But with more foreign universities especially from UK and Australia marketing aggressively in this part of the world, coupled with an ever-increasing group of O/A level achievers, not to mention the deteriorating condition of the country, more and more people are opting to study abroad.

Zainab appears to be pulling the right strings, having been interviewed by Dawn for their Sunday magazine and now even contributing how-to articles to the same. With these effective strategies, she’s fast becoming an established brand. A B.A in Comparative Literature, she also teaches General English at South Shore School of A-Level Studies and a councilor at British Overseas School.

She must have a huge fan following by now considering that Dawn has given her ample coverage and she would do well to collect testimonials and put all of them in her profile online. But why does she need to go to all the trouble of asking her clients for recommendations, and then compiling them in her online profile when she’s already an established brand?

Simply because of this:

”Publicity is a double-edged sword that can slice through the very person it has promoted. Besides, the higher the profile gets, the heavier the burden one is compelled to carry. “

Shobha De

What follows is the recount of the experience one of her customers had with her when he was applying for the Fullbright Scholarship:

“The Fulbright ad mentioned Ms. Sabrina as the person to contact for guidance at United States Education Foundation. When I contacted her, she referred me to Ms. Zainab Khan. Since Ms. Sabrina came across as a credible and trustworthy person, I relied on her recommendation and set up a meeting with Ms. Khan. I called her up and we agreed to meet at Café Fresh the following Sunday. She told me up front that this one session was going to be free and from then on she will charge Rs. 1,000 per session.

She further said that on an average it takes about 15 sessions to churn out an excellent application for scholarship, without knowing what my progress was by then. At the rate she was charging, that would amount to a staggering Rs. 15,000. It was too expensive for me as I had already doled out almost Rs. 30,000 on TOEFL and GRE. I told her that was way over my budget and besides, I didn’t need the full package since I had already done the bulk of the work (Excellent GRE and TOEFL score as well as published work) and only needed help with the essay and personal statement. I also gave her my complete profile on the spot. She flipped through it in few seconds and declared that yes I had done 70% of the work and would require only 5 or 6 sessions which would comprise of writing request for references, resume, essay and personal statement.

I again reiterated that I only need help with the essay and personal statement and that this ought to be covered in 4-5 sessions. She reluctantly agreed at that time when she saw I was having second thoughts about acquiring her services. The truth of the matter is, there wasn’t much I could do other than hire her since only two weeks were left for the submission of application and she had me convinced that she was the right person to help me, boasting of how she had got people into Ivy League colleges. In this session I also found that she had very little understanding of Fulbright Scholarship, its process and requirements. Nevertheless, it was not pertinent as I believed I was hiring her for essays.

However, when we met for the first paid session, she was back to her earlier stance. I gave in, thinking how long would it take for something as basic as writing a request for recommendation. I was wrong.

She made me write like a child word by word the darn request, which stretched for the entire Rs.1,000 hour. Now she may have worked for ultra-rich kids for whom a thousand bucks is nothing more than a single rupee. But for someone like me who belongs to a middle class and has to earn his living the hard way, it’s a huge amount to be spending on a single hour especially when that hour is literally going to waste. I told her numerous times that references wasn’t an issue for me since the people from whom I was going to get it from were close to me and they certainly didn’t need a formal request from me.

But she kept at it. So much so that even half hour of the next session was diligently devoted to this request. Another Rs.500 down the drain.

The next half hour was spent on resume. Even here, she didn’t tell me anything extraordinary. It was basically rearranging the different elements of the resume, that I had diligently built over a period of time, which I easily could have done myself in fifteen minute had she just given me the format which she was holding in her hand. But she refused to do so, claiming that I would copy it all. Duh.

The entire next session was again spent on resume. Three sessions and Rs.3,000 later I had learnt nothing that would help me complete the application. Three sessions, no essays so far. The deadline was getting nearer. I was on the verge of a breakdown.

She finally saw my desperation and called for a 20 minute session which she categorically said was free. We again met at Café Fresh (I was beginning to hate that place) and in that 20 minutes she dropped another bombshell. She said we were on the verge of wrapping up the session and that we need not even meet. I would write the essay and personal statement myself and email it to her and the ensuing discussions would be telephonic. I was completely lost by now.

Right from the beginning she had led me to believe that she would be the one writing the essay and personal statement based on my feedback. No, she hadn’t directly said it but she had implied it all along. And since the time was passing by fast and she was not on the proximity of the reasons I agreed to pay her, this belief got stronger. And now at this critical point she was telling me I had to write it myself. If it was me going to be doing it, why didn’t she just give me the guidelines and let me do it when there was ample time instead of leading me on to the eleventh hour? She knew exactly what my deadline was.

I was on the edge now. I wrote my essay and personal statement myself based on the few guidelines she finally did give me, then called in a friend to polish them. After we both had spent almost four hours fine-tuning the essay and personal statement, I emailed first the personal statement to her and called her to let her know. I was online the whole time, and it took her no more than 20 minutes (remember this was being counted as a Rs.1000 hour session) to ‘edit’ it and send it back to me. The same thing happened with the essay. Within 20 minutes she was done with it. The only thing she did edit was cut short the length of the essay by removing some parts. That’s it. No grammatical check, no nothing.

She called this time asking about the money. In the beginning, she had demanded Rs. 5,000 in advance which I had given it to her. Now only Rs. 1000 was remaining since one session was free. However, when I did go to give this amount, she demanded Rs.2000 counting even the free session. When I reminded her that one of the session was declared free by herself, she just stared at me with growned face. I finally paid all that she demanded, but it was a truly harrowing experience for me and I would advise anyone aspiring to hire the services of these so-called consultants to first check with their previous customers before spending a fortune on their service. A few hours worth of search on the internet would in fact be more fruitful than hiring them.”

Before you decide that maybe this customer was ignorant and refused to acknowledge his weaknesses which Ms. Khan tried her best to correct, this guy is an IBA graduate in addition to being a computer engineer. What’s more, he’s working in an MNC and his articles have been published in the business pages of Dawn and Business Recorder. In short he’s no muck with the pen.

So what can we deduce from this narrative which does sound like an ordeal:

Under promise, Over-deliver, the brand mantra devised by Tom Peters  has been and will always be the best and the shortest possible way to make your brand go from obscurity to popularity and then on to greatness, irrespective of whether that brand is a person, an event or an object. And yet how many brands today are following this simple rule? Some do follow it initially until they attain a certain level of success after which they resort to the reverse of it: Over-promise but under-deliver. This incident happens to be one such case.

With power and in this case popularity comes responsibility, and with her customer base growing, Zainab Khan will have to ensure that no customer of hers gets agitated enough to start a negative word of mouth campaign against her. If she feels that someone is not going to be satisfied with her services at the outset, she should avoid taking him or her as a client altogether. And never underestimate a single customer, even if he appears to be a loner. In the social-media driven world there’s no such thing as a reclusive person. Your reputation can be blown to pieces by even a non-entity on the internet.

In fact these oft-ignored rules ought to be followed by anyone and everyone who’s building a personal brand based on his or her services. In today’s wired world where not the customer but Social Media is always right, you need to be extra vigilant of what the networked realm is saying about you.

Building powerful profiles on the social networks including facebook, linkedin, twitter and of course a blog, is not a luxury but a necessity. And then loading these profiles with testimonials and recommendations is a must.

No matter how careful you are, there are always going to be a few people dissatisfied with your service. So once they launch a venomous attack on your credibility online, the best way to counter it would be the afore-mentioned strategy. And if you have a blog you can even respond to the allegations directly giving your version of the events. And if you really did mess up, the best thing you can do would be to simply apologize to the aggrieved party online.

Whatever you do, just remember this simple rule of thumb by Kevin Roberts, the CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi from his best-seller LoveMarks:

Jealously guard your reputation:

Built over a lifetime. Destroyed in an instant. Consumers today are ruthless if you let them down. So don’t.

No related posts.

Now only if the service worked as it was communicated to the entire nation by a very expensive branding campaign.

There’s no doubt that the local branding endeavors have become quite refined in the last decade. Pakistanis are fast catching up with the Indians in communicating the brand promise. Trouble is, the promise is broken more frequently than the frequency of the loadshedding.

The same is the case with Easypaisa. It’s launch on the 15^th of October was unprecedented in the history of branding in Pakistan. Full front and back-cover print ads in all the major dailies except Dawn. Even in Dawn, a full page ad was present, only that it wasn’t on the front page. That’s impact for you.

And the cost? A full page ad in one of the inside pages of Jang costs a staggering Rs.1.3 million. Now if you want to take the entire front page, which isn’t offered as an option, it must have cost twice that amount. Multiply that by the number of major dailies, both English and Urdu, and you get a staggering Rs.100 million plus thrown away on a single day, and that’s only the print medium. You can safely add another 100 million for the TVC and then you get an idea of how much Telenor is spewing out on this campaign.

Of course it’s their money and they can dish out as much as they want, there’s no law against it. But when the moolah changing hands is in the scale of millions, it does make you wonder why a fraction of this dough couldn’t be spent on streamlining the service before going for an all-out launch?

The reason this thought is probably crossing the mind of any marketer observing telenor’s easypaisa launch is because it has begun to take stingy hits from the consumer almost as soon as the launch. Since the launch was aimed at pretty much the entire nation, the masses influenced by the campaign reacted favorably by opting for the service right away.

Maybe Telenor was not expecting a response of this magnitude or it wasn’t ready at all. In any case, the blogosphere is buzzing with mostly negative to lukewarm reviews of the service. But the most damning verdict has come in the form a letter to the editor in which the irate customer narrates his ordeal that in spite of paying his electricity bill through easypaisa, his electricity connection was disconnected by LESCO.

Although Mr. Sikander Ali, Director of Tameer Bank, tried to control the situation by replying to the letter in the same section right away, the damage had been done.

This was a one-off case. The most common complaint doing the rounds in the blogosphere is that it’s way too expensive. One blogger on Karachi metro blogs narrates he was charged Rs.10 on a mere bill of Rs.140. He says if he has to pay that much, he might as well do so through online means rather than going to all the trouble of physically visiting the easypaisa shop.

So there are basically three issues at work here. One, easypaisa is expensive, two, it is not that convenient, and three, it is not 100% reliable.

No service, no matter how sleek, is 100% fool-proof. There are bound to be problems, some that you cannot even anticipate beforehand. The trick, however, is to find out as many of them as possible by launching a stealth mode instead of coming out with the all-out launch right away.

There’s no evidence that Telenor did take easypaisa for a net practice. That seems to be hurting it badly now.  The fact that a company of this caliber will be able to weather this storm is secondary. The primary consideration ought to be preemptive measures to save the brand not only from the competitor onslaught but the more deadly consumer onslaught as well.

And in this day and age of social media, it is surprisingly easy. All Telenor needed to do was create a Facebook profile for easypaisa augmented by a Twitter account (which it has done now). It should have notified its customers (which is the 2^nd largest customer base after Mobilink) through SMS of its new service, and then just waited to see what happens. No ad. No TVC. No nothing.

Telenor’s investment in this strategy? Zero.  Was this so hard to do? Or because it entailed no money that the brand manager thought it won’t work?

Of course, even then there would have been some negative reviews, but only confined to the blogosphere. And it would definitely have created a buzz in the real world that Telenor was doing something radical in the online world. It would have gone viral and although it wouldn’t have reached the 170 millions souls Telenor claims to have reached with this extravagant campaign, it would have given Telenor enough customers to take its easypaisa for a proper test drive.

Then when it had identified and rectified sufficient bugs in the system, it could have gone for the extravagant campaign which it did. There’s just no way this test-driving strategy would have fared worse than the present one.

So why did Telenor failed to apply such a common sense strategy? Herd mentality. Every brand worth its salt in Pakistan has not dared to come up with a launch strategy that kickstarts from cyberspace and then makes it’s appearance in the physical realm.  There have been  online campaigns, alright, by some of the well-known brands, but they have been far and few in between. And no exclusive product launch.

The best that has been done is what is fashionably referred to as the 360º launch strategy which entails making use of all medium to create both hype and awareness about the brand.

But what’s so bad about creating hype first and then not living upto that hype?

 You break the immutable law of marketing, ‘ Underpromise but over-deliver’. By doing what Telenor has done with Easypaisa, you over-promise but under-deliver.

The best way a business can flourish is to exceed customer expectations. Not many businesses are able to do that, but then not many businesses are successful. And marketing is just a tool to deliver this positioning. The real value addition has to be imbibed into the core of the business, not embedded merely in the branding strategy.

The fledgling Wimax industry in Pakistan is a classic example of these blunders. First to commit the original sin was Wateen which offered the moon to its customers but failed to satisfy them because of technical glitches and constraints which it didn’t address before the formal launch. Then came Infinity whose story was just a tad better than Wateen. Then came Witribe all guns blazing with its launch, its most glaring blunder being, its inability to offer the services in many parts of the city it advertised to be operating. On top of that, potential customers who expressed their interest in the service by registering online as well as at the sales outlets were never contacted to let them know when the service would be available in their area, or even a courteous response.

This pretty much sums up the appalling state of branded service not just in the telecom sector but across different industries in Pakistan. Qubee, the new player in the Wimax domain looks to be the only one with a shrewd strategy, that strategy being to remain low-key until it has streamlined its network substantially. It is aiming to promote its brand only through shopping mall kiosks and its own service outlets spread throughout the city. And of course it has its website to spread the word. In addition to that, it has dedicated one of its reps to surf the online lounges and counter jibes taken at Qubee, an extremely cunning tactic if there ever was one. No other brand has had the common sense to make use of this virtually free tool.

Does this mean Qubee will have no customer problems? Hardly. But at least, they won’t spread like wildfire like the rest of the brands, because Qubee hasn’t as yet come out in the open with clear-cut brand positioning and promise, so what will the customers complain against?

A few problems have already arisen and are well-documented in the blogosphere but if Qubee plays its cards right, it ought to be able to deal with them without them being known too much. That’s the beauty of keeping a low-profile until you get a grip over the simmering issues.

So what’s the verdict? Easypaisa could have been a better launch if it was beta-tested akin to what has been done with Windows 7. And even then, it should have been confined to a few niches rather than going for the masses. To Telenor’s credit, it invited some bloggers to the launch ceremony held on the 16^th of October at PC Karachi, but for some inexplicable reason, it has failed to garner the support of bloggers which it probably expected with the invitation. At best there have just been a few posts mentioning the event not the rave reviews Telenor would have wanted. At worst, well, here’s a trailer of that.

The other thing not in favor of easypaisa that it’s not entirely unique. Settlement of utility bills through mobile banking and the likes already exist. It’s only they are not that well-known and thus confined to a few niches. In fact Nadra’s E-Sahulat fulfills the same purpose for almost free.

Easypaisa on the other hand is geared towards the masses and yet requires a somewhat hefty charge.

Whether Telenor will be able to weather the storm and make its branded service relevant to the masses only time will tell.

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