Mind over matter – Opinion news

The shutdown of local microblogging platform Koo offers valuable lessons for budding entrepreneurs about how not to position their products. While its founders may say they went under because negotiations for partnerships with several big companies fell through, the reality is that no one bets on a losing horse. For a horse to be a winner, its positioning is the most important thing. Marketing and branding gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout, in their masterful 1993 work, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, demonstrated how me-too products never work. The first principle is that it’s better to get into the mind first than to try to convince someone that you have a better product than the one that got there first. The second is equally important — if you can’t be first in a category, create a new category where you can be first. Everyone is interested in what’s new. Few people are interested in what’s best.

Simply put, in a competitive environment MarketplaceMe-too products don’t work, and Koo was just that — a desi version of Twitter (now X). Koo was launched in 2019, but it only became a popular product around March-April 2021. The reason was not that the product attracted users through any innovative feature. It was simply that Twitter at that time was struggling to comply with the new intermediary guidelines notified by the government. Several ministers talked about national sovereignty and jumped on Koo, signaling that they would boycott a foreign product if it did not follow national laws. As is often the case in such cases, the regulatory battle with Twitter soon petered out. Still, Koo was doing well for a year and managed to reach about 30 million users. It could have gained more if the government’s regulatory battle with Twitter had continued at frequent intervals over blocking accounts or removing content that was not seen as politically correct. But with Elon Musk When he took over Twitter, such friction disappeared.

The other lesson in Koo’s closure is that muscular nationalism may work for some political leaders, but not for consumer products. With only central ministers and government departments joining in, and opposition parties generally conspicuous by their absence, the perception is that it is some kind of social media sarkari. Even prominent India Inc’s personalities never became part of the platform. The founders should have known that in the past, local platforms similar to Whatsapp disappeared because it failed to become a generic product. Globally, too, Meta launched Threads, something along the lines of Twitter that failed to gain much traction. However, where it was first — Facebook and Instagram — it remains a leader with no challengers in sight. If the product name becomes generic, it will be able to maintain its lead. Just as Xerox became a substitute for photocopies, Twitter is to the microblogging world.

So if Indian startups want to be winners, they need to be first in the minds of consumers. After all, minds cannot be changed once they are made. They must know that marketing It is not a battle of products, but rather a battle of perception. And for that to happen, innovation is the key. Of course, the funding environment and the support and guidance from the bigwigs at India Inc will be necessary.

Anvitii Rai, Editorial Correspondent, The Financial Express

Opinions are personal

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