Wrong Analysis. Review on Business World

I too am a regular subscriber of BW for the last 3 years and appreciate the quality of the articles and cover stories the magazine has, but there is a point I would like to mention, which caught my attention as I was reading the magazines’ May’2003 edition. There was an article in the magazine that was based on wrong business analysis or rather superficial business analysis; this was an article on the relative comparison of the Budget Allocation for Advertisement and Marketing and the Marketing strategies of Reliance Infocom and Tata Indicom in its May edition. The issue raised was that by means of its optimized Marketing strategies Reliance Infocom was able to save 75 % of the estimated expenditure and be a hit. On the other hand Tata Indicom could just manage 15% and couldn’t optimize their expenditure on Advertisement and Marketing. The issue raised over here was a bit illogical as Reliance by means of its cost cutting actually ended up having a poor Marketing portfolio and an evident lost focus of its customer. The results have been in front of us in the form of low penetration of Reliance Infocom in big cities, which has been due to its high hidden cost on the mobile sets and poor connectivity. So without looking at the end result of a strategy how can one decide that it’s right or wrong. I won't say that TATA Indicom has done well, but the issue raised over here is that the comparison is between two failures and the one is projected to be a success because of the superficial knowledge gained by the writer while writing the article. With this I’ll conclude and expect the BW team to have a wider perspective.