Maruti rating has got to do with JD Power

For a month I have been researching on buying a new hatchback, had a Mahindra Renault Logan petrol GLX for 2 and half years and finally gave up on Mahindra’s marketing strategies of reducing the pricing of car. Imagine what happens to early adopters is a big middle finger.

My criteria was responsive, economical, spacious for 2 adults and 2 kids, good mileage and little occupy little space on parking.

Cars I had in mind where, Hyundai i10, Hyundai i20, Fiat Punto, Chevy Spark with gas, Maruti Alto, Maruti wagon R, Maruti Ritz and Maruti A-star.

The real battle was between Chevy Spark with gas and Maruti A-Star Vxi.

No rants out here. Maruti A-Star finally won my family’s heart, and I was happy that I did have to shell out much on the accessories. The deal had sun film control, PU steering grip, PU car seats, Car body cover, Pricol Remote locking and under chassis painting.

PU – imitation leather.

Finally had to give the feed back when people from popular vehicles people call me up, I said my rating was 6/10 for Maruti. The person who call me said it was a problem, check the rating which I have attached as image. I said Maruti has their rating system for which I will not respond. I had my own rating system were 6/10 was actually good.

These are marketing guys gimmicks. I have a feeling J.D Power satisfaction report has got to with Maruti rating system. Where every customer responds with 8/10 naturally J.D power will have to be biased towards Maruti. Check the link below

http://www.indiacar.com/jd_power/default.htm

check the "customer satisfaction index" for 2008. You will understand what I am referring to.

P.S: I believe Chevy Spark will do better in coming days. I received a call from Spark guys and they wanted to analyze on why they lost a customer. I told them about resale value, mileage. It was indeed a call I didn’t expect. I love their "Chevy" car design, interior, responsiveness and handling. Just that, this time it didn’t work out.

tags: Photography, Chennai, Cars, Maruti, Hyundai, Chevy, Fiat, JD Power, Customer Satisfaction

maruti a star

maruti rating card

Kebab court @ AnnaNagar, Chennai, India

Yes it is an exotic Indian Cuisine, The ambiance is amazingly good, spacious. Well they can entertain corporate or private parties for 16 than people or more in a separate dining area. Food is excellent, service is good, Well be ready to spend 300+ RS / person.

Yes both my kids felt it is exotic place to be, they did enjoy.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

McDonald now @ AnnaNagar Chennai, Launch today

McDonalds Congrats, and thanks for bringing it to AnnaNagar Chennai. Ascendas Chennai outlet was a real pain.
McDonalds covered the entire roundtana AnnaNagar for its promotion, check out the photos.
OK the outlet is next to Shah's.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions

Why only few interactions are successful?
It is not just usability, there are few more things beyond to make users to stick on with your product or service.

Know you customers – need & usage

A disappointed salesman of Coca Cola returns from his Middle East assignment.

A friend asked, “Why weren’t you successful with the Arabs?”

The salesman explained, “When I got posted in the Middle East , I was very confident that I would make a good sales pitch as Cola is virtually unknown there. But, I had a problem I didn’t know to speak Arabic. So, I planned to convey the message through three posters…

click on the image for a large view

First poster- Aman lying in the hot desert sand…totally exhausted and fainting.

Second poster – man is drinking our Cola.

Third poster – Our man is now totally refreshed.

Then these posters were pasted all over the place

“That should have worked,” said the friend.

The salesman replied “I also didn’t realize that Arabs go from right to left”

Kindly note: this was a forward mail, I liked it, so I am sharing with you all.

Do Freebies players actually worry about the market?

The answer is simply No.

Freebies players actually don’t worry about the market value, they just want their share.

This brings to an interesting note.

A store like Walmart or Saravana Stores (Chennai, India) wants to acquire a million copies of a product and shares it willingness with its distributors and their offering price being half the selling price, and their selling price to consumers being 40 percent off on the product. Remember the distributor gets huge monitory benefit from this deal.

If you being the distributor will you sell the product to them?

If you say YES, you end up as slave to Walmart or Saravana stores, as consumers are going to flood their stores and killing the entire availability of that product in small stores. You being a distributor, the willingness to buy the product from you by small vendors is going to be nil.

If you say NO, what will be your conditions?
The condition has to be. Walmart/ Saravana Stores can sell the same product at 10-20% less than the MRP (maximum retail price) and if they want they can offer any freebies as their wish to promote sales.

In that way the value of the product is still not lost. If you remember the popular tamil magazine Kunkumam their intial offer was with lots of other products as freebies and still maintaining the MRP.

Technorati Tags: sales, distributor, small stores, marketing, freebies, free, chennai, India

How Commercial Software, can fight against the Free Softwares?

Before you jumping in to making of a software you looked in to the market and realized there is enough market share. Now you made it, wanted to test them. You made it free as a beta Phase, you now started making commercial version of the same and by retaining the free version with limited features for people to try.

Guess what? A new player comes and provides a me too version of the software for free, only revenue channel being advertisement inside the product.

How do you fight the free version?

Now let us look at same problem solved by the big software companies, I am just taking 2 examples.

1. Microsoft Windows VS Linux
2. Camtasia snagit VS Firefox addons Screen Grab VS WINK (Free)

Microsoft Windows – People continue to make fun of the “Blue screen of Death” in Windows, but funny bone people continue to run their machines with the same Microsoft Windows OS at least the majority of them.

When the threat came from Linux for Windows, I remember every media said that it was death of Windows and even now people say that web will be the new OS, that is still speculative.

What did Microsoft Windows do?
If I am not wrong, they came with lot of advertisements to educate users about the benefits of using Windows. They came with Windows XP SP1, SP2 & SP3 and fixed as much as they could. They executed it well.

I believe the marketing spend on Microsoft XP could have been almost or significantly nil when XP sales was at its peak. Word of mouth still holds good in business. Techies still continue to say XP is stable compared to Vista and there is no major innovation in Vista, that people have upgrade to Vista.

To say, we are still dependent on Microsoft for most of our office productivity. Aren’t we?

The second story is the most significant one. Their product is easy to create and it requires less effort and they still continue to be leaders in their USP. I am taking about TechSmith the makers of Camtasia Snagit.

They did face the similar issue of free software from the open source community.

The popularity of Firefox add ons created a market slow down for Camtasia Snagit and on top of that was the Freeware software called WINK, it did almost the same functionality of Snagit and it was free and forums was available for support.

How did TechSmith Camtasia Snagit fight?
Camtasia Snagit 7.2.5 the earlier commercial version of the software was given free.

Do you want to know why they made it free?
The story goes like this in the Indian shop vendors or Medical Shops, If you ask for a medicine and if it is currently out of stock, they will send one of their members to collect the same medicine from the medical store just opposite their store or even few streets away to procure the same and give it to their customers. It is that the customer gets a feeling that any medicine he needs can be obtained. And that he will come back to the same medical store if he needed one.

TechSmith didn’t want end users to try free software instead allowed users to try the previous commercial version for free.

I use Camtasia Snagit free edition as I experience the reliable, proven and easy to use screen capturing/recording software. BTW, I have already tried the software and its features, and even know each and every interface. It is just that it is easy to use, Comfortable. The only feeling being left out, that I am unable to use the advanced features, which are available in the current commercial version.

For the extra mileage they have contributed few projects called Jing Project and ScreenCast
That takes care of community etc etc

Final Notes: Winning over Free is difficult, but not impossible. If you believe in Free, you can’t win over Free. Undo the learning and fight against Free. If you wish to.

Technorati Tags: software, free, commercial, fight, microsoft, Linux, techsmith, camtasia, Snagit, Jing, Screencast, story, advertisement, revenue, marketshare

FaceBook killer – Bravo Google Friend Connect

Seems like Google wants to embrace the non social networking sites to be part of social networking sites.

If you thought Myspace, Ning and Facebook made a killing, Please welcome the new Kid on the Block – Google Friend Connect. Do check the introduction video for more elaborate answers.

I see a lot of traffic to be increased to the personal or corporate websites too. All you need to do is sign up then embed few piece of code in to your website and let your friends and customers do the talking (bring the traffic back to you)

How does the traffic happen?
When ever a visitor visits a site and interact, their interactions are being reflected as updates in to the social networking sites which they belong. The updates are not mandatory, if wished, the interactions are reflected.

Corporate sites could integrate friend connect to have more authentic users

Personal websites could bring all friends buzzing among themselves and create new friends too

Bravo Google
An approach to fight spam is unleashed.

Technorati Tags: google, freind connect, friends, social networking, social, networking, traffic, facebook, myspace, ning

Banks in India do operate through 3rd party.

In India privacy doesn’t matter much, at least for the common man. And We Indians don’t make much use of all the facilities that the Banks offer.

Things I learned:
I did have a bank account with ABN Amro for 2 years till 2004 and the minimum balance was 10,000 INR, which of course I didn’t have, so the interest started to eat in to the balance money which I had in my ABN account.

Lesson 1: If you can’t maintain a minimum balance please close your account. Then don’t blame the bank.

The interesting part comes here check this image below, click on the image for a  larger view

I had closed the account in 2004 and still been getting the updates in my email account from the bank. So that means they don’t have a system which notifies that this account is closed.

Lesson 2: If you don’t want to receive spam mails kindly update your details with the bank

When talking about updating  here is one more interesting image down below, click for a larger version

The login didn’t happen at ICICI and the check the regret message dated Aug 14th 2002. Abandon pages still exist on the server. check this link
http://www.icicibank.com/Regret.html

you should still be seeing this link.

BTW Citibank is no exception. They keep sending SMS and calling me up to let me know that they would be interested in increasing the credit limit increase to higher amount, Which I am not interested and had told over the phone to update their system that I am not interested in that offer.
Click on the image below for a larger view

Lesson 3: Never submit online forms with your personal details unless you are quiet sure that your private data remains private

I do remember the advertisements on banks offering loans use to exist on some 3rd party sites. When clicked on the link it would take to a banner landing page. How many of you checked for the privacy of your data, i.e on which server does that page exist. Assuming if you clicked on X bank banner did you land on X bank website.

And we continue to scream at our Mobile service provider that the DND system is not put in to use.

How many of us use Bank by Phone for the following?

1. Deposit money
2. Withdraw money
3. Demand Draft / Pay Order
4. checkbook request

And we continue to say that we had a long wait at the bank.

Lesson 4: Use Phone by Bank or Internet access to finish your work. For 50 RS + taxes will be much lesser than your precious productive time at work and less on your fuel expenses.

OK, I accept that there are quiet a few banks which don’t offer the above, but will have to change in due course of time.

Technorati Tags: bank, India, 3rd party

The Devil in my Mahindra Renault Logan

Meet the Devil right here. After I took my car from my first free service, I returned home and went to buy fruits along with my family. After shopping, we got in to the car, my wife and my son did enter the right side back door as the opposite doors was no were possible to open because I had parked next to wall close to the door. Usually they get in to the companion front seat.

So we drove back home and I had completely switched off my car, so did the central locking system open the safety latches, so as to open the door. But the right side rear door was not opening, she was pulling the lever for sometime, She screamed at me to help her unlock the door, sitting in the driver seat, I turned back and pulled the lever, the door didn’t open. The opposite side door was already facing the wall this time too, as I had done the parking next to a wall.

I unlocked my door, that was possible. Then I felt “Shit man, I asked them to fix the rattling noise at the left side front door, Why did they touch the back door? I thought they screwed the back door” I reached to the back door and pull the lever to unlock the back door. I was crazy, how come it works from outside and not inside.

Took the car this morning “Monday” to the service station.
Don’t you want to meet the devil in my Mahindra Renault Logan. Here it is…

Latch or manual lever in ON position top

Latch or manual lever in OFF position top

Some one at the service station had turned the lever to “ON” State.

The best part is that this small lever works manually, and is called the child safety lock for the rear doors.

How does this work?
If you are going to make sure that kids alone are traveling with you, you switch on the lever and then lock the rear doors.

What ever the damn situation may be. Let it be accident or fire or hell freezes over your car. Your kids can’t unlock the back side car doors.
You must noticed in the Cops cars. They put the criminals back at the rear seats and lock it. No matter what, they can’t unlock from inside. Some one needs to unlock the door from outside, even when central door locking unlocks the safety latch.

Why would I choose to have my kid in the back seats while leaving the car in the off state.

What a moron usability on the Mahindra Renault Logan?
Why can’t the child door lock feature be part of central locking system. If the central locking system disables the safety latch, even the door should be made to open from inside.

Update:
I heard from a close friend, all rear door child lock performs the same way as the Mahindra Logan. Just to note, I have updgraded from Maruti 800, so I am totally unaware of the rear child safety lock. Still I would like all cars to posesses intelligent system. So control for the driver to have more control on the doors or atleast the dashboard to have controls so that any passenger can disable the rear door child lock.

Some more post which are in continuation with Mahindra Renault Logan

1. Why Mahindra Logan, Renault Logan, Dacia Logan?
2. Mahindra Logan – Usability Explored
3. Is your Mahindra Logan in safe hands – After sales, What service
4. Mahindra Logan – Look out for the new version
5. Mahindra Renault Logan free service – unveiled
6. The Devil in my Mahindra Renault Logan
7. Tested on animals – Mahindra Renault Logan

Technorati Tags: Renault, Logan, Mahindra Renault Logan, Review, safety, kids, usability, car, chennai, dealer, howto, best, petrol, diesel, fear, marketing, sales, savings, automobiles