Mokkai Mania

It is been a long time since I watched the afternoon movies on Sun TV.. for one the ISB cable network sucks big time and it requires me to search for the channels almost everytime I wanna watch TV. Anyways.. yest afternoon I was totally vetti (meaning had nothing better to do than to program my TV channels) so I decided to watch any movie on Sun no matter how crappy it was. And it turned out that I got lucky.. I was able to get the signal of K TV (which telecasts movies whole day). And voila.. there was "Neerum Neruppum" going on. So for a while I settled for watching Tamil Nadu's 2 former CMs dance and fight and do a lotta circus in the name of love.

Even then I wasnt very satisfied - first reason being there were way too many ads (My God.. talk about MARKETING) and second I still hadnt figured out which frequency Sun was being telecasted on. So I decided to give JJ and MGR a break and started tuning again. And this time guess what?? It was Chinna Kounder (CK) on Sun TV!!! 

For those who dont understand what I am talking, I suggest u stop reading now. Cuz the remaining blog is gonna be about how mokkai movies can be really entertaining. So, if you didnt understand what mokkai is, better stop it now buddy.. it's really hard to explain everything you see! Alrightie.. so eventually I settled for CK and I must say I really was impressed with the movie. I had watched it many times before but for the first time I really appreciated lotta scenes. Captain can be such a dear - there werent many "left foot down and right foot on the chest" kinda fight nor were there really villainous terrorists whom Captain captures in a 15-minute guerilla attack.

The plot is a very typical hero-worship in a village setting where everyone starts with praising how great CK is and goes on to blame him for everything that goes wrong in the village and finally falls at his feet asking for apology. The interesting thing was that the heroine had a really good role to play too. She was not just the songs-only girl friend but stayed in everything from comedy track to the crucial turning point of the movie. And the whole movie was such a sweet love story. Highlights were the songs that have been playing on a continuous loop on my VLC since yesterday.

There were 2 main comedy scenes that I wanted to bring out here:

1) The one where Manorama and Suganya fight verbally and then laugh about it after Suganya marries CK. The reactions of Koundamani and Senthil as they get stuck in between the 2 bickering ladies was just hilarious. ("Dey.. rendu elumbu kootukku nadoola maatikittom da!!!")

2) This one was not really a comedy scene but I rolled on the floor (technically, the sofa) laughing. CK gets mad at the villain for ruining his life and walks to his house with a foot-long knife to kill him. Just as he enters the villain's house he realizes that his niece's engagement function is on. The villain is his brother-in-law incidentally. So all the vetti mokkaiyans who have gathered there start praising CK for being there uninvited. "CK... CK thaan. Koopidamaye vanthurukkaru paaru", "enna thaan-naalum CK-oda akka ponnachey" etc etc. So CK drops the knife and blesses the girl and returns crying. It was a typical.. "Ippidi yeththi vittu vittey.. odamba puncture aakaranunga" comedy!

Anyways.. so finally.. I wanna conclude by saying that not all afternoon movies are mokkai and some mokkais can also be very enlightening if not entertaining. Have good fun over the weekend! (Switched to "Kannu pada poguthaiyya" on VLC now ;))

Loyalty - A Myth?

Yesterday we had a class on relationship between customer loyalty and profitability. Prof. VK took us through a series of marketing models built upon 8 indicators of whether a loyal customer today is going to be a profitable one in the next few years. It was interesting to see a lots of myths getting busted - a loyal customer is

- costly to serve

- price conscious in some sense

- not always profitable

The moral of the story was firms need to decide when to stop chasing a customer. And the evidence Prof. VK put forth were satisfying both quantitatively and analytically. The more I think about these indicators (which included frequency of buying, returns, focused buying etc), I feel that loyalty is not really a concept to worry about because there are no "loyal" customers in the world. There is only waves of propensity which firms could ride along and make money. When one dies, another one comes up. A smart marketer should only look for the right wave. On an average, the loss of customers gets compensated by new ones.

But one thought still lingers in my mind and it might even be recursive in some sense. Once we stop chasing a customer does that mean he is never going to be a loyal one in the future? I remember an example Prof. Bell used in class about Starbucks. There are 2 people who come n drink Starbucks coffee every day - one spends lot more than the other. But the costs of serving these 2 people are the same. The question Prof. Bell posed was 'should we let go of the second customer who pays less and costs more?'. Almost everyone in the class yelled yes except one student who said he would wait to see if the second customer pays more in the future and would not lose him just because he spends low today. And that indeed was the right answer in that situation. 

Coming back Prof. VK's conclusion, in an ideal world where you acquire customers just by way of innovating in products and services, losing a not-so-profitable customer is not a big deal. But we live in a world of marketers and it costs a fortune to acquire n retain customers. Shouldn't we also be asking the question of "when to start chasing a customer?". The window of opportunity is not between time zero and when a firm stops chasing. It is between the times when the chasing starts and stops. It would be interesting to look at data that captures both these frames. And it might even be true that customer loyalty is cyclical - there are only waves of loyal customers...