It gives me great pleasure to share that eTutelage has been nominated in TATA NEN Hottest Startups Awards, link here, but more than that, the support of our friends and well wishers has been overwhelming.

We are getting good wishes and congratulatory messages from far off friends, peers, old classmates, friends of friends, eTutelage team mates, site visitors and customers. It is an overwhelming feeling and we are savoring every moment of it - more so because entrepreneurship can be painfully lonely at times.

Thanks everyone for your support. It means a lot to us all and it gives us the strength and conviction to plough along when the going gets tough.

For those of you who haven’t already voted, voting is on, you can either go online and vote or send HOT 374 to 56767 through your mobile phones.

Survival of the fittest is a macho term laced with a certain romanticism. Capitalism, in its pure form, is supposed to be a perfect example of a system embodying Darwinism at its core. If you are not proactive at reading the market, too hung up to adapt to changes, too inefficient to beat the economic efficiency curve or too exalted to serve the customer, you ought to be finished, eaten up alive and go belly up.

Then why do we see so much economic inefficiency all around. Why can the big corporations continuously afford to ignore, annoy and even infuriate the customer or why can a small business keep on sustaining extremely unprofessional levels of services. If the customer is really so important then why does he have to listen to weird music for 20 minutes before being hung upon when he calls “customer care”. Why can the phone company keep on putting new, weird and  un-agreed  to charges on your bill and still proclaim “happy to help”, why can the banks keep on applying charges for services as inane as getting an account statement or knowing your account balance, why can the cooking gas company afford to ignore your calls for three days and deliver the gas on fifth while proudly proclaiming they deliver within 24 hours.

A lot of these answers can be found in theoretical economics. You can say cell phone service providers in India are an oligopoly where none is different from the other in terms of service levels, switching costs are high because all of a sudden you don’t want your cell number to change after having it for 7 years and the service is an essential - you can’t go without a cell phone.

However, let’s try to examine the question as to what kind of a task master capitalism is - after all, it is supposed to be the best system known to man to support enterprise, innovation and efficiency and it is as close as a man made system comes to classic Darwinism.

The fundamental assumption of capitalism is that people want to grow, expand and earn more money. They also want to conserve money by paying less if they can for an equal product or service. Statistically, out of multitudes of people, some do aspire high and sustain capitalistic growth.

Now consider a situation where no body aspires for greater growth. No aspirations so the incentive to be innovative, market oriented and efficient becomes irrelevant. The scenario of course seems highly unlikely  because struggle for growth is almost as fundamental, if not just a variant of struggle for life. However, look closely and it is not that unlikely.

No further aspirations means one is satisfied with what one has got and this may happen with a small business as well as a large corporation with equal probability.  Complacency is  not an  endangered species in corporate sector. Moreover, it gets manifested in various forms - it could be an unwillingness to innovate or to go the extra mile for the customer. It can also be manifested in various “not so above board” practices we see all around us (I do not see what other name could you give to various services being included in your cell phone plan without you even knowing it and you being charged). The point is, companies start taking the customers for granted when they think they can afford to do that.

What’s the answer? Well, capitalism can induce only so much efficiency. For the rest, may be a more balanced customer-provider power equation would prove effective. Point is, how do you restore balance to the skewed power equation between a million dollar corporation and individual customers each of whom pays may be a hundred dollars every month for example.

The solution seems to be more and more aware customers. Give feedback to the company fast and strong. Also, share your experiences with others. That’s the only ammunition a customer has, and that’s what can shake the companies off their slumber - the customer can bite too.

The built in mechanisms in capitalism fall flat when somebody is ok with you taking your business elsewhere. But if you includes not just you but hundred others like you, that bite can hurt.

The current problem is, so few of us bite and that too, far too little.

Oh yeah, the secret sauce, the silver bullet, the magic mantra. But actually, like most of the things that work in life, its no magic at all. Infact, reams (or, more recently, GBs) have been filled with gyan extolling the virtues of this magic pill. Every business professional swears by it, though that’s not always reflected in the way things get done. The idea is so simple, we miss it becuase of just that.

Let’s keep the fun going for a little longer, let’s keep the secret sauce, a secret for a little longer. First, let’s take a look at how we buy stuff.

I will be using the word “product” to mean both products and services. Of course, both can be as different as chalk and cheese depending upon the context, but for the purpose of this post, they essentially work similarly as vehicles of value delivery.

If it’s a repeat purchase, we draw upon our previous experience with the product. Typically, we buy from someone we’ve had a significantly positive experience before. The marketing razzmatazz by a competitor has limited value here, unless there is some significant additional value on the offer in which case, it becomes more akin to a new product purchase.

In case of a new product, something we’ve never experienced before, we try to draw upon the experiences of those we know and trust.

Thus, we tend to go more by positive experiences, whether our own or of the people we trust, rather than being completely taken in by carefully designed communication coming out of marketing departments.

In case of a new product or service, positive experiences of innovators and early adopters create the ripple effect which galvanizes the majority to adopt the new offering, and, a new product reaches its profitablity potential only when the majority adopts it.

The only case that’s left now is of such a new product which does not have enough users, a very new offering. There too, marketing campaigns focussed on creating awareness will create a critical mass of earliest adopters which would subsequently drive the adoption by the majority making the product innovation successful.

Thus, the strongest theme in the purchase process across the board is the positive experiences with the product, which, when shared with customers feeling the need generate the bulk of sales.

In other words, it’s an army of happy customers that’s your strongest marketing tool. Yeah, so much of ado for just this little thing.

Let me now trade my analytical hat with that of a hard nosed entrepreneur leading a start-up. You have to see the quickness, ease and cost effectiveness of a new sale driven by a happy customer’s referral to believe it. Nothing that you read or analyze will get you to really appreciate the magic that happens here.

However, what’s interesting is that so few of the businesses realy internalize this truism and pursue it as a strategic goal.

I am not talking about customer delight being a part of the vision and mission statements; not even about it being a part of an yearly employee training program. I am talking about customer delight being pursued as a strategic objective of the organization as a whole, infact, strategic objective number one. Marketing, Operations, Support, Management - everybody has a significant role in this.  

The other instruments of marketing should facilitate the positive experiences of a few being shared with many and in turn, many more.

That’s what your worldly wise billionaire uncle (if you had one !!!)  will tell you - make your customers happy. If you are in business, that’s the only way to be happy.