Open & Shut Case 3

 

What is the Solution ?

at first ! What is the problem?  

The profitability of the business or even a mere existence (sustainability) is difficult for small neighbor hood shops. 

That is why 

 Open with Hope & Shut with Despair.

happens

This situation is due to various external factors some of them being,

On line Shopping

Chain of Stores opening shops in every neighborhood (while these stores before were only in rich class area)

Big Retail Giants opening showrooms in neighborhood(while these showrooms before were only in Business locality)

Multinational Brands coming to neighbor hood

Real Estate cost

Etc ...

While there could be many other such factors as well, so there could be many ways to tackle the situation as well.

But  let us analyze it from the following points,

If a new shop is opened were they able to inform the customer about this development.

Are the existing small shops visible to customers (as like earlier).

If they are visible are they able to attract and retain customers.

If there are customers coming are they able to convert them into loyal customers.

The above points if taken care of will at least solve the existence crisis of  small shops,

This points to acquiring  retaining and growing the customers.

 While the present day neighbor hood shopping space invaders have big marketing budget, the local vendors cannot afford it, still have to find a way to reach the customers. That is where the local advertising opportunity comes to help. One such opportunity is Carnatic Music Concerts Platform

We will see how to utilize this platform in our next blogs

Namaskaram

V Rajagopalan

Open & Shut Case 2

 

The new vendors found it difficult to establish themselves so they kept on changing their place of business, for example from a extn street they will shift to main road or vise versa, Thus they tried to keep their business going on and of course they managed it to a certain extent. So these shops functioned in one area but from different address, at different point of time.

Then the neighbor hood was transformed by arrival of Flats(apartment) culture this brought a huge difference in the way the neighbor hood bazar functioned. Super market /Chain of Supper market came into existence and then the Shopping Mall culture creeped in. These establishments advertised themselves thru newspapers and Television channels because they are available across many areas and also in some cases in various cities. Thus they could keep the business running.

Till this time the shops that were established in  a neighbor hood functioned from that area for quite a good period of time.

Due to online shopping and the advent of multinationals in daily commodity business and big companies setting shops in neighbor hood, also due to real estate cost, these single area neighbor hood vendors could not sustain in their business in the area of their establishment.

Thus the situation today in many neighbor hood is the small shops and establishment vendors will open shop today and will close very soon because they could not survive profitably.

Thus if you visit a neighbor hood today and see a shop and if you go there after three or four months the chance are very high that the shop might have shut doors. 

Open and Shut Case.

What is the solution let us see in our next blog

Namaskaram

V Rajagopalan

Open & Shut Case 1

 

For the past 20 are so years I have been observing my neighbor hood Retail Shops & Establishment. Also whenever I get an opportunity to visit other areas in  my city Chennai and also other towns if I am familiar with that place and if I visit those places often  I make it a point to watch out for the Shops and Establishment trends in that area. 

The Trend I see

20 years before, the neighbor hood was occupied by shops which are there almost since the early stages of that areas formation, the available space for shops and establishments were also limited. The requirement of the customers were are also of  regular commodities. The customer were all regular customers the shop keepers, mostly the owners, had personal equation with almost all the customers. The business was predictable, no surprises, the customers were loyal, most of them had credit facility with the shops. 

Point to be noted here is these shops and establishment took part in all the neighborhood celebrations in fact they volunteered to organize, sponsor and extended all kinds of support for these activities. This gesture in turn helped these shops & establishment to earn the loyalty of the customers. Some time the customers even willing to pay some premium for the product and services for the sake of emotional connect.

As times rolled by the extent of neighbor hood expanded and and there was seamless merger of many neighbor hoods because of dwelling units coming in between two distinct areas. This gave access to more than one vendor in the vicinity for the customers. Though the loyalty was in decline this was compensated by increase in the number of customers. The business started to be little bit unpredictable. As more and more dwelling units came up very close together the requirement of more than basic needs increased so new type of shops and establishments came in to existence and by now the landscape of the bazar has totally changed. 

The old shops & establishments continued to do business in spite of competition with support from loyal customers. Due to less profit earning because of competition and also due to escalating cost of the events the old establishments showed diminished interests in the events. This was taken advantage by the new vendors and they started supporting these events  but due to availability of more vendors the visibility and connect with customers for these new vendors was very much less compared to the old establishment.

Namaskaram

V Rajagopalan

Classical Music Platform for Branding -5

Personnel Level Branding

Branding as we know has got four levels 

Recognition, Recall, Top of Mind and Brand Preference.

A Brand looking

 for primary recognition 

can arrange for a Group Singing concerts, followed by a concept called Akandam (whole day singing by various artsist, students etc.. ). This will bring in lot of foot falls and the first recognition can be established.

For Recall

can arrange for concerts for a specific auspiocus days (aradhana day, Shivarathry day etc..) this will  enable a closed group of people to gather for the concert and the recall campaign will be achived.

For Top of Mind 

can arrange for concerts of Celebrities, Legends, Trending artist etc.

For Brand Preference and Loyality

Can arrange for concerts under invitation/special concerts for a targeted group of  audience.

As we discussed earlier these above concerts can be arranged at a suitable venue, for a suitable age group etc with all permutaion combination possible thus giving scope for a tailor made campagins.

The flexibility of tailoring your campaign to suit your needs makes the Carnatic Concert Platform an ideal one to suit every budget.

These concerts can also be recorded or live streamed again to targeted audience if required thus expanding the scope of  the campaign.

In our next blog we will see how the Brands can interact with their customer/potential customer during the campaign.

Also we will look at how we can arrange concert platforms for various branding requirement like B2B/B2C Personnel Branding etc taking into account the above four levels.

Namaskaram

V Rajagopalan

 

Classical Music Platform for Branding -4

 Personnel Level Branding (PLB)

We were discussing how personnel level branding has a USP (unique selling point) in reaching the customer and can be used for all category of branding.

Personnel Level Branding can be effectively used for all kinds of  situations B2C /B2B  etc, Individual Personality brnding, All kind of  Products, Individual Company Branding , Industry Branding, New Idea Campaign, Service Branding, Government Programs Branding etc.

While there are many platform like Temple Festival, Local Exhibition, Local Sports event, Special Day Celebration/Observation at local level, Local level Medical camps and other awareness campaigns, to do PLB, 

We will discuss how Carnatic Music Platform can be used for PLB.

This Carnatic Music Platform offers targeted marketing, like choice of venue for geographcial audience selection, Demographic auidience selection by arranging for concerts of particualr age group. Audience from particular ideology etc.

The concer  arrangements  can be tailor made to suit the Branding Requirement. For example you can chose athe venue like Temple, Sabha, Party Hall, Marriage Hall Etc, You can choose to arrange for Celebrity concert,Concerts of Legends, concerts by up comming artists etc,,

Like wise there are many variables that can be made suitable according to the promotion requirement.

Let us in comming blogs look at how arrange these concerts for Brand Building.

Namaskaram

V Rajagopalan

Classical Music Platform for Branding -3

 

Personal Level Branding 

Personal level branding can be defined as where the consumer and the business {Brand}meet directly(face to face so to say). In other words the business {Brand} participates directly in consumer Activity, Interest and Opinion{AIO}.

Let us explain it like this  {AIO}

The O :- Opinion is some thing the consumer has on let us say about Climate Change, Save Wild Life etc.

The I : Interest can be like Cooking, Crafts, Stamp collection etc.. Hobbies can also be included

The A : Activity is a daily routine. {Some may have their hobbies as their daily routine like Practicing Music, Cycling etc.}

So our Personal Level Branding should concentrate on the above aspect and the brand should directly support (in terms of Budget) these activity. The brand should be seen as a part and parcel of these activity of the customers. The brands association with these activity of the customer will give a personal touch. 

The mass branding also address these activity but due to sheer size(geographical area covered) and the method of delivery, the size of the market with very many diversified segments, makes it a virtual experience  bereft of  personnel touch.

Personal Level Branding can be used for all category of branding namely

Personal branding, Product Branding, Service Branding, Retail Branding, Corporate Branding

Namaskaram

V Rajagopalan

Classical Music Platform for Branding-2

 

Branding can be done in many ways. Let us for our topics convenience  divide this into virtual branding and personnel level branding. Virtual branding or Mass branding, can be any thing that are being done thru  Audio/Visual channels. While these are normal route to branding and all the support systems are in place for such branding activity to be carried with out hassles, these do need a big budget. One more issue here is not all the business need this kind of branding because these branding channels will normally address a very vast geographical area which local business do not need to address.

Nowadays virtual branding can be done thru Digital Space. Though this offers a lot of scope, still it needs a good budget, a lot of strategizing, a lot of technical understanding of how these digital space works etc, while these can be easy for a big business these are still a concern for small scale and local business. Some times the big business may have to address a targeted audience and can have budget constraint etc, where in they may not be able to go for the mass branding exercise.

To address these requirement a personnel level branding option is a must. In our up coming blogs we will discuss the ways of personnel level branding in brief and move on to how Classical Music Platform can be one of the option of personnel level branding.

 The above discussion is applicable to both B2C and B2B companies

Namakaram

V Rajagopalan

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