GGI Business Review is a new business series, capturing snapshots of the GGI Harvard Case Style Masterclass by CEOs and Industry Leaders.
This particular piece is a snapshot from Naiyya Saggi's GGI Masterclass.
The journey of an Entrepreneur is filled with continuous challenges. However, tackling these challenges enables entrepreneurs to grow in their journey of building their dreams. The seed of entrepreneurship is laid inside a person when they set out to solve a problem that they genuinely believe in and that problem defines their purpose of being an Entrepreneur.
Naiyya Saggi, founder of Baby Chakra takes us on the journey of how to build a brand while tackling different problems that come up in the journey known as “Entrepreneurship”
Every brand is built on certain values, which act as a pillar in the brand’s journey. It is essential to have a set of defining values for a brand because that is what sets it apart from others.
Through the example of Baby Chakra, we will understand how having some defining pillars helps a brand pan out its strategies:
FIRST PILLAR - EMPOWERING THE CONSUMER JOURNEY
It is important for each brand to make each customer's journey as empowered as possible by providing them with all the relevant resources they need for a smooth experience.
SECOND PILLAR - EMPOWERING COMMUNITIES
It is important to build communities that empower the stakeholders and provide them with a platform to learn and grow along the way because peer-based learning goes a long way in a person’s journey.
THIRD PILLAR - EVERY CUSTOMER IS UNIQUE
Brands need to understand that every consumer is unique and everyone has their own journey, this is why through the use of technology we can hyper-personalize services to the customers to serve them better. The availability of explicit and implicit data points further helps in providing unique services to each consumer.
SECRETS TO GROWTH
1. IDENTIFYING UNMET NEEDS
The biggest secret for growing a brand is to identify the unmet needs of the consumers and work towards providing them with the solution to those unmet needs. For example, Baby Chakra identified that parents in their community had various unmet needs which they talked about a lot when they were not able to procure quality products for their needs. This is where Baby Chakra saw the opportunity for growth and worked towards building strategies to cater to those unmet needs to grow exponentially.
2. SERVING ALL THE STAKEHOLDERS
After serving the customers, the brand needs to look at the other stakeholders involved in their business, and it must ensure that these stakeholders can gain value through our business. In the case of Baby Chakra, apart from the customers, other important stakeholders are the doctors who have partnered with the brand. Now, it becomes the responsibility of the brand to identify their needs as well and provide them with the relevant value to help them enhance their experience with the brand.
SCALING AFTER REACHING A PEAK
Today digital media has become the go-to place for all brands to market their products and services and reach out to their consumers because their target consumers are actively spread out across all digital platforms. Also, the use of digital media helps to gain a qualified audience that is relevant to the business by easily segmenting the audience into different segments based on numerous characteristics. Digital Media can help a brand in acquiring a good cohort of users, which can lead to the conversion of leads for the brand.
However, after a brand has scaled to a point where it can reach out to a huge number of potential customers, it becomes expensive to reach out to those users as the number of potential users is massive as compared to what it might have been in the brand's initial journey, and this impacts the overall of cost of acquisition of a customer.
So, now the brands try and identify different alternatives to digital media that are relatively cheaper and where the cost of acquiring a customer can be low. Activities like partnership building and the usage of mass media are some sources that can act as good alternatives to digital media. However, these alternatives have their drawbacks as well, and they can lead to a diversified audience, which would make it difficult for the brand to segment the relevant audience. For example, in the case of Baby Chakra, the alternative to traditional social media could be the usage of mass media for reaching out to a large number of people, but it would have compromised the quality of relevant leads that come into the company.
Another way of growing the user base for a brand like Baby Chakra could have been growing into Tier 4 and Tier 5 cities that had not been targeted by the brand till now. Now, although this move might have provided a good number of potential leads to the brand, it might not have led to a good conversion rate for the brand as its potential customers are based out of urban areas.
So, a brand should very clearly identify its potential customer base very carefully so that it can effectively allocate resources towards the acquisition of relevant customers from the areas targeted by a brand.
FEEDBACK FOR GROWTH
While doing all the above activities, a brand should constantly focus on getting feedback from all the stakeholders involved in the business, to ensure that the level of service to each stakeholder stays on top. This would act as a constant growth lever for the brand.
Naiyya is the founder of BabyChakra which empowers parents to make the right maternity & child care decisions. She has previously served as a business analyst with McKinsey and Co.
Naiyya was the Fundraising and Development Lead for Executive Aide on Special Initiatives to the President, Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). She has also assumed the roles of Consultant at the Bridgespan Group and advisor at DLabs at the Indian School of Business.
A law graduate from the National Law School of India University, Naiyya joined the Harvard Business School as an MBA candidate in 2010, where she co-chaired The Harvard India Conference (2012).
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