The Near-Monopoly Game

(Disclaimer: This is nothing but a general interest post. No marketing or any form of endorsement intended)

               Economics has always been one of my favorite subjects *taking a minute as fond memories of hours (read: sleepless nights) spent over monopolies and oligopolies and perfect competition come rushing back*

             As markets grew more mature and competition started getting the better out of establishments, monopolies and near-monopolies became less prominent or hidden from the public eye. In our Economics lectures, we would tick off two maybe three companies that enjoy monopoly in India - Indian Railways being the first one that would come to our mind. That was a year back. The advantage of being a curious YouTube-r is that you ending up watching multitude videos - one leading to another like a Chain Reaction. That's how I ended up watching the 2012 CBS documentary "Sticker Shock: Why are glasses so expensive?" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voUiWOGv8ec). My mouth went from a tight line to open, halfway into the video.

             I recently got a pair of Raybans for AED 600 from the Sunglasses Hut and wondered why and how I paid so much for glass, plastic and steel (crudely put, I agree). The logic was a no-brainer: so many many brands of eye-wear and competition should be driving prices down especially when there's hardly any innovation. There's Rayban, Versace, Oakley, Bulgari, Vogue and the list goes on. HOW do they continue making profits with so much competition in the market? Answer lies in the simple economic theory of Monopoly (or near-monopoly in this case). The company that manufactures frames and sunglasses for all of the above brands (and more) is the same - Luxxotica.

                  They started off as a tiny Italian glasses firm and went on to buying every eye-wear related company they could get their hands on - apparently in a rage - and roping in deals to making glasses for every fashion designer the world has ever known. As I am thinking, maybe I have a choice in selecting the retail chain I buy my glasses from, I am rudely brought back to reality as the documentary talks about how Luxxotica also owns Sunglasses Hut, LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Target Optical, Sears Optical, etc. That's about every major retail eye-wear chain in the $28 billion (approx) global eyeglasses industry.

              Luxxotica, which controls around 80% of the eye-wear brands in the market, estimates that half a billion people around the world are currently wearing their glasses. Being what economists call a price maker, Luxxotica enjoys "insane" profits by dictating the price as the highest amount consumers would be willing to pay for their products. This is unlike other competitive markets, to be a part of which for a price maker, competition constantly encourages to innovate or drive prices down (to be as close to the manufacturing cost).

                      Why do I sound like I am raging? For starters, I am not. I am exhibiting disbelief (?), I know not. For my next birthday, I have been eyeing a pair of Chanel sunglasses over Armani, but after the documentary I realize I have only been given the illusion of choice. As Ana Swanson puts it, a very "cynical form of capitalism". The fact that the high price is commanded by the embellished logo is common knowledge but consumers (me included) are ready to pay the price of the sticker to wear the logo.

                    Lenskart is an Indian eye-wear online portal which has started making a dent in the whole affair (at least in India). Founded by Peyush Banal, Amit Chaudhary and Sumeet Kapahi, the products include prescription eyeglasses, sunglasses and contact lenses. Impeccable customer service, amazing convenience (glasses can be tried in the convenience of your homes) and a wide variety of designs define the brand. It's no Chanel, but my Vincent Chase has a mean design! :) I am sure there are other online portals as well trying to break the illusion of choice in their own economic ways! And that's that.

P.S: Oh and guess what? Google Glass - Luxxotica makes them too! :)

Pearls of Wisdom (I'd like to think so :P )

                                 Its been a year since I graduated out of Business School. Have I become wiser for the better? Yes, most definitely. Wise would be a massive understatement. Shrewd would be so befitting. Passing out of UG, we were all once so naïve, so in awe of the corporate world that we let it sweep us away. At least, it happened to me. Luckily and definitely by The High Command’s grace after my UGs I have had to give only 2 interviews – both of which were successful – thus giving me the choice to pick the best. I saw a lot of my friends struggling to get through basic questions. I wanted to help but couldn’t. It was all about charm and persuasion!

                                  By the time I was out of business school, I was equipped with all the necessary astras – 2 years of Sales & Marketing experience with a Fortune 500, an international degree, more than my fair share of exposure to the outside world, a wide open-mind and the realisation that our so called “curriculum” can be deemed excellent only if we apply it. And so I did. Needless to say, I attended the most gruelling interview I have had and nailed it. Which is when I started telling my friends to do the same. And my juniors. Long story short, I did a small non-lecture but a presentation thingy about the Dos and Donts of attending interviews and campus placements. So this post is to all you MBA students, graduates and anybody else who wants to reminisce the time they sat for interviews – hope it helps! J

                               

                                  I came up with an analogy. What do we do in an interview ultimately? We market and sell ourselves. Just like it is with products and services. Organisations come up with strategies, tools, matrices and what not to make sure that the product/service is desirable even for an alien from Mars. We, Job seekers, also need these tools, strategies and several other thingumajigs.

First up, it’s extremely important to differentiate between selling and marketing. Believe me, I have met many a senior personnel who believe they are one and the same. Agreed, one complements the other not necessarily that it means they are one and the same. One of my favourite marketing profs from B-school used to tell us – “Even if you’ve learnt nothing from my class, learn this ‘Selling is not Marketing’”. Marketing is all about ensuring that the product goes off the shelf or that the candidate gets selected for the job. On the other hand, selling is about ensuring that the product reaches the shelf or that the candidate gets the interview call. Capice? Let’s move on. 

According to an article in the Harvard Business Review (August 2012), traditional marketing – i.e. advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications – has failed. Traditional marketing (which has become little more than an expensive, very often valueless mass communications methodology) has failed. As far as mass communications is concerned not only has it failed, the internet and social media have surpassed anything the conventional marketing professionals have to offer. Marketing has been at death’s door for well over a decade. It’s just that marketing professionals don’t want to recognise the reality! 

Marketing Mix for “YOU”

Traditional ways of job seaching has gone obsolete for a while now. Now Job Search is all about Networking, being cheeky, pro-active and all that jazz. Just like products have a Marketing Mix of 4Ps so do we as Job Seekers.

Product: You are a brand. If you haven’t made a brand out of yourselves yet, it’s high time you did. It’s a simple process, identify your USP and the industry you aspire to be in. Imagine how you would position yourselves to your best advantage and voila you have Brand “You”.

Promotion: This includes all the “Tools of the Trade” you would use to promote yourselves to all those wonderful recruiters fishing for the right candidates. You should always be equipped with updated resumes and cover letters that you can whip out at a moment’s notice.

Place: How are you going to distribute the tools that you have gathered? What are professional social media platforms like LinkedIn and Glassdoor (amongst many others) for? Network. Network. Network!!! Find out about the company that you are applying to, how the organisation is structured, salaries (Yowsa, I know) and so much more. All of these for free.

Price: Evaluate yourself. Find out how much you are worth out in the market. If you are worth a gazillion bucks and you are a 100% confident of delivering gazillions bucks worth to the company that you wanna be in – go on ahead. Ask for a gazillion bucks as CTC. If you prove your worth, you would be scooped up like *snap*

Well that’s it. Simple, hanh? But requires a lot of practice. I have been there. To conclude, I would like to add a list of Dos and Donts while facing a recruiter.

Dos and Donts (In random order)

1. Get your BASICS right. If you have the foundation right, you can build the Leaning Tower of Pisa on it. These basics, can be anything from technical to non-technical. You need to learn to learn to be pragmatic in the concepts that you learn. That will be your KO card in your interview.
2. Don’t shrug off fine details. You might end up not cracking the interview because your resume had a word mis-spelled. So burn some midnight oil and be a perfectionist!
3. DO NOT misuse the word Strategy – absolute NO NO. An MBA graduate is bombarded with this holy word billion times over the course of his college tenure. Often, we misunderstand what it means. I recently had a lengthy “argument” with one of my seniors about the right meaning and to prove my point I had to haul my Strategic Management bible (by Dess, Lumpkin, Eisner and McNamara). He left the service of his company a few days later – a happy man. J
4. It’s amazing how mundane our Introduction statements have become. “I am blah blah blah…” Why not spruce it up a bit? Or make it a crisp one? Remember, first impressions are the best impressions and should never be the “last” impression.
5. Accept your “ignorance”. As an aspiring professional, you are expected to remain updated but hey, we are homo sapiens and might miss out a thing or two. And if you are caught, accept your mistake and assure that you would review and get back to them with it. And ask questions, legit questions, to recruiters.
6. Re-work your resume, make it professional, be elaborate when possible. Word in your USP and highlight how that will add value to the employer if you are chosen.  Do not plagiarize. I haven’t really understood the concept of plagiarizing when its comes to resumes. Each resume is mapped to the person it belongs to so there cant be plagiarism. All the same, plagiarism – NO. Recruiters would have seen many tens of resumes to be fooled by the content.
7. LinkedIn Profiles, in this day, would be your best face forward. Keep this updated to the dot. It’s a great networking tool and will help you get connected to like minded people. So network, network, NETWORK.
8. And last but definitely not the least, please go through your JD – Head through Tail. This will save you from a lot of trouble and give you a pencil sketch of the landscape. I knew someone who joined a firm thinking he was going to be in Recruitment when he was actually going to be a part of HR backend operations. He was a highly demotivated personnel and ended up quitting real soon.

So, there you go my friends. Awfully sorry, for the long post. I tried to do justice to what I wanted to convey in as few words as possible. Feel free to reach out and connect with me if you need any advice or even a pep talk J I am game!

Cheers and all the best in cracking the interview. Like a friend once said, “It’s an opportunity to walk in with all-guns blazing like John Rambo.” In the process, have fun and bag the job.

P.S: The post is based entirely on my opinions and experiences. I am definitely not scoring an A+ for this :P Please forgive the mistakes that may arise due to differences of opinion or other reading materials.

The Revolution that is Ola Auto

                                 For an NRC (Non-Residential Chennaite) or an ARC (All-Rounder Chennaite), there is one thing that has been a nightmare from time immemorial - auto rickshaws. Chennai has welcomed hundreds of NRCs over the past few years and auto drivers have given these NRCs their own kind of welcome: "meter + one and a half". These poor NRCs minus the lack of Chennai knowledge and negotiating power end up being prey to the heinous amount that these auto drivers command.

                                  I would be lying if I don't state that there have been improvements in favor of us NRCs (Yes, I have been a proud NRC for close to a year now). For example: there is Auto Annadurai (http://www.theweekendleader.com/Heroism/1531/anna%E2%80%99s-auto.html) who ploughs down the OMR (Old Mahabalipuram Road) stretch celebrating birthdays of CEOs of major IT companies by giving its employees discounts. And, wait for it, has free wi-fi and popular B-mags in his vehicle. Needless to say, he had a few million hits on YouTube, was featured in newspapers, people in the other metros grew jealous of Chennaites and NRCs blessed his family and him a long and happy life.

                            Meanwhile, share-autos (another boon that Chennai was given) became the favorites of the young and the old who weren't privy to the luxury of the lone OMR auto “anna”. For a meager amount, these share-auto drivers will "deliver" (yes, that's the word I planned on using) passengers down a short fixed stretch. I used deliver because these share-autos are like normal autos with the ability and space to carry 3, maybe 4 passengers but by some magic (nothing scientific, whatsoever) these share-autos carry TEN people (including the driver, of course). I would not be surprised if I see a couple of passengers riding on top the vehicle. As such cases with convenience go; Chennaites started preferring these share autos and buses to cater to their transportation needs. When the normal auto drivers felt lonely and deserted, they raised a hue and cry about how these share-autos were disrupting their business and warned the city officials of an impending strike if they dint curb the unruly behaviour of these share-autos. The city officials saw how silly these normal auto drivers were and ignored them.

                                     Then came a revolution!!! A much needed one at that. "The Ola Auto". Ola (formerly "Ola Cabs") is a mobile-app taxi service provider. They have been on the forefront for a couple of years now competing against Meru Cabs, Taxi For Sure (which they have now acquired) and the like. Bhavish Agarwal (CEO & Founder of Ola) is now being included in the list of Gods thanked and worshipped for answering the prayers of hundreds of Chennaites like me. The b-plan for Ola Autos is brilliant and simple. These autos are normal autos carrying 3 passengers (extra charged for an extra passenger) but they charge according to the digital meter (something that Chennaites never thought they would see make a come-back) starting with a minimum fare of INR 25. These can be booked only via the app at the time you want to travel. A convenience fee of INR 10 is charged. Oh, fun fact: these autos are equipped with a GPS. How does Ola pay these auto-drivers? The drivers get to keep the fare amount and are paid INR 1500 per week. "How in the world does Ola make profits?" they ask and I am sure a lot of us have. But it's definitely a win-win-win for all of us!

                                   What with the umpteen complaints against transportation services coming up these days, Ola has made sure that the autos are audited for maintenance, the drivers are trained, and the app even has the facility to share the details of the ride (driver name, contact number, vehicle number, etc) with your friends and family. From my experience and a lot of my friends', Ola auto has been like a big brownie-point to us value+convenience seekers. There has risen a new generation of auto drivers that we never knew existed and we have our fingers crossed that this generation of lenient, obedient, fair and traffic-abiding auto drivers is here to stay.

Download that app and get booking. Cheers!

P.S: For public knowledge, Ola autos (beta version) are available in Bangalore, Chennai and Pune. Ola also runs the "kaali peeli" service in Mumbai where it has roped in the "black-yellow" taxis.

P.P.S: This is a general post from my dormant-hoping-to-become-active blogging self.