The brand
quandary: IndiaMART still carries the 'India' tag despite global
feelers from members
After having carried the
field for years on end and succeeding in invoking the interest of
investors such as Intel Capital, IndiaMART
is in a fix. Why would a global customer come to an 'India'MART,
they tell Debasish Roy
After being
invested in by Intel Capital,
IndiaMART.com is now
looking pretty and more confident that they will make it big
time. On being asked the reason for the timing of the investment
Intel's Vivek Kupram had commented: "It is the numbers.
IndiaMART did not have
the requisite numbers earlier. Now it does."
In other words, the success of a brand depends on the
acceptability of the business model by customers in general.
Websites such as IndiaMART
thrive on the number of registrations they get instead of the
number of page views or hits they experience. The hits and
misses game is for the content |
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site such as Indiatimes.com or Yahoo.com or MSN.com.Not
IndiaMART, which is a
coming together of many offline active businesses.
The business model is entirely different and it goes to the credit
of Dinesh Agarwal, managing director and CEO of
IndiaMART to stick to his
business model steadfastly.
However, after blazing a trail in India and for Indian buyers and
sellers, IndiaMART has
suddenly found itself eminently able to handle a global footprint.
Currently, quite a few of buyers and sellers on
IndiaMART are in India.
However, there has been constant interest from foriegn buyers and
sellers from abroad to be part of
IndiaMART.com.
The only hitch has been that owing to a brand positioning clash
many companies do not want to become part of a site which has India
in its name.
Well, to book a domain with a name like Globemart would not help as
the hits and the high response from buyers and sellers around the
world and particularly from India is on
IndiaMART and not on some
new site which was unknown till now.
IndiaMART InterMESH Limited's other domain ventures such as
www.indiangiftsportal.com and www.abcpayments.com are relatively
unknown attempts to hog the limelight on the Net in those particular
verticals.
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IndiaMART's
success in enabling small and medium businesses in India to
fructify and join the global bandwagon on its B2B net enabling
platform as a page on the www.IndiaMART.com
site, is a highly effective and simple strategy, which has
worked like a charm.
However, now the promoters Dinesh Agarwals and his team find it
increasingly difficult to get a large number of conversions to
jump onto the India brand if they are from other parts of the
globe.
The advertising agency and the A-team of the company is
addressing the problem and is trying to arrive at a consensus as
to how to leverage the brand and at the same time convert it
into a global brand.
For one thing, IndiaMART
will not be able to have its cake and eat it too. It will either
have to shed the India image or carry on with it and sacrifice
its ability to attract buyers and sellers from a worldwide
footprint.
The other option available to this company is that it spends
overseas to promote a site such as www.globaltrade.com and then
redirects it to www.IndiaMART.com/global.
This would require huge marketing funds and also a policy
decision to actively develop the brand for
IndiaMART and not just
tom tom its facilties available on the Net.
Till now, however, all advertising that has come from
IndiaMART has been on
listing of its wares.
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PLAN
YOUR BUSINESS MODEL AND ALSO PLAN YOUR BRAND POSITIONING AROUND
IT. WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU FIND YOUR SUCCESS STRANGLED FIVE TO 10
YEARS FORM THE BEGINNING, OWING TO WRONG POSITIONING?
Al Ries and Laura Ries, Management gurus and branding experts
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