Dipali Banka from Impact magazine interviewed me about martech, entrepreneurship and Netcore. From the intro: “Rajesh Jain’s idea of creating differentiated experiences for your best customers through ‘Velvet Rope Marketing’ and creating ‘Proficorns’ rather than ‘Unicorns’ are concepts that companies can adopt in these difficult and uncertain times to ensure a profitable business. The Founder & Managing Director of Netcore Solutions is clear that this is the best time for a CMO to adapt and become a Chief Profitability Officer using marketing technologies on the existing customer base.”
A few excerpts from what I said:
- I think one important shift, which even otherwise was going to happen, and has been accelerated due to the current situation is the shift from AdTech to MarTech. AdTech is about customer acquisition, while MarTech is about customer engagement. In these times, one of the first budgets to reduce is new customer acquisition. Rather than spending money on acquiring new customers, companies are going to focus on the ones they already have.
- Generally companies focus on ‘median’ customer marketing. They don’t tell you to separate customers based on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) segments which are there. There is a tendency to protect the customer churning. But when marketing budgets get minimised, the key idea will be to focus on your best customers and create differentiated experience for them, which I call Velvet Rope Marketing (VRM).
- Marketers can actually be profit drivers of the companies at these times. The CMO should actually become the Chief Profitability Officer at these times, and use new technologies on existing customers and generate profits.
- A Proficorn company has four characteristics: profitable, private, promoter-funded and having a reasonable valuation (say, $100 million or more). The whole mindset is towards profitable growth. In difficult and uncertain times, Unicorns fire and Proficorns hire.
- At Netcore, we build a full stack marketing automation, including owning the channels of delivery, automation and analytics built into the system and then AI and ML, personalisation and CSM. That Netcore is in a strong position financially will help us differentiate even more…In business as unusual, we really want to expand aggressively in the US so probably this is a good time to look at acquisitions there.
Here is the interview on pages 18-19 of the magazine.
There is also a video of the interview.
