Author name: Shubranshu Singh

-A caravan of Chinese brands desperate for global dominance- Connecting the East and the West, the Silk Road was central to the economic, cultural, political and religious interactions between them. Lucrative trade and exchange of goods and ideas played a significant role in the progress of world civilization. Back then, the world went to China. Now, China wants to access every world market. A new Digital Silk Road is emerging. Chinese brands are using it to increasingly strengthen their reach overseas, competing against each other for growing presence, while generating impact across categories. They are more purposeful and more data-driven, shifting from traditional sectors like Electronics and Appliances to Fast Fashion and Mobile Gaming, and even Social Media. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Powerful brands are emerging, ones that have been able to differentiate themselves from the competition and be more salient by staying front-of-mind for consumers. China has done this riding on its strength in contract manufacturing, advantages of economies of scale, rapid prototyping and even copying of design and technology. Are Chinese brands going to win at the global level? Will they be the engine to propel China’s economic growth in the future? China as a national brand is handicapped by perceptual baggage. Their story of growing economic might and rapid growth of the GDP does not add enough colour to their brand offering. They need to manage diverse global consumers. This is by no means a new occurrence. Low quality manufacturing that matures into leading edge brand offerings has happened previously in Japan and South Korea. Already, many Chinese Global Brands rank in the Global Top 100, including technology leaders Huawei, Lenovo, Xiaomi, giant retailer Alibaba and ByteDance, the internet company with social media platforms like TikTok. These are mostly ‘export from China’ brands trying, via a set of disciplined activities, to gain awareness and consideration with consumers and build social cachet. A few schematic aspects of their journey are as follows Evolving from a volumetric, sales-centric approach to a brand-centric approach. A strong brand that stands for something meaningful, beyond what a business actually makes and sells, can last many lifetimes. There is a compelling correlation between strong brands, valuable brands, and financially successful brand driven businesses. Most Chinese brands think aggressive pricing, promotion and placement make for sufficient brand building. It’s much more complex than that. A brand is an intangible value built over time and includes much more than just advertising. It’s the product itself – the customer experience, the retail design and so on, all amounting to a clear brand purpose. They are also learning that brand magic extracts more from the profit pool. Sheer volume at shallow profit gives no joy. Focusing on storytelling beyond the product. The Chinese are picking up their market performance data and linking it with market insights, trends data and behavioural data. This is helping them identify areas of opportunity by sector and in gauging what consumers really want. They have reached a point in their international expansion where they have to think beyond product and move from shareholder value to shared value. It is not enough to focus on being everywhere and deliver sheer value. To win, they have to move to a purpose-driven storytelling approach.  “Made in China” has to begin to acquire positive incorporeal associations of “Created in China” Localising brand management. Chinese management runs local companies. They don’t hire senior people from leading local brands who know how things are done. This approach fails to get the nuances required to win in a local market. State led enterprises have this handicap of parochial bias. Global multinational corporations don’t –at least not at a divisional or geographical level. Creating compelling, high-quality content. Storytelling is an essential part of driving brand awareness, helping brands make meaningful and memorable connections with consumers, and building loyalty. The ability to target audiences also gives them the opportunity to present content that’s tailored to resonate with specific groups of people – and even individuals. Chinese brands do not currently have positive connotations when it comes to ‘badging for esteem’ and social packaging.. To conclude, as of now, the Chinese excel at disrupting the affordable end of a category due to their value proposition. They come in at a low price and often knock out the competition. However, they are not upping their game on brand aura, socialization, purpose enriched authorship of narratives and premiumization. That is where they face the real test. It is where they will likely fail !! http://www.businessworld.in/article/Down-The-New-Silk-Road/08-07-2020-294982/

Paul Kennedy’s seminal work ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers’ claims that to qualify to be a great power depends on economic and military capabilities and that these two aspects are linked and ,ideally, mutually self-fulfilling. I feel the role of ‘soft power’ is even greater. Military and economic action may not be ‘always on’ but the cultural forces are never at rest. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] China is, in PPP terms, the biggest economy in the world and it is only behind the United States in military might.However the gap in nominal GDP and military power between the USA and China is substantial. So substantial, that the US is not yielding any strategic space. Therefore China will aim to become a regional hegemon first. China’s rapid economic growth is not endless. It has already plateaued before the inevitable decline. The assumption that China has the momentum to ensure regional dominance without contest is simply incorrect. The elements that constitute China’s national capabilities are not of a quality that make its dominance a foregone conclusion. China is an over prepared but improbable superpower. India is an under prepared but definite regional power. Firstly China’s growth rests on cheap labour as the most abundant resource. That demographic dividend is over. China’s population is ageing. It will be old before it is prosperous in ‘per capita terms’. In 1979 China had 7 working people for every 1 retiree. That changed to 5.5 working people to 1 retiree in 2015. It will become 2 working people to 1 retirees by 2035. However, India and USA’s working population will continue to grow till 2050 So, China’s labour factor of productivity is diminishing. In any case, the advanced robotics that has been commercialized in Japan, European Union and the US has obviated the need for unskilled, semi-skilled labour to a great extant. Capital inflow is also under constraint. Early industrialization in China was driven via small scale enterprises. Then 1990s onwards, ‘Made in China’ transition took over.The gold coast policy exploded export intensive manufacturing. This wasn’t new. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan had done the same earlier but China had more capital and labour. However, China’s growth is not efficient in terms of productivity. It is a state enterprise dominated economy. In its second phase of growth in 2000 – 2015, China grew 6-8% each year depending on how you do the computation but the growth was not driven bylabour or productivity. It was on account of growth in investment /fixed assets thanks to infrastructural surge. From 2008 – after the global financial crisis – the West began a gradual decline in China centered manufacturing because demand itself began to gradually decline. Corporate level of debt as a percentage of GDP doubled in China. China’s government ordered state owned banks to lend to state-owned companies. This was clearly not organic economic demand. It was the largest national building program in world history. Perhaps also the most wasteful one. What happened in Europe in 400 years happened in China in 40 years. Manufacturing moved 400 million people from rural poverty to urbanized mass middle standards.That’s suggestive of a possible high tide of bad debt. Japan also had this boom and then went to 25 years of near zero growth. China’s capital output ratio is about 50 times worse than India’s. This is a remarkable fact. But it is very poorly publicized because India gets much smaller investments due to infrastructural challenges. India is superior in the efficient use of capital.Another area where India has enormous headroom is agriculture. Our yield per hectare is much lower and if we match China’s level of yield we will have some 600 million tons of food grain more to store. This will also explode Indian economy because 65% of our workforce is rural and dependent on Agriculture. Lastly India is a private economy when compared to China where 150,000 state owned enterprises get nearly 80% of all finance and the 6 million private companies survive on the rest. The top 3 state enterprises in China ,in 2015, had revenues exceeding the combined revenue of  the top 500 private companies. It has become even more skewed with the general economic slowdown.This is where the Chinese Communist Party derives its strength. It has commercial empire which gives it ability to extend patronage and control every part of the economy. China has no rule of law, intellectual protection or democracy. India, which does, is more prepared for the future in the real world. Finally, let’s look at soft power. This term was coined by Joseph S Nye Jr.in 1990. But India’s and China’s civilizations have engaged in soft power for the last 5000 years. China has been an insular country. India was colonized and from the year 1100 AD, the country was in turmoil because of invasions including widespread cultural destruction. Despite this, India is ahead of China in art, culture and public sentiment when it comes to recognition across the world community. China is getting soft power from projecting strength economically in Africa and Latin America. Whereas in Asia, it has issues with all neighbours – Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, India, Philippines. This is not true for India. We have bilateral and multilateral friendships. When ZuiXieobowon the Nobel Prize in 2010, he was the first Chinese citizen to be awarded a Nobel prize while still a resident in China. He was not released from prison, nor was he allowed to accept the award in Oslo. This shows the system currently in power in China. China has internal weaknesses, external strength projection. India and China can be the story of the tortoise and the hare. Keep walking India… http://www.businessworld.in/article/Why-India-Can-Be-The-Preeminent-Power-In-Asia/07-07-2020-294974/

The Internet changed marketing from a military parade to a dance floor! Occasionally the business context changes so dramatically that the laws of business need not to be reframed. This happens when there is a massive shift in either a dominant communication medium or a dominant technology. It happened with mass printing, radio, television and now the internet. Likewise it happened with the commencement of agriculture, the arrival of the steam engine, production while the assembly line and now information technology. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] But, for the first time, the Internet represents both a new dominant technology as well as a means for communication. Hence, this is by far the biggest disruption to business equilibrium. Access and enablement are the universal outcomes of the Internet era of marketing. Besides state actors, it is still only corporations, media agencies and tech majors who’ve had access to data and resulting insights. Imagine when the ecosystem has ready access to “all data’. It has the potential to make marketing more relevant than ever before or totally irrelevant depending on how marketers respond to this change. Prior to the arrival of the internet, marketing was often defined in terms of war. It even used military terminology e.g – target, flank manoeuvre , frontal assault, strengths , weaknesses ,campaign, gain– loss, attack-defend , territory, advantage, tactics etc. Brands ran advertising campaigns aimed at whole populations sending strong thematic messages. It built strong brand associations ,generation after generation, and gave people a sense of relationship even if they were not buyers or consumers of the given product or service. With the arrival of the Internet the ‘one-to-many’ motive for any pre-eminent medium was lost forever. The most significant difference between new media and traditional media operators was the wealth of data available with the former. The damage that ‘data – ism’ has done is to diminish the role and relevance of creativity is a subject of deep study. It has also given short-term outcomes more prominence and established this modality in the name of ‘effectiveness’! Targeting, retargeting, search and social media – many of these have compromised longer term brand fame. Everyone is relying on last-minute targeting. This neglects renown, prominence or talkability and flattens the transformational effects of great creativity. The metrics and horizons for brand building cannot be the same as those for the quarter, half year or fiscal year of business reporting. Emotional priming, gaining fame and earning and owning of memory structures needs time. However, we are seeing that the immediate and short-term considerations are of supreme importance. Tactical marketers pander to the ‘short-termist’ majority. They celebrate a lot of jargon and flashy bits of ephemeral advertising. The very first public stage exposure for this new age was only as recently as 2011 when McKinsey & Company Circulated a report called ‘Big data: the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity’ . Soon after this IBM, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and several others began to claim expertise, products and solutions to make big data a commercial reality. There were authoritative articles written about how the CMO was becoming a bigger driver of digital adoption and tech adoption  than even the CIO. For digital centricity, C-suite collaboration critical—from the CEO who presents a unifying vision, the CMO who owns the customer relationship, the CIO, who enables data analytics, the CFO who weighs financial priorities, to the Chief Human Resources Officer, who identifies a talent strategy. Applied thoughtfully, digital technologies can better connect organizations to their customers, partners, and employees. But tech-enabled interactions must not lack a human touch or connection. Brand building needs a leveraging of technology in ways that enrich, rather than dampen, the human spirit. Likewise, brands are moving from being isolated entities to being members of far-reaching ecosystems that can address customer needs more holistically. With technology, brands can expand to new business areas by looking beyond industry boundaries to address customer needs, identify opportunities for growth and partnerships, and create new value for customers. Businesses that solve unmet needs through smart, open ecosystems can displace competitors that are unwilling or unable to do the same. Only very few organizations have the opportunity to involve consumers and communities in shaping, influencing, building, and co-creating brands. Many marketers feel the need to evolve and create dynamic, two-way engagement across all stages of the consumer journey and the product life cycle. Hence customization, community building, or crowdsourcing can turn willing customers into brand ambassadors, influencers, advocates, collaborators, and even innovators. I have had the privilege to do that at Royal Enfield building one of the largest and most engaged social media communities in India besides the huge presence of the same riders on ground. In an era of connected technology and big data analytics, customers and regulators are increasingly conscious of trust and its sanctity. This may require companies to create a structure that protects customer data and privacy, detects threats to data protections and security, and promotes the ethical use of AI. The breakneck pace of technological change is not slowing. Companies that embrace change and place the customer at the center of their organizations can make choices that have a win-win impact or they can wait to perish. Today’s business leaders know that digital technologies hold the potential to transform nearly every aspect of our world. Organizations are exploring advanced analytics, AI, cloud computing, and the internet of things. But they are also learning that these technologies aren’t a substitute for the bonds we share as humans. http://www.businessworld.in/…/The-Internet-Changed-Marketing…-/18-06-2020- 288747

Disruption, chaos and complexity are amongst the most important subjects of study in the modern era. They are profoundly important multifaceted concepts. However, they are very less understood. Einstein’s ‘Theory of Relativity’ shredded the concept of absolute time and space. Quantum physics took us beyond controllable measurement processes. Studying chaos shows us a world beyond deterministic predictability. Chaos has beautiful and intricate patterns. Irregular order can seem like chaos. We have to identify and understand non-linear patterns. The world is dealing with a pandemic and cannot make sense of it because our capacity to model non-linear systems is poor. Be it the weather, the economy, traffic, a set of random numbers, landslides, shape of natural objects, stars in the sky, or a series of stock prices, chaos is about pattern and probability. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] The brilliant French mathematician Henri Poincaré(1854-1912) is,in some ways, the father of chaos theory. His central insight is that of the ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’. Many physical systems exhibit sensitive dependence on arbitrary initial conditions, and are therefore essentially unpredictable. The classic example is the weather.In 1972 Edward Lorenz, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a paper – ‘Predictability: does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”The paper did not provide the answer. That was the point it wanted to make. It showed that weather occurrences obeyed certain mathematical rules, but never repeated themselves within any finite period of analysis. Even tiny changes in a couple of variables, extrapolated over a month or beyond, could produce dramatically different results.The weather makes itself up as it goes along. Complex systems like the weather, economies, astral phenomenon,animal kingdom, our brain’s impulses and the internet are not stable.Our reflex, when confronted with non-linear systems, is to attempt to solve them by substituting linear approximations. Regularities that get detected in this way are totally counterintuitive. In the 1970s, Benoit Mandelbrot, a mathematician working in IBM’s pure research department analyzed cotton price data with massive computing power. He showed that there was unexpected order within the disorder. He coined the very useful word ‘fractal’ to describe things that are very similar to each other, yet not identical. Things like cotton prices, rainfall, earthquakes or vegetation. Patterns are endlessly repeated but ininterminable and unpredictable variety of ways !Business is fractal: no situation is quite like another, but there is a limited set of key factors that always resemble each other. Business outcomes are utterly unpredictable. A proven science of management giving universal laws may never be possible. Just like we may never learn the best way to prevent, or manage pandemics even though the patterns seem to be familiar. The useful lessons for life, brands and business may be spelled out as : 1. Look for pattern or order in apparently random or disordered data. Patterns exist. The only question is whether we can detect them. All markets generate patterns of behaviour and response. 2 Linear analysis is not the way of finding the hidden order if the system is reasonably complex and interdependent. The human brain has the flexibility and imagination to discover the pattern. 3.Simple systems do complicated things. Conversely, complex systems can give rise to simple behaviour A few key things when combined with chance can lead to incredibly varied outcomes. Try to isolate the key variables, the main causes that interact with each other. Look for characteristic and reliable patterns of simple behaviour 5.Chance or luck has an impact on our lives and this world. Just because cannot be modelled doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. We have to always expect unexpected things and also factor in the unknown. Lastly, we should build flexibility into our plan by changing the things that we can control. It also brings up the need to have alternatives, contingencies and multiple strategies. There is a Farsi verse in a couplet by a famous Sufi that says ‘Eenturfatamaasha been daryabahubaabandar’ – ‘Behold the spectatcle, an ocean is inside a bubble’ Life, is in many ways a bubble in a churning ocean. Live it. http://www.businessworld.in/…/An-Ocean-Inside…Bubble…/20-05-2020-192658

We, Homo sapiens, arenavigating our 21st century existence with Neolithic genes. We need to enrich our understanding of who we are – genetics, anthropology, palaeontology, neuropsychology, and social psychology- to realise this better.Our genes lag behind our real world environment. The progress of evolution has long periods of relative dormancy and constancy, disrupted by short periods of swifttransformation. Human existence has had two such significant transitions -from hunter-gatherer Stone Age society tosettled agricultural civilisation and the relatively recent shift to an urban, industrial society. We are seeing the third –a transition to an information age -where existence will be seamlessly physical and virtual at the same time. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Humans emerged as hunter-gatherers about 250,000 years ago, living in clans. Some 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, agriculture started and transformed society. Then 500 years, global commerce began to grow and, in turn, fuelled industrialisation some 200 years ago. Our shift to a settled, prosperous, urban and generally safe society has been very recent.In terms of time, the information age has barely even beeped on the radar of human existence. The conditions of life have changed radically since the Stone Age, but we arestill ‘hardwired’ hunter-gatherers. We carry constructive social traits,self-destructive tendencies and primeval biases. Our emotions take precedence over our reason. We revel in machismo and are clannish. All of us have a herd instinct and indulge in gossiping. We build natural chains of command and follow assertive frontrunners reflexively. In what ways are we from the Stone Age? Instinctual cooperation- Collaboration, partaking, specialization and sociabilitybegan with affiliation. Our Stone Age ancestors began living in groups of up to 150 people. Virtually all hunter-gatherer tribes shared to survive. Sharing food was the basis for cooperative exchange among hunter gatherers. The animals hunted were big and successful hunts were infrequent. It therefore made good sense to share the kill throughout the clan.Sharing reduced the risk of going hungry because other hunters would reciprocate.The humans who survived and prospered passed on their genes. Cooperation, specialization and skill building require friendliness. Therefore a predisposition to sharing information, exchangingthings and doingmutualfavours is hardwired in us.This Stone Age affability and cooperation are very appropriate to modern living. But, it is because of this that we find it hard to deliver bad news, to quantity each individual’s contribution accurately, or disproportionately reward contributors by culling out the laggards. Moreover, there are several other primitive characteristics we need to be aware of and compensate for. I list the major ones here. Emotion over reason- Alertness was a matter of life and death. Good instinct saved lives. Emotions were and are the first reaction to everything seen or sensed. These instincts got passed genetically. So, when we receive negative feedback, we react emotionally. Emotion beats cold reason. – Typecasting from first impression – Because the Stone Age world was threatening and complex, it was necessary to classify things immediatelyon the most basic data. Genes that survived, were of those who made quick decisions on first impressions. Sitting around to analyseevidential data was not life enhancing. Today, even when it is not so vital to decide instantlywe still give enormous weight to first impressions. As a salesman knows, a winning smile, a firm handshake, and a good opening line can close the sale.We make many poor decisions and omit to weigh the evidence judiciously simply because of emotive short circuits in our processing -Comfort in hierarchy- In hunter-gatherer societies ad hoc hierarchies were led byconfident leaders. Security increased with attachment or deference to a leader. We are wired to follow a pecking order.This explain why every revolutionary attempt destroys hierarchy. But strangely, once the existing official hierarchy is abolished, an equally valid unofficial pecking orders springs up and flourishes. Hierarchy without insight is value destructive. -Risk avoidance. Conformity is still wired in us and following the herd is as popular as ever. One look at fashion, music , sports, celebrity mania and conformist ideology –isms will show us that. Hunter-gatherers tended to take risks only under constraints when they were able to find no safer option.A high degree of security seeking prevents us from embracing risks. Because hunter-gatherers weren’t secure, they generally avoided risk. Now we are often much more secure than the hunter-gatherers, yet we are still loath to take risks, even when these are far from life threatening. This reluctance to take risks is a hangover from the Stone Age. Risk aversion is built into most modern business. We talk about a ‘risk premium,’ where returns must be significantly higher to justify taking an extra risk. Disruptions, innovations, breakthroughs emerge from smaller enterprises who have less to lose. It is ironical that those who are bigger and more profitable are reluctant to take risk. Because we are risk averse, we move only when convinced that the upside greatly exceeds the downside. This is despite evidence that, increasingly, business fortune goes to the brave. In conclusion, we should not be distressed about the implications of evolutionary psychology on the one hand and our modern existence on the other hand. Remember, we are the only species that can formally learn and transmit learning. This means that we can realise that many of our weaknesses are because of genetic bias and, if we are mindful, we can be successful in correcting such biases. Like all species of living things, mankind is also hardwired ,but it is the only that is capable of wilful rewiring. In this lies our salvation. http://www.businessworld.in/…/Neolithic-Genes-In-Modern-Times/14-05-2020- 192118