Blog by S.Swaminathan

Jupiter has just released a research on the impact of Social Computing on Financial services.

The key as I see it, is the need for these large financial monoliths to change their world view on how banking will be done in the future. Look at what the topline findings of the report has to say:

Peer-to-p...

Who said there is no innovation left in the credit card business. 

Amercian Express seems to have come-up with one. At least it can catch the fancy of consumers. It is positioned as a new stylish companion!

Take a look

Last week, I had posted about Toyota Scion using kids to influence purchase. Now, it seems that Toyota is getting into customizing marketing messages.

Toyota is letting customers choose the ad that they want to see. imedia reports that  one ad asks users to select their personality type - then r...

Wired News reports:

Add another category to India's intensifying regional competition with China: online gaming.

Tangible progress will be marked by the first Indian participation in the Electronic Sports World Cup, which kicks off June 30 in Paris. Earlier this month, 162 regional qualifiers from nin...

Wells Fargo has a launched a great mortgage product where they handhold the  customer till they become creditworthy to extend a loan product to them!

They will help improve the financial well-being of their customers who close on a new nonprime home mortgage loan. The program, "Steps to Su...

NY Times has an extremely interesting article on the way companies are rejigging their business process to get more customer-centric - no, customer driven would be more precise. The article provides interesting cases of how one should get ready to recraft your marketing initiatives in the future:

Tak...

For all the talk about how important ideas are in business, ideas are really a plentiful commodity. What's scarce are the skills to get ideas through the myriad layers of bureaucracy that threaten to declaw, neuter, or bloat them beyond recognition. "There's this irrational notion that when the...

Toyota quietly began an unusual virtual promotion of its small, boxy Scion: it paid for the car's product placement in Whyville.net, an online interactive community populated almost entirely by 8- to 15-year-olds.  The power of younger consumers has grown stronger in recent years. According to ...

Frequent flier programs are big business. Northwest has 30 million registered members; American Airlines, 52 million; Delta Airlines, 38 million; and United Airlines, 40 million.

In 2005, the airlines combined awarded 2.7 trillion miles, but redeemed only about 895 billion miles. And the unredeemed m...

Each year, the gap between what companies pledge and what customers want, grows wider.

According to Customer Loyalty Index (done by  Market Research firm Brand Keys) which surveyed over 16,00 customers, it was found that :

• Customer Expectations have increased  dramatically across all categor...