On 22nd September 2016, the Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur had the pleasure of hosting Mr. Jatin Luthra, Vice President, Global Growth, Zomato for a guest lecture. Mr. Luthra carries with him an experience of 15 years in delivering outstanding returns on invested capital and successful team building in organizations ranging from Startups to Fortune 500’s. An MBA graduate from ISB Hyderabad he has worked in reputed organizations before being associated with Zomato.
Mr Luthra began his lecture by citing the most vital element of any business model: “How to get more customers.” He discussed about the various components that a business must pay heed to for its growth and profitability.
Some of these were Business Model Canvas, Amazon Loop, Growth Mindset and the Conversion funnel. The session was very intriguing as it incorporated various real time business examples which Mr. Luthra substantiated with existing business models.
He explained the importance of the AARRR model (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral mechanism) that a company adopts to improve the conversion. These steps involve a great deal of innovation and brainstorming to be implemented in a defined and successful manner. The importance of digital marketing and growth hacking for customer acquisition was stressed on. Digital marketing, he stated, is vital for driving traffic to websites and growing the customer base. Adding on, he explained the key characteristics of growth hacking which included creative marketing, data analytics and tech expertise. This combination of it all is what is termed as Viral Marketing.
Mr. Luthra expounded on the importance of analytics which we require at various stages of customer conversion. The absolute importance of data for every business decision was cited as the most crucial element in the digital world today. The presentation through its course shed light on the two ways of marketing that exist in the business arena — Conventional and Innovative. Mr. Luthra enumerated the conventional ways of marketing and highlighted the golden old era where in these ways made an impact on the customer base. He mentioned how offline events, online events, dependency on customer base of existing platforms, use of engineering as marketing and blog advertising played a crucial role for marketing and driving traffic.
Innovative and contemporary topics like viral marketing, affiliate marketing, content marketing, community building, business development/Partnerships, merger and acquisitions for marketing etc. were discussed with considerable zeal among the students. He laid emphasis on focusing on advertising on new platforms like Snapchat and not redundant platforms. The main idea here is to make an impact with the new popular platforms where the customer base would eventually burgeon.
The lecture came to its conclusion with the statement, “There is no standard way of marketing, rather organizations must Learn, Build and Measure in an ever changing environment” and Zomato as an entity stands by the same belief.