Bogus Marketing + Self Promotion Thread

Wonderful discussion here@Neyawn , it's discussions like these that keeps the community strong and growing. 

From 2012/13, you've been the biggest reason for creating a community of civil services aspirants, especially after orkut and mrunal's forum were closed. 

Within just a few years, forum became the reddit for civil services aspirants (the positive comparison), where everyone could find answers and peers just by sitting at home. This not only resulted in knowledge sharing but also knowledge sharing by successful aspirants who were among everyone in the community. 

From that to building a highly trustable brand and a business has made you nothing less than a celebrity among the aspirants. The craze to meet "Neyawn sir" or "Ayush sir" and get a direction to their preparation is very real and I have heard it from hundreds of aspirants. 

You are today among the top mentors and successful business persons in edtech industry and this is only the beginning considering how strong your business foundations. 

Now, what I admire the most about you is, inspite of having achieved so much in this sector, you come here and analyse your marketing strategy here in the public. It takes absolute courage to do that and full credit to you for always doing such things and perhaps why you'll end up being a "Doyen" of this sector when you decide to call it a day. 

Coming to the discussion part, about the marketing in edtech sector, I'll share my humble opinion. 

1) Marketing is indispensable: Without marketing, even the best product dies. 

2) Ethics in Marketing: I've always held this thought that marketing in edtech should be "product based" and not "result based". The very nature of competitive exams are dynamic and "no product" can guarantee selections, it's only the individual efforts and individual person's journey (habits, aptitude and attitude, way back from school) that plays a huge role in selections. The best of the edtech products, at best "aid and advise" the aspirants but are not and cannot solely be responsible for selections. The reason being, each edtech product solves issues related to a specific preparation area and there is "no product" that can solve entire "A to Z" problems of every aspirant, considering both time and money constraints. 

So, I'll be really happy the day every edtech player, focuses on explaining the features of their product in depth and how it can effectively solve problems in their preparation, rather than just correlate it with the number of selections from the aspirants who purchased that product. Even the toppers, just say I used so and so product, but never actually share in detail that I used so and so product, for solving x y z problems related to my preparation. 

To cut it short, the problem with marketing in edtech is lack of specifics and honesty. Perhaps that's why the government also decided to crack a whip on edtech advertisements on selections. 

The day any major edtech player starts getting into the marketing based on the product "specifics", is the day when the consumer will have a win-win situation because not only is he/she a getting a high quality product that solves a highly specific problem, but the aspirant also gets to make an informed choice and understands that the product is not the panacea to all their problems but one of the problems.

The marketing conundrum: Now, coming to the absolute commercial side of business. The majority of the crowd that enrolls for the courses are "non-serious" aspirants, by which I mean that cracking civil services exam is not their highest priority. They just want to taste the process and leave. Such aspirants can be non serious either due to situations in life or due to their own personal interests. For such aspirants, they don't really care about product specifics because they don't want to or don't have the time to understand the exam process in depth. They just want to look at the number of selections from x y z and that'll be their sole criterion for deciding whether to invest in a product. If you start explaining the product specifics to them, they'll simply move to another product where only the number of selections are given. Because they are not so involved in the exam process, they want to make decisions based on the ease of information and want no complex information to enter into their decision making process. 

From a consumer psychology perspective, the consumers look for a "fame value" in any product they buy because somewhere it provides the feeling of almost cracking the exam, because someone else cracked the exam using the same product. (For example, many surveys indicate that people buy iphones to be perceived as rich and important, rather purchase an iPhone for it's utility). Similarly, aspirants want to buy a product that can give that mental validation that they'll be successful after the purchase. 

The problem is, majority of the consumers want the marketing to be outcome oriented and not process oriented. So, in such an environment, which business firm will want to risk a new marketing strategy that majority of the consumers neither value or understand?

Right now, nobody has an answer to this. No one knows how to educate and motivate those majority of the consumers. Neither do businesses have time and resources in the highly competitive environment to focus on these aspects. That's why the marketing conundrum ensues and will continue to. 

Even with the tiny experience I've had as a  business entity in this sector, I've seen the same. I've lost hundreds of consumers because I've never marketed myself (consciously) and even if I did, it was half hearted because deep down my aspirant soul knows that people who get selected do get selected by their own individual efforts and my products or any other product, may have played only a small role. I've made the best of products and yet have had zero registrations. And I've made commerical products that serves the consumer psyche and they have sold like hot cakes. Not once but multiple times, and that has cemented the belief in my head that consumers do not want to go through a complex decision making process by evaluating the product specifics. They only need a simple metric like number of selections or a product that gives them a sense of validation.

(Though my experience as a business entity in this sector is negligible, because somewhere i never wanted to be a business entity in this sector because of the same marketing conundrum, but happened to stay there due to personal circumstances. I cannot work where my beliefs are something else and the reality is something else. I face this cognitive dissonance related to marketing every day and that's why I felt like commenting here on this thread because this issue is something that I think almost everyday. I still remember the uneasy feeling when 80% of the test series buyers on my platform never attempted any and that money just went down into the drain. And there were many who passed prelims from those remaining 20%, and they give credit to my test series till date, but deep down both i and them know that the reason they cracked prelims was their mad efforts and I only played a small part. One year down the lane, i entirely stopped the test series initiative because somehow that money from people who never utilized the product dint feel right to me. I no longer wanted to do it just for the sake of money. Once I was having a casual conversation with the ceo of the firm that provides lms to many major coaching institutes and he too agreed on that fact that majority of the product buyers never utilise it.

Hopefully, one day I get to work where i spend my hours in improving the lives of people even by a tiny amount and not spend my efforts on guaranteeing selections to people through marketing. That's how I want to make money in this life. But then, these are only my personal thoughts and inclinations.)

To add more weight to my argument, one can see and witness the number of "psuedo-coaching" initiatives that have proliferated like madness on Instagram and other social media. They have cracked the consumer psychology that I've explained above and are successful baiting "those non serious majority aspirants" to generate a significant revenue, while providing absolutely no value to the consumers. 

Ethics is anyway a subjective term, and people do call "advertising of selections" by edtech players as unethical, but what else is the way out? In this edtech sector, if a business has to survive and thrive, there's no other option, because the consumer mindset will perhaps be very difficult to change. 

So anyone who wants to succeed in the edtech sector, will have to put aside "ethics in marketing" and perhaps display immense business ethics in how the products are fulfilled (in post purchase processes like effective delivery of goods and services, ethics in refunds and returns etc). If anyone goes into "ethical marketing" without solving the marketing conundrum, they are just killing their business slowly. 

To end, as bad as it sounds, generally agreed ethics and marketing in edtech sector cannot go hand in hand at the moment. Let's only hope for a better future. Until then, do everything you can and do not think about ethics in marketing, if you want to get bigger and bigger in the edtech sector. 

Absolutely, will come back over the weekend for more insights. 

Adding a few more pointers.

1) Lol, no. I'm definitely not overestimating you. Whatever I'm saying is based on what I've seen. And i still stand by those thoughts because what you've done in the last 5-6 years is highly difficult to achieve. And this is just the beginning, 30 years down the lane, considering this trajectory, things will be what they have to be. 

2) Not just forum, but many people who are either in college or fresh graduates, do not know other major institutes also. The problem again, is of marketing and outreach. I've hardly seen any innovative approach with respect to this among the coaching institutes. 

A campus ambassador programme, free virtual workshops, tie ups with colleges can easily solve this in just 2-3 years of time. Any college would love to tie up with forum or any big brand because providing access to preparation for civil services is a matter of reputation for colleges. Setting up a civil services prep club and having a dedicated faculty advisor/coordinator will ensure that there is consistent registrations every year. Once this is done, the issue of awareness in college folks will be a thing of the past. 

Also, such an exercise is relatively not capital intensive, you'll just need a dedicated team to focus exclusively on the outreach and awareness aspect. 

3) I highly doubt that a person with your experience and talent can do anything stupid to sink the ship. I see it as more of a problem in navigating the dilemmas. Some times our personal set of beliefs pull us back, so it's just a matter of introspection and devising a clear cut algorithm of what to do in such situations, so that the business always stays in the healthy curve. 

4) True, I agree with you, building a business with a community will provide checks and balances and is also very difficult. But once that is done, if you look at any business that has a growth based on community participation, there are hardly any disappointments. So, the community thing is highly rewarding in the long run.

5) Investors will always want better returns. That's the only thing they care about. How we do it, is left to us. With or without selections, with or without high quality courses is really not their headache. 

It's just that the coaching institutes lower the quality of the courses, in the pressure of meeting investor targets - kind of an easy approach to the problem. I don't think any investor would tell a founder to tweak around with courses "as long as the numbers and the revenue keep flowing". 

If today you think that forum is not as investible as say, srishti, it's because of the numbers. If forum can generate those numbers, while maintaining the quality of the courses, then there would be bee-line for investments.

And i definitely, without any doubt can say that forum can reach those numbers with the same high quality content with innovative approaches in marketing and thinking beyond the delhi crowd. (For example, I've stopped marketing for my initiative long ago, whatever happens is through organic searches and through content generated long ago by influencer marketing. With almost zero marketing in the last 1 year, people from the remotest parts like nagaland, mizoram, arunachal and other rural areas are sitting at their home and ordering products from my website.)

There are millions of aspirants waiting for trustable initiatives to come near them, atleast virtually, so that they can also prepare at the best of their capabilities. Unfortunately, those millions of aspirants don't really have a choice to make. Whatever they have is clearly not catering their aspirations and that's why they end up searching for more and more initiatives. 

I've always wondered what stops all the major coaching brands to increase their presence in colleges. The solution is definitely an open secret, it's tech + innovative marketing, but why it hasn't been executed yet, hopefully i get an answer to this one day. 

I genuinely feel that if any coaching brand wants to be the next 1000 crore "revenue" brand, without any VC backing, then going the college route and establishing strong presence in the academic institutions, across thousands of them in the country, is the way forward. The first mover will obviously have the largest advantage to succeed here. Time and pace at which it happens is of critical importance. 

All this aside, as a common member of this platform, it's a privelege to discuss on these issues on a public forum. The talks that usually happen in the board rooms are out here for everyone to look at and share their thoughts on it. Full credit to you. And thank you again for this thread. 

It's absolutely alright for things to go unnoticed and it's understandable considering your schedule. 😁

Well, that's unfortunate what they're doing. 

After a certain scale, such things happen as we come across as competitors. 

Competitions on such a plane are anyhow won by the most powerful in terms of money and network. Ofcourse with some rare exceptions. 

So, to survive, either we become a part of them, so that we no longer are the part of competition or

We keep thriving on the plane of innovation and creativity where there's no competition. 

In any case, this too shall pass, and wish you the best.