure. The
price of entry-level smart-
phones has dropped to
around Rs 4,000, from Rs
15,000 two years ago. "It's
compelling buyers to opt for
fancier phones," says Anshul
Gupta, principal re-
search analyst of Gart-
ner India, who feels
something fundamen-
tally changed for the
Indian market in the
last quarter of 2012.
"We are at the tipping
point." However,
Shashi Shankar, chief
marketing officer of Idea Cel-
lular, says handset prices have
to fall further.
"The market is expanding fast,
but a tipping point is still
about a year away," he says.
"We need smartphones for
around Rs 3,000." About 20%
of the phones that Samsung
sells are smartphones, and
this has doubled in the past
one year," says Asim Warsi,
VP, Samsung Mobile, which
has a dozen smartphones
priced from Rs 7,000 to Rs
42,000.By 2015, about a third
of shipments will be smart-
phones, 67 million out of an
expected market of 230 mil-
lion," adds Vipul Mehrotra,
director, smart devices, Nokia
India.""It's beginning to pick
SMART PHONES IN INDIA FINALLY
REACHING THE TIPPING POINT….
up," says Warsi.
"Smartphone makers are
able to push a dearer
phone, where the margins
are better, for a monthly
instalment no more than a
cost of a family dinner out-
ing."In 2012, the market
doubled to 20 million, at
Rs 8,000-10,000. This year,
45-50 million devices will
be sold and prices have
dropped below Rs 6,000."
Even if this is not the tip-
ping point, it's formidable
by numbers. And the real
tipping point is not far
away. According to Re-
serve Bank of India, mobile
banking transactions in
January 2013 doubled to
5.6 million and trebled in
value to Rs 625 crore,
from a year ago. Else-
where, Flipkart reports a
three-fold increase in
transactions via handsets.
Gupta of Gartner believes
such usage will accelerate
the migration to smart-
phones, which offer a bet-
ter experience
MARKET
MANTRA
25TH APRIL 2013
Volume 1, Issue 1
INFORMATION &
ANALYTICS
2
PROSUMER 2
SAMSUNG 2
MARKETING
TRENDS
3
YOUNG AND REST-
LESS
3
MAHINDRA REVA 3
RETAIL RUSH 4
INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
THE MAGAZINE
FOR
MARKETING
PROFESSIONALS

2. customers to become a prosumer. In
Subway, you choose the bread, the
flour, it is made of, its length, the fill-
ings, the sauces, the garnishing, the
toppings and finally to be baked or
not. In effect , the customer, literally
makes the sandwich for himself and
can be called a Prosumer.
Prosumerism, gives
a great sense of
satisfaction to the
customer and he
invariably ends up
liking the the prod-
uct (after all it was
he who created the product). The
company just provided him the envi-
ronment and infrastructure, and his
creativity did wonders.
Prosumerism leads to habitual buying
and is also self innovating, in the sense
that the customer himself , can try out
new combinations and thrill himself.
Some companies create an environ-
ment in which they act as workships
from which the customer create the
product and services they want.
Dell offers a perfect example in that
the consumer designs the product he
wants. To that
extent, Dell’s cus-
tomers aare acting
as ―Prosumers‖ (i.e
Producing Consum-
ers).
SubWay also offer
this scope to its
A former CEO of Unilever said that if
Unilever only knew what it knows, it
would double its profits. The meaning
is clear : Many companies sit on rich
information but fail to mine this infor-
mation. This has led to an explosion
of interest in knowledge management:
organizing a company’s information so
that it is easily retrievable and learning
can be extracted from it.
Marketing is becoming more based on
information than on brute sales
power. Thanks to the computer and
the internet, no sales person can say
to the boss that he or she didn’t know
the prospects’s industry, company,
problems, or potentials. Using sales
automation software, a sales person
can record each prospect;s and cus-
tomer’s needs, interests, opinions.
The salesperson can answer questions
in the hprospects’s office by connectin
with the company’s mainframe or
toher resources on his or her laptop.
The salesperson, after negoti-
ating, can jprint out a custom-
ized contract for athe pros-
pect to sign. And afterwards,
the sales person can look up
what any customer bought
andfigure out further oppor-
tunities for cross-selling or up
–selling.
Walmart knows the sales of
each product in each store at
the end of the day, making it
easier to order the right re-
placement stock for the next
day. The result: Wal-Mart
carries lower inventory and
therefore needs less working
capital.
7-Eleven, another retailer, in
Japan, replenishes its stock
three times a day in response
to orders from individual store manag-
ers of what they expect to sell in the
next few hours. That’s the power of
information technology, which can be
harnessed and put to good use.
crossed that of Nokia's in the GfK-
Nielsen survey. The all-India figures,
which will include rural sales, will be
released shortly.
"It's truly unbelievable the way Nokia
fell in India in the past six years. The
brand failed to rejuvenate itself and fell
prey to customer fatigue. Add to that
the speed of execution - while Sam-
sung was taking six months to launch a
new model from the drawing board to
retail store, Nokia was taking more
According to market tracker GfK-
Nielsen's data, Samsung's volume mar-
ket share in urban areas in March rose
to 31.4%, surpassing Nokia's 30.1%.
GfK-Nielsen urban panel tracks sales
in 793 cities and towns with a popula-
tion of over 50,000, which account for
more than 70% of India's total handset
sales.
This is the first time the Korean com-
pany's volume market share has
than a year," said former BlackBerry
India head Sunil Dutt, who was
Nokia's head of sales till 2007.
WHAT IS A “ PROSUMER” ?
INFORMATION AND ANALYTICS
SAMSUNG BECOMES THE LARGEST SELLER OF MOBILE PHONES
IN INDIA.
Selling starts only when you have
a product.
Marketing starts before there is a
product.
MARKET MANTRA
Page 2

3. VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1
One can try and explain this by saying that
young people are naturally more optimistic.
But that would be both simplistic as well as
incorrect. In the past, boom times have gen-
erally given rise to startups while their num-
bers have shrunk as economic sentiment
dipped.For example, during the go-go years
of the first dotcom boom of 1998-99, access
to easy venture funding saw a record number
of people — ranging from college students to
housewives, and from middle-aged execu-
tives to presidents of companies — setting
up their own dotcom ventures. Many of them
had no real business plan, and others simply
aped the plans of more famous startups in
the US.
And VCs often competed with one another to
get a slice of the new companies. Similarly,
during the early days of the BPO boom, every
other person you met was starting up an IT-
enabled services company.
Once the economy corrected after these
booms, the number of people setting up
companies dropped dramatically. The dotcom
bust, in fact, saw people scramble to get back
into stable jobs and entrepreneurship fell out
of favour for quite a few years.
The interesting thing about the current boom
in entrepreneurship is that most of the start-
ups you meet now have actually kicked off
their ventures in what is -considered to be a
bleak phase in the Indian economy, when
access to venture funding and other forms of
capital is tough.
You may have noticed something odd about
business sentiment in India over the past few
years. On the one hand, many leaders of big-
and medium-sized companies in the country
have sounded rather pessimistic about their
prospects. They have also put their expan-
sion plans and projects on hold or scaled
down ambitions and targets.
On the other, an ever increasing number of
young people are giving up secure jobs and
stable opportunities to turn entrepreneurs and
start up new companies that hope to revolu-
tionise business sectors and markets. Or
even create markets where none existed.
And many of these people are taking risks
despite having little capital or organised
support. They are far more upbeat about their
prospects than many of the established busi-
ness leaders.
Marketing , per se, is extremely dy-
namic, it keeps evolving, taking into
consideration the various macro and
micro environmental factors. Gener-
ally one can see the following trends
emerging, in the coming years
1. From make and sell marketing
to sense and respond market-
ing
2. From owning assets to owning
brands.
3. From vertical integration to
virtual integration
(outsourcing)
4. From mass marketing to cus-
tomized marketing
5. From operating only in the
market place to operating in
cyberspace as well.
6. From pursuing market share
to pursuing customer share.
7. From focusing on customer
attration to focusing on cus-
tomer retention.
8. From transation marketing to
relationship marketing.
9. From customer acquisition to
customer retention and satis-
faction.
10. From mediated marketing to
direct marketing.
11. From marketer monologue to
customer dialogue.
12. From separated planning of
communicaitns to integrated
marketing communications.
13. From single-channel marketing
to multichannel marketing.
14. Fromproduct-centric market-
ing to customer-centric mar-
keting
15. From marketing department
doing the marketing to every-
one in the company doing the
marketing
16. From exploiting sulppliers and
distributors to partnering with
them
These trends will affect different in-
dustries and companies at different
times.
$ 15 billionMahindra Group, will
start exporting its first electric
vehicle in the hatch back seg-
ment, E20, starting early next year.
The flagship model, which hit New
Delhi earlier in March, was
launched in Bangalore on Wednes-
day. The vehicle is priced at about
Rs 7 lakhs (on road) in the city, a
few thousand more than that in
Mahindra Reva Electric Vehi-
cles Private Limited, a part of the
the capital due to the absence of
subsidies on electric cars in the
state.
"We are definitely looking at the
global market. But, this will only
happen by early 2014," said
Chetan Maini, Chief of Strategy &
Technology, Mahindra Reva Elec-
tric Vehicles Pvt. Ltd, at the launch
event.
YOUNG AND RESTLESS…...
NEW EMERGING MARKETING TRENDS
MAHINDRA REVA..
Page 3

4. Dear students,
I always dreamt of having a magazine for Marketing Management students, a
kind of platform to share with each other ,any new strategy, idea, case, thinking
on marketing.
Nothing better , than an E magazine to do that. Its cheap (almost free), con-
venient, easy to make and distribute and youth friendly.
Very hastily , I have put together some articles and news , because I wanted to
set this rolling before the beginning of your 3rd sem. The first edition is out
and into your mail. To keep this alive ,I need fresh blood (YOU !!!).
Send me articles, news and contributions (Creative and fresh ones please) to be
included in the next edition. I particularly look forward to receive articles from
all those students, intending to take MARKETING as major.
PROF JAYESH TIWARI (tiwarijayesh@gmail.com)
tween ―multi-brand retail‖
and ―single-brand retail‖,
with radically different rules
for each. Companies like
Ikea, the Swedish flat-pack
furniture maker, and western
apparel groups such as Hen-
nes and Mauritz are gradu-
ally moving to set up shop.
But not a single global
. In most economies, retail-
ers are retailers. Some, like
supermarkets, department
stores and pharmacies, sell
products from many different
brands, while others, like
Ikea and many clothiers, sell
items all tagged with an in-
house label. Policy-wise,
though, they are usually
treated pretty much alike.
India, however, is not most
economies. In Septem-
ber New Delhi finally opened
its retail industry to foreign
participation, a move touted
as signalling the country’s
desire for overseas invest-
ment. But India has made
complex distinctions be-
hypermarket such as Wal-
mart, Tesco or Carrefour has
applied to open retail stores,
deterred by onerous condi-
tions.
―The current regulations are
not very favourable for
(foreign hypermarkets) to
come in,‖ says Raghav
Gupta, a retail expert at
Booz and co, the consul-
tancy.
Walmart, Tesco, and Carre-
four already have a toe in
the iNdian market with their
wholesale ―cash-and –carry
―businesses, which are al-
lowed to sell to other com-
mercial enterprises.
RETAIL RUSH
Caption describing picture or graphic.
SEND YOUR ARTICLES TO
jayeshtiwari@gmail.com
Cell: 98931-68696
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