From ‘champ’ to ‘also ran’

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Rediff needs a valiant effort to be in the web race

The Indian Internet industry is nothing less than a battlefield with all major players throwing in their hats in an effort to capture the maximum market share. Each player is capitalising on a new weapon to combat competition and face up the challenge. Zapak for example, is relying on high decibel advertising. Yahoo too offered all its users with an unlimited quota for storage and has now also come with an integrated messenger. Even, Indiatimes and MSN are feeling the heat despite initiating a slew of new offerings and initiatives.

In an effort to make its presence felt in the market, Indiatimes has also launched myIndiatimes on the lines of iGoogle to give audiences a personalised experience. Rediff on its part launched iShare in the month of July, which was both a medium for social networking and sharing flash based content. Following on Yahoo’s footsteps, Rediff has now made ‘Rediff Bol’ integrated with its email offering. But, the question here is whether Rediff has done enough to keep up the pace with the industry, which is not only growing fast, but also innovating at every level?

Although Rediff.com was the pioneer in offering unlimited mail box space, yet its marketing initiatives could not take advantage of its first mover advantage. Manish Agarwal, VP Marketing, Rediff.com says, “We are growing at 80% on a YoY basis, which is faster than the industry average”. Also, he denies the fact that they are normally followers in the industry.

Agreed that Rediff was the first company to offer and launch unlimited space mailbox worldwide to all, and has 56.5 million users (a service which was later provided by Yahoo and Google), the fact is that it could not innovate any further. Moreover, a survey by Juxt Consult reveals that 44% of Indian users prefer Hindi language but then in terms of usage (‘most preferred website’) Rediff is preferred only by 10.9% users and to further worsen the market dynamics on brand recall front, Rediff has only 11.50% users in its kitty.

Going by the figures above, Rediff needs to revamp its strategy and also needs to focus on more of global content. Rediff is trying to make a point with its exclusive features like iShare. But against Rediff’s wishes, the recent launch of web-messenger in Rediffmail is again haunted by bad promotion and late launch. Also the fact is that services like iShare and web-messenger in mail have already been captured by Google, Indiatimes and Yahoo. Rediff definitely brings out new features but then these features are either compilation of features offered by other service provider or just repetitions.

Well, if Rediff wants to regain its lost market dominance, it needs to bring out more exclusive new features and promote them at high decibel as they did in case of unlimited space in Rediff mail. Till then Rediff can only wait for its glory days to return.

As the saying goes, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’. It would definitely take this new product some time to gain a strong foothold in the Indian market. One must admit that while the tie up with Wall Street is a good sign, HT has to contend with the fact that it’s entry into the pink daily segment is quite late in the day, and grabbing market share from them will not be easy. It’s a known fact that changing reader preference in terms of brand of newspaper is extremely difficult.

What can work for HT is the existing loyalty base of its national daily plus the fact that it’s going to bring Dow Jones content for the first time into the Indian market. As Indian businesses get increasingly global in their reach, the importance of timely, quality international content in business publications has increased profoundly. With this weapon in its arsenal, HT could certainly make a few heads turn.

Edit bureau: Sray Agarwal

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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