who needs the net...now?

The media of the masses-Internet-is yet to

reach the masses in India. But does this mean that the Internet’s only role for an

Indian marketer at present is as a means of ‘keeping up with the Jones’. The

Internet is much too powerful a force to be just a marketer’s and communicator’s

fancy of the month.

On one hand, it is giving a business the

opportunity to make the world-at least the connected parts of it-their market. In the same

stride, it is creating a competitor for him in Venezuela, even if his business happens to

be supplying widgets to the friendly manufacturer next door.

The Net is casting aside a system of fixed

suppliers and vendors, which had been a creation of an imperfect world, as economists

would term it, where information was a private property not a public domain. Recently, one

of the big three Detroit boys announced that it was discontinuing the practice of having

fixed suppliers for non-critical components for its automobiles. Its gameplan is to use

the Net to get the most competitive prices for parts like nuts, bolts, and widgets. This

move created an opportunity for a component maker in Chennai, and alongwith it placed a

threat for everyone in the business of nuts and bolts.

The Net is becoming a two-faced sword and

at this point of time there are some Indian businesses especially exposed to the

tremendous upside and an equally pronounced downside. These, for most part, are businesses

that have traditionally not found too much value in advertising. The paradox is, they see

web presence as the reward

that a big corporate cat gives himself

after he finishes signing on a Rs 40-crore advertising campaign. This misperception has

deterred them from taking their business global with a click of a mouse.

Among the most vulnerable are businesses

whose business is exploiting the comparative strengths of nations. For an exporter, one

sure way of committing hara kiri is by not having a Net presence. The guy who competes

with him from Taiwan already has a better cost structure, image for quality, and is on the

Net. For an importer in the US, who sources his products on the Net the businesses would

not even be in reckoning. Forget level playing field, he would not have any field to speak

of. On the other hand, if this exporter gets a brother in Bangalore to put together a web

site for him, which one can realistically assume could be better than that of the

Taiwanese chap, he changes the ballgame. Wasn’t it Sun Tsu who said that if you are

not too good at a certain playing field, then the thing to do is to change the field.

Net presence is equally valuable to the

in-bound travel trade in India. People overseas not only use the Net to see which movie

they should watch, but also to decide where they want to take a vacation. Selling travel

service is the single biggest component of ecommerce at present. According to Yahoo! Inc.,

provider of the Net’s most popular search engine, travel-related ecommerce is growing

at 400 percent per year and last year stood at $ 40 billion. In some places, it has

started to challenge the traditional channel of travel sales.

There is a very real market for in-bound

travel to India that can be tapped using the Net. This was discovered by a leading Indian

travel company, which set up a web site to promote its treks along the Ganges. Over 9,000

people visited the web site in the first month and led to a conversion rate of around 570.

A much higher response rate than the average rate of 4 percent for a database mailing.

Only that here one does not need a database to begin with.

Another example of a business which netted

clients using the Web as a storefront is that of a real estate developer who had a

property for sale near Kodaikanal. The market for this was mostly NRIs, originally from

southern part of India who would like to eventually settle in Kodaikanal. The

communication consultancy devised that the most cost-effective solution was setting up a

web site. The result, enough first inquiries to completely sell the entire 200 acre

property in just under a year. Normally this would have taken over a year and a half.

These are just some of the Indian businesses that stand to benefit from setting up a web

site. Moreover, a couple of factors make web presence attractive for even the small

businesses.

Contrary to what people may have one

believe, Net presence does not cost too much money. In fact, it is the most cost-effective

solution for small businesses. And if one sets up a site at Geocities (which I would not

recommend owing to lackluster performance) it costs absolutely nothing.

Equally strong is the misunderstanding that

setting up a web site is complex. Though it helps to have professionals do the job, even

you can set up a web site with the help of software that are as easy to use as Word or

PowerPoint. And in the time to come, these software will become increasingly more user

friendly.

One factor which makes the Net especially

irresistible is that in the fast-paced world, which marketers have to live in, a web-based

solution is one of the fastest and easiest to implement. There is no need to put together

a database, send out mailers. You are in business from the word go.

However, a word of caution. The currency of

this linked world is a thing called indexing. It is the process by which a web creator

tells the search engines that such and such information exists at such and such web site.

It’s indexing which makes or brakes a web site and as creating web pages becomes

easier, indexing becomes more challenging.

A hash of indexing and the web site will be

an isolated and unexplored corner of the Net. But if one does the job right, then each

time a purchase engineer in Detroit uses a search engine to find out about suppliers of

nuts and bolts, the engine will give a link to the Chennai-based component supplier’s

site. And then, your business will click in the global village’s marketplace.