Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Project Report Sample
Project Report Sample
“ MARKETING STRATEGIES
OF PAYTM”
BY
Sachin wadhwa
2
STUDENT UNDERTAKING
3
CERTIFICATE
xxxxxxxxxx
Project Guide
4
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
If words are considered to be signs of gratitude then let these words convey the very
same, my sincere gratitude to ONE97 COMMUNICATIONS LTD,.PAYTM for
providing me an opportunity to work with bank and giving necessary directions on doing
this project to the best of my abilities. Acknowledgement is an individual’s feeling
towards many people, who directly or indirectly stimulated & influenced ones
intellectual development in ones student and professional life.
This formal statement of acknowledgement will hardly meet the ends of justice in the
matter of expression of my sense of gratitude and obligation to all those who helped me in
the completion of this project.
All the very outset thanks to xxxxxxxxx for instructing me and providing me the
opportunity to participate in the project and sharing her invaluable knowledge and
experience with me. Her innovative ideas provided me clarity of thoughts which helped
me to think in the right way. Despite their busy schedule they spared valuable moments
for reviewing and rectifying this project work.
Due to the proper guidance the making of project report became an enjoyable experience
and easy to workout.
5
PREFACE
Training is the act of increasing the knowledge and skills of an employee for performing
a job. The major outcome of training is learning. A trainee learns new habits, refined
skills and useful knowledge during the training that helps him improve performance. It is
designed in such a way that student can grasp maximum knowledge and can get practical
exposure to the corporate world in minimum possible time. Business schools of today
realize the importance of practical knowledge over the theoretical base. The Project report
with special emphasis on the development of skills in analyzing and interpreting practical
platform of learning through practical experience. This project report covers all the
benefits strategies methods which have been adopted by the organization to increase and
enhance the performance of employees. The main emphasis of this Project report was to
develop awareness about the industry, so that we can understand its process, procedure,
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TABLE OF CONTENT
TOPIC PAGE NO
CHAPTER 1:-INTRODUCTION
1.1 About The Company - Paytm
1.2 Strategic Analysis
1.3 Digital Wallet
1.4 Marketing Ideas To Retain Existing Customers
1.5 Gaining New Users Marketing Strategies
1.6 The Creation Of A Marketing Strategy
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EXECUTIVE SUMMERY
Paytm has several business interface and customer friendly processes for the ease of doing
transactions. The basic process of using Paytm is as follows. Once a user has registered with Paytm,
they have to transfer some money using netbanking, credit/ debit cards, IMPS or other ways
mentioned from their bank. Once the money is the Paytm wallet, codes and numbers of vendors are
used to transfer e-money from customer to vendor. As the brand is new and is growing rapidly, it had
also focused on customer service processes.
The distinction between “strategic” and “managerial” marketing is used to distinguish "two phases
having different goals and based on different conceptual tools. Strategic marketing concerns the choice
of policies aiming at improving the competitive position of the firm, taking account of challenges and
opportunities proposed by the competitive environment. On the other hand, managerial marketing is
focused on the implementation of specific targets." Marketing strategy is about "lofty visions
translated into less lofty and practical goals [while marketing management] is where we start to get our
hands dirty and make plans for things to happen." Marketing strategy is sometimes called higher
order planning because it sets out the broad direction and provides guidance and structure for the
marketing program.
Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the demonetisation of the Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000
notes, Paytm and other mobile wallets have enjoyed tremendous growth. The lack of cash in hand and
long lines have made digital wallets a necessity for the common man - at least those with smartphones
Paytm claims to have over 150 million users, making it the biggest online payments platform in the
country. Despite this, there are many more in India who are yet to use Paytm and its digital wallet. Are
you too confused about what is Paytm, how Paytm works, and what you can do with it? Then read this
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CHAPTER – 1
INTRODUCTION
9
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 ABOUT THE COMPANY - PAYTM
Paytm is an Indian digital payment system and financial technology company, based in Noida. Paytm
is currently available in 11 Indian languages and offers online use-cases like mobile recharges, utility
bill payments, travel, movies, and events bookings as well as in-store payments at grocery stores, fruits
and vegetable shops, restaurants, parking, tolls, pharmacies and educational institutions with the
Paytm QR code., As of January 2018, Paytm is valued at $10 billion.
As per the company, more than 20 million merchants across India use their QR code payment system
to accept payments directly into their bank account.[7] The company also uses advertisements and paid
promotional content to generate revenues.
History Of Paytm
Paytm was founded in August 2010 with an initial investment of US$2 million by its founder Vijay
Shekhar Sharma in Noida, a region adjacent to India's capital New Delhi. It started off as a prepaid
mobile and DTH recharge platform, and later added data card, postpaid mobile and landline bill
payments in 2013.
By January 2014, the company had launched the Paytm Wallet, which the Indian
Railways and Uber added as a payment option. It launched into e-commerce with online deals and bus
ticketing. In 2015, it added education fees, metro recharges, electricity, gas, and water bill payments.
In 2016, it launched movies, events and amusement parks ticketing ] as well as flight ticket bookings
and Paytm QR. Later that year, it launched rail bookings and gift cards.
Paytm's registered user base grew from 11.8 million in August 2014 to 104 million in August 2015. Its
travel business crossed $500 million in annualised GMV run rate, with 2 million tickets booked per
month.
In 2017, it became India's first payment app to cross over 100 million app downloads. The same year,
it launched Paytm Gold, a product that allowed users to buy as little as ₹1 of pure gold online. It also
launched Paytm Payments Bank and ‘Inbox’, a messaging platform with in-chat payments. By 2018, it
started allowing merchants to accept Paytm, UPI and card payments directly into their bank accounts
at 0% charge.) It also launched the ‘Paytm for Business’ app (now called Business with Paytm App),
allowing merchants to track their payments and day-to-day settlements. Its merchant base to grow to
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more than 7 million by March 2018.
It launched two new wealth management products - Paytm Gold Savings Plan and Gold Gifting for
long-term savings.
In January 2018, itentered into a joint venture with Alibaba Group-owned gaming company AGTech
Holdings to launch Gamepind, a mobile gaming platform. It was rebranded as Paytm First Games in
June 2019.
In March 2018, Paytm Money was started with an investment of ₹9 crore for investment and wealth
management.
In March 2019, the firm launched a subscription based loyalty program called Paytm First, and in May
2019, it partnered with Citibank to launch Paytm First credit card
In July 2020, Tata Starbucks partnered with Paytm allowing its customers to order food online during
the COVID-19 pandemic.
In August 2015, Paytm received a license from Reserve Bank of India to launch the Paytm Payments
Bank as a separate entity. Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma will hold 51% share, One97
Communications 39% and 10% will be held by a subsidiary of One97 and Sharma. The bank was
officially inaugurated in November 2017.
It was set to launch over 1,00,000 banking outlets across India by the end of 2018.[ However, the
bank's branches are yet to touch double digits.
The Bank has appointed veteran banker Satish Kumar Gupta as its new Managing Director and CEO.
Paytm Mall
In February 2017, Paytm launched its Paytm Mall app, which allows consumers to shop from 1.4 lakh
registered sellers. Paytm Mall is a B2C model inspired by China's largest B2C retail platform TMall.
Sellers have to pass through Paytm-certified warehouses and channels to ensure consumer trust. Paytm
Mall has set up 17 fulfillment centres across India and partnered with more than 40 couriers. Paytm
Mall raised $200 million from Alibaba Group and SAIF Partners in March 2018. In May 2018, it
posted a loss of approximately ₹1,800 crore with a revenue of ₹774 crore for financial year 2018. The
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market share of Paytm Mall dropped to 3 percent in 2018 from 5.6 percent in 2017.
Strategic analysis is designed to address the first strategic question, "Where are we now?"
Traditional market research is less useful for strategic marketing because the analyst is not seeking
insights about customer attitudes and preferences. Instead strategic analysts are seeking insights about
the firm's operating environment with a view to identifying possible future scenarios, opportunities and
threats.
Strategic planning focuses on the three 3C’s, namely: Customer, Corporation and Competitors. A
detailed analysis of each factor is key to the success of strategy formulation. The 'competitors' element
refers to an analysis of the strengths of the business relative to close rivals, and a consideration of
competitive threats that might impinge on the business' ability to move in certain directions. The
'customer' element refers to an analysis of any possible changes in customer preferences that
potentially give rise to new business opportunities. The 'corporation' element refers to a detailed
analysis of the company's internal capabilities and its readiness to leverage market-based opportunities
or its vulnerability to external threats.
Mintzberg suggests that the top planners spend most of their time engaged in analysis and are
concerned with industry or competitive analyses as well as internal studies, including the use of
computer models to analyze trends in the organization.[14] Strategic planners use a variety of research
tools and analytical techniques, depending on the environment complexity and the firm's goals.
Fleitcher and Bensoussan, for instance, have identified some 200 qualitative and quantitative analytical
techniques regularly used by strategic analysts while a recent publication suggests that 72 techniques
are essential. No optimal technique can be identified as useful across all situations or problems.
Determining which technique to use in any given situation rests with the skill of the analyst. The
choice of tool depends on a variety of factors including: data availability; the nature of the marketing
problem; the objective or purpose, the analyst’s skill level as well as other constraints such as time or
motivation.
"The marketing strategy lays out target markets and the value proposition that will be offered
based on an analysis of the best market opportunities." (Philip Kotler & Kevin Keller,
Marketing Management, Pearson, 14th Edition)
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“An over-riding directional concept that sets out the planned path.” (David Aaker and Michael
K. Mills, Strategic Market Management, 2001, p. 11)
"Essentially a formula for how a business is going to compete, what its goals should be and
what policies will be needed to carry out these goals." (Michael Porter, Competitive Strategy:
Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors , NY, Free Press, 1980)
"The pattern of major objectives, purposes and goals and essential policies and plans for
achieving those goals, stated in such a way as to define what business the company is in or is to
be in. (S. Jain, Marketing Planning and Strategy, 1993)
"An explicit guide to future behaviour.” (Henry Mintzberg, “ Crafting Strategy,” Harvard
Business Review, July–August, 1987 pp. 66–74)
"reserved for actions aimed directly at altering the strengths of the enterprise relative to that of
its competitors... Perfect strategies are not called for. What counts is... performance relative to
competitors.” (Kenichi Ohmae, The Mind of the Strategist, 1982, p. 37)
The distinction between “strategic” and “managerial” marketing is used to distinguish "two phases
having different goals and based on different conceptual tools. Strategic marketing concerns the choice
of policies aiming at improving the competitive position of the firm, taking account of challenges and
opportunities proposed by the competitive environment. On the other hand, managerial marketing is
focused on the implementation of specific targets." Marketing strategy is about "lofty visions
translated into less lofty and practical goals [while marketing management] is where we start to get our
hands dirty and make plans for things to happen." Marketing strategy is sometimes called higher
order planning because it sets out the broad direction and provides guidance and structure for the
marketing program.
Marketing strategy is a long-term, forward-looking approach to planning with the fundamental goal
achieving a sustainable competitive advantage. trategic planning involves an analysis of the company's
strategic initial situation prior to the formulation, evaluation and selection of market-
oriented competitive position that contributes to the company's goals and marketing objectives.trategic
marketing, as a disinct field of study emerged in the 1970s, and built on strategic management that
preceded it. Marketing strategy highlights the role of marketing as a link between the organisation and
its customers.
At its most basic level, strategic marketing addresses three deceptively simple questions:
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(3) How are we going to get there?
In attempting to answer these questions, strategic planners require sophisticated skills in both research
and analysis.
Scholars continue to debate the precise meaning of marketing strategy. Consequently, the literature
offers many different definitions. On close examination, however, these definitions appear to centre
around the notion that strategy refers to a broad statement of what is to be achieved.
Marketing strategy involves mapping out the company's direction for the forthcoming planning period,
whether that be three, five or ten years. It involves undertaking a 360° review of the firm and its
operating environment with a view to identifying new business opportunities that the firm could
potentially leverage for competitive advantage. Strategic planning may also reveal market threats that
the firm may need to consider for long-term sustainability. Strategic planning makes no assumptions
about the firm continuing to offer the same products to the same customers into the future. Instead, it is
concerned with identifying the business opportunities that are likely to be successful and evaluates the
firm's capacity to leverage such opportunities. It seeks to identify the strategic gap; that is the
difference between where a firm is currently situated (the strategic reality or inadvertent strategy) and
where it should be situated for sustainable, long-term growth (the strategic intent or deliberate
strategy).
A fourth question may be added to the list, namely 'How do we know when we got there?' Due to
increasing need for accountability, many marketing organisations use a variety of marketing metrics to
track strategic performance, allowing for corrective action to be taken as required. On the surface,
strategic planning seeks to address three simple questions, however, the research and analysis involved
in strategic planning is very sophisticated and requires a great deal of skill and judgement.
A marketing strategy is a business' overall game plan for reaching people and turning them into
customers of the product or service that the business provides. The marketing strategy of a company
contains the company’s value proposition, key marketing messages, information on the target
customer and other high-level elements.
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The marketing strategy informs the marketing plan, which is a document that lays out the types and
timing of marketing activities. A company’s marketing strategy should have a longer lifespan than any
individual marketing plan as the strategy is where the value proposition and the key elements of a
company’s brand reside. These things ideally do not shift very much over time.
A digital wallet refers to an electronic device that allows an individual to make electronic transactions.
It is also referred by other names like mobile money, mobile money transfer, and mobile payment
generally represents a payment services operated under financial regulation and are performed from or
via a mobile device. This can include purchasing items on-line with a computer or using a smartphone
to purchase something at a store. An individual's bank account can also be linked to the digital
wallet. In other words, mobile money transfer refers to any method of monetary exchange that utilizes
the facility of a mobile device with authorized support facility and conformance to defined and
explained legal policy.
PayTm, as its abbreviation states, Pay through Mobile was launched in 2010 by One97
communications as a prepaid mobile and DTH recharge company. Gradually, it made its way into the
e-commerce market in the year 2014 and further added bus ticketing to its kitty in 2015. PayTm now
offers multiple products ranging from primary mobile recharges to buying apparels or electronics
enabling customers to get everything at one place. Thus, over a period of time, it has become both a
payment platform as well as the marketplace.
This strategy not only enables PayTm to serve multiple needs of the customers, giving them a holistic
experience by saving their time and efforts but is also expected to be helpful in cross-selling and up-
selling and thus increasing the overall profitability of the organization. It has even obtained the license
from Reserve Bank of India to run a Payments Bank. As a result, PayTm is amongst the top 7 e-
commerce companies in India to have billion-dollar valuation and transformed the business model of
PayTm from a recharge web site to a payment cum e-commerce marketplace. It has 100 million
PayTm Wallet users that carry out over 75 million transactions every month. China’s Alibaba Group
with its affiliate Ant Financial invested $680 million in PayTm in September 2015 to raise their stake
to 40%, taking its valuation at somewhere around $4 billion. On account of higher valuation, PayTm
had resources to stitch Rs.203 Crores worth of deal with Board of Control for Cricket in India for 84
matches. Considering the quantum of following that cricket has in India, this association with BCCI
for primary sponsorship rights is sure to get a lot of visibility to PayTm brand and likely to catapult it
as a national brand with significantly high brand recall amongst all sections of society.
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We all are well aware of the term ‘Demonetisation’. Have experienced its wrath. On 2016 with the
announcement of demonetisation of 500 and 1000 rupee notes by Indian Government it got tough for
the masses to cope up eith daily money problems. Banks and ATM’s too were exhausted leaving
people clueless to deal with money problems.
Paytm was launched into market long back but its digital wallet came to much use during the
demonetisation period. It was not that there was no other app that solved the purpose but Paytm with
its huge ad campaigns attracted more audiences.
Between the period of November 10 and December 20 , PayTm added almost 20 million new
users. They had over seven million transactions each day which was more than combined daily
usage of debit and credit cards.
This definitely was not possible in a jiffy with other competitors in market but this was the result of a
great marketing strategy applied by Paytm team.
PayTmKaro is now viral and now everyone is upto saying let me PayTm you! It became active in
social media and also partnered with Uber and NDTV for their campaigning. Creating awareness camp
and going facebook live to make people aware of their digital wallet helped them a lot in business.
Competitors-
Oxigen Wallet
Mobikwik
FreeCharge
Vodafone M-pesa
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Airtel Money
1. Safety Flowchart
No matter how much modern people have grown day by day but transferring and paying money online
creates a bit of confusing thoughts among users that would it be safe or not. But Paytm made a
flowchart depicting how using their digital wallet is as safe as compared to credit and debit cards. As
digital wallet is not connected to bank account so its amount is limited and also if any case of hacking
occurs or fraud ones bank account remains untouched!
Infographics
3. Facebook Live
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It’s very important to make people believe and understand of how their account is protected and free
of hacking with Paytm digital Wallet. what could have been a better way rather than using Facebook
Live!
6. Workshops
Parenting camp were introduced where the trainers spoke how teenagers nowadays tend to bad habits
due to use of free pocket money. This can be used by limiting their account and payments by using
Paytm.
7. Mumbai Dabbawallas
They tied up with Mumbai dabbawallas, rather with the lunch services to accept Paytm cash only for
more usage of app.
8. MBA Contest
A free video contest for MBA first year students were conducted. A team of four were asked to create
a video about how Paytm can be used and the video that would get maximum likes would win. This
became viral and gave more user retention to Paytm.
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1.5 Gaining New Users Marketing Strategies
1. Pocket Dance
This was the best of the ad campaigns. It was known as Pocket dance. The miseries of taking out
wallet a to pay and checking for money on various pockets of a user. It can be made easy by just
pulling out ones mobile and Paytm-ing the amount. It ended with the message- Why do the pocket
dance every time looking for money? Paytmkaro!
2. Celebrity Endorsements
Famous dancing stars like ShiamakDavar and Remo D’Souza were seen doin pocket dance in
television. In internet cartoons and GIF’s were made on famous people doing pocket dance that went
viral. Remo And Shamak
These marketing strategies has been great by Paytm to attract audience and they have been successful.
Let us watch out on how they further build up a strong network in marketing.
Marketing strategies are often confused with marketing plans. Because they do feed off one another, it
is not unusual to find the marketing strategy and the marketing plan baked together into a single
document. Although the transition between the two is blurry, a marketing strategy covers the big
picture of what the business offers - the value proposition and related brand messaging. The marketing
plan is how the business will get across those key message - the platforms, the creative, the timing, and
so on. The marketing strategy may also be absorbed upwards into the corporate value statements and
other strategy documents.
A marketing strategy grows out of a company’s value proposition. The value proposition summarizes
the competitive advantage a company has in its market. The value proposition usually provides the key
message for all marketing. Walmart, for example, is a discount retailer with “everyday low prices,”
and its business operations and marketing revolve around that. A company is never creating a
marketing strategy from scratch. They start with the value proposition and distill the key marketing
message(s) from that.
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Once the value proposition is succinctly stated, the hard work is done. Any marketing asset, from a
print ad design to a social media campaign, can be judged by how well it communicates the value
proposition. To further the efficiency of marketing efforts, market research can be added to the
marketing strategy for the purpose of identifying untapped audiences or refining the target consumer.
Finally, an overall goal for the marketing strategy can be set, with all the subsequent marketing plans
inheriting the responsibility for delivering on it. These can be concrete, bottom-line goals such as
increasing sales or something less direct like climbing the ranking of trusted providers within the
industry.
Marketing plans are operational documents that get more attention because they are the day-to-day
work that a company does to sell itself to the world. That said, a marketing plan would be meaningless
without a message, a target market, and a goal — the core of every marketing strategy.
Definition
Scholars continue to debate the precise meaning of marketing strategy. Consequently, the literature
offers many different definitions. On close examination, however, these definitions appear to centre
around the notion that strategy refers to a broad statement of what is to be achieved.
"The marketing strategy lays out target markets and the value proposition that will be offered
based on an analysis of the best market opportunities." (Philip Kotler & Kevin Keller,
Marketing Management, Pearson, 14th Edition)
“An over-riding directional concept that sets out the planned path.” (David Aaker and Michael
K. Mills, Strategic Market Management, 2001, p. 11)
"Essentially a formula for how a business is going to compete, what its goals should be and
what policies will be needed to carry out these goals." (Michael Porter, Competitive Strategy:
Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors , NY, Free Press, 1980)
"The pattern of major objectives, purposes and goals and essential policies and plans for
achieving those goals, stated in such a way as to define what business the company is in or is to
be in. (S. Jain, Marketing Planning and Strategy, 1993)
"An explicit guide to future behaviour.” (Henry Mintzberg, “ Crafting Strategy,” Harvard
Business Review, July–August, 1987 pp. 66–74)
"reserved for actions aimed directly at altering the strengths of the enterprise relative to that of
its competitors... Perfect strategies are not called for. What counts is... performance relative to
competitors.” (Kenichi Ohmae, The Mind of the Strategist, 1982, p. 37)
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The generic competitive strategy outlines the fundamental basis for obtaining a sustainable
competitive advantage within a category. Firms can normally trace their competitive position to one of
three factors:[64]
Superior skills (e.g. coordination of individual specialists, created through the interplay of
investment in training and professional development, work and learning)
Superior resources (e.g. patents, trade-mark protection, specialized physical assets and
relationships with suppliers and distribution infrastructure.)
Superior position (the products or services offered, the market segments served, and the
extent to which the product-market can be isolated from direct competition.)
It is essential that the internal analysis provide a frank and open evaluation of the firm's superiority
in terms of skills, resources or market position since this will provide the basis for competing over
the forthcoming planning period. For this reason, some companies engage external consultants to
provide an independent assessment of the firms capabilities and resources.
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CHAPTER – 2
RESEARCH
METHODOLOGY
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RESEARCH METHODOLOGY.
This chapter focuses on data and research methodology. It highlights the use of statistics to test
research hypothesis and assumptions done during the course of research. The chapter discusses the
rationale used while drafting the questions for sample study and the differences in questionnaire for
Plastic Money and Virtual Mobile Wallet. The survey explored the unexplored area comparing the
users of Plastic Money and Wallet.
Awareness about the conditions of card holders, services and security measures has been ascertained
during the survey. The popularity of the cards and wallet is also an important factor that would
contribute to the overall growth of different kinds of electronic modes of payments and electronic
services offered to the user.
Additional benefits of cards relate to shopping convenience, loans and disbursements in the form of
credit and debit facility, safety and recordkeeping.
Currently acceptability of mobile wallet payment is limited at outlets though Paytm has increased
acceptance at many outlets. But the wide acceptability of wallets is still required to gauge the correct
impact of wallet on payments services. The current effort captures the data set considering the
limitations of the system.
Data was collected from both primary and secondary sources. Data on the use of plastic money and
virtual wallet was done by two different questionnaires which are similar in nature and constitute the
primary data source for this research. Pilot test was carried out using a set of questionnaire.
The questionnaire is well structured and starts from collecting the user’s demographics, then user
usage and perception on plastic money and virtual wallet. The questionnaire was devised after working
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out the various surveys and literary contents. The central idea was to use the data collection to bring
out the usage and preferences of customers and non-customers. The result of the pilot was used for to
carry out the survey on a large number of participants.
During the survey it was evident that the users had very different expectations from the plastic money
and wallets so it would not be great to draft nearly same set of questionnaire from the respondents.
Wallets is new and it is difficult to gauge people responses as most of the people are not aware of the
features and definitely most people are not experts at using this new technology.
The study was carried out in and aroundBengaluru City and during the survey process users from various walks
of life were interviewed. The interviewees are professionals, businessmen, students, retired personals and from
all walks of life. The questionnaire was distributed online as well as using forms. Each spot for the survey was
selected carefully and meticulously to ensure a decent mix of participants from all walks of life. Similarly, there
is lot of issues while collecting mobile wallet data as this is relatively a new way of payment transactions and it
is hard to find large number of user. Anonymity of users is also maintained for users who did not like to
disclose personally identifiable information. The survey ofnon-userhelps to understand the expectation of
potential users as well. Objective questions and five point Likert scale was used to capture the survey data.
Demographic factors and the responses were captured using a combination of subjective and objective
questions. Data collected was nominal, ordinal and five point Likert scale. Data also included radical questions
like who uses your card aimed at drawing indirect reference that would give a hint of how the card is used or
misused and also some insight into the way users manage their personal information. Some of the data set is
different and trying to collect data set be directed and inference rather than asking question of binary nature
which are sometimes not answered truly.
On collecting the data set was cleaned to detect errors and aberrations. Analysis was done to compute
measures, data pattern, relationship between variable, identify factors in the data groups.
Conflicting data is subjected to the statistical test to find the significance. Editing was done to ensure
that the data is accurate to exclude minor human errors and aberrations or large deviations in data.
Data is arranged in homogeneous groups and for easy analysis and display. Graphs and charts are
prepared for the easy analysis and interpretation of data.
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Nominal and ordinal data set was collected during the questionnaire. Inferences can also be drawn
from indirect/direct answers where participants are new users of the system like mobile wallets. Using
multiple approach can give us insight into the human nature and user behavior as these financial
instruments are more often used with family members as was evident from the survey. India is unique
and so is Bengaluru in many ways. The city is multilingual, multicultural and highest tax collected
from salaried individual who leads to thinking that the attitude and perception of the masses towards
use of cards and wallets would be different nature. To capture this aspect some question asked are an
indication of the preference of the user and then the actual user preference is captured by asking direct
question on security or preference.
Responses are categorized into appropriate category and then analyzed using statistical methods.
Aberration are removed for consistency where necessary. Other times the data is normalized to
compare plastic money and mobile wallet data summary. Normalization is done after considering the
fact that the Plastic Money is much more mature in terms of wide variety of security measure,
acceptability and other facts. Plastic money has been around for 60 years where as wallet technology is
less than five years. More recently there are new entrants in the market which play a critical role in the
setup and so the data has to be normalized to draw reliable inferences.
A large number of factors and variables have potential to affect user perception and acceptance of
plastic money and mobile wallet. The data was appropriately group to find the following key
influencing factors and the impact of those variables in the growth and adoption of plastic money and
mobile wallet.
3. Demographic factors like age and how it affects the usage and adoption of cards.
5. Education and awareness about the use of these instruments that affect the use.
The data is drafted and tabulated on which the statistical analysis is carried out.
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Inferences and conclusions are arrived using the following statistical analysis tools like.
1.Descriptive statistics
2. Correlation
3. Chi-Square Test
The primary and secondary objective of the research point out at various demographic and social
factors that lead to the use a combination of survey and other statistical methods like chi square, and
other statistical analysis tools.
The initial idea with this research was to bring out the message from the people which needed few
iteration and in-depth analysis of the data collected during research. The outcome of the literature
review was crystalized into set of queries for the survey. The survey itself was split with one survey
questionnaire for mobile and the other for credit cards and debit cards. In this survey a great emphasis
was given to a mix of object type and open ended queries to arrive at suitable conclusion.
During the survey Technology Acceptance model along with few iteration during the survey was
found to be useful to understand the subject and test out the hypothesis outlined during the research.
Once the outcomes of the question were studied some inferences were drawn during the pilot survey.
As virtual wallet is a new technology and so there are differences in the way the evaluation has to be
carried out. The survey questionnaire was drafted after carefully studying the literature and the various
outcomes.
A specially is the mix of indirect questionnaire which is used during the survey and leads to indirect
inferences. The various aspects of virtual wallet security are little known to the users at the time of
survey so the use of indirect questions like “How confident are you that your personal information will
27
not be stolen?” is used to bring out the user’s confidence level while using the virtual wallet and also
gives a glimpse of security and the users perception about security
Perception of users is very difficult to gauge from a standard set of questionnaire and it is extremely
difficult to compare the perception of users of plastic money and virtual wallet in the absence of
uniformity in terms of ease of use, features and other parameters. A simplified and modified view of
Technical analysis is used for this survey as it involves two different kinds of financial tools like
plastic money and virtual wallet.
Survey questionnaire is a well-established method of collecting data from users. This data collection
technique used mostly electronic questionnaire and hard copy of the survey questionnaire that is used
to collect the user information and views during the survey.
A key point during the research is the relative difficulty in getting users of virtual wallet and the
absence of large scale acceptance of this financial transaction mechanism at various outlets.
To overcome the issues a set of questionnaire is drafted and responses are collected using electronic
tablets at Airtel mobile wallet stores and other similar establishments. For a set of users, the data is
collected via a combination of interview and questionnaire method. This was done to engage the
audience and get the time from them to fill up the questionnaire.
The outcome of the pilot was used as a baseline for the subsequent survey efforts and the design of the
survey was structured was from simple direct questionnaire to detailed questions, indirect questions,
Likert scale and then opinions. There was scope to provide feedback during pilot and actual survey.
The form layout was kept simple and clear to give a clutter free look even though the survey had a
large set of questionnaire.
Survey Construction
The survey was carried out using two different sets of questionnaire. One for virtual wallet and another
was plastic money. The set of questionnaire is structured in a similar fashion but different in terms of
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the data set collected based on the interview questionnaire circulated.
Each survey has a top section that is used to collect the demographic information followed by multiple
choice questions, Likert scales, indirect questions and open questions or places where the users can
express their opinion and demand additional features or services.
This mixed approach was selected to gather data set specially engineered for particular cases like
virtual wallet services which are just gaining acceptance in the market. This survey construction is also
required to gauge the perception of the users in direct and indirect way as there is a likely hood of
getting errors while asking similar repeated questions during the duration of the survey. This survey
would help in creating awareness in users as they saw the various kinds of security measures that are
available with plastic money, some of these security features were known or used by users while
others were not known to a large section of users. The participants were a decent mix of technical and
non-technical respondents and there was a chance of error while using technical or security
terminology in the questionnaire. Thus a conscious effort has been made to reduce the technical
jargons in the survey. A range of scales have thus been used in the survey starting from binary values
like yes/no to multiple choice and descriptive questions. Some of the questionnaires are closed ended
for easy statistical analysis while some are open ended used for interpretation.
Sustaining relationships with merchants with daily sales of INR 50K+. This category of
merchants includes vegetable vendors and fruit sellers among others who find its cap (INR 20K
per month without KYC, INR 100K per month with KYC) too low. I know at least two
merchants that have bailed out of PayTM for this reason. (Interestingly, they’ve gone back to
cash, which suggests that PayTM’s competitors couldn’t recruit them either)
Willingness of PayTM’s Chinese backer to fund the company's cashbacks and mounting losses.
As they say, past performance is no indication of future success. This maxim is as true for PayTM as
any other company. Only time will tell how long India’s #1 mobile wallet will hold on to the top spot.
Full Disclosure: Other than being a user of PayTM - among other e-wallets - I have no personal or
professional interest in the company.
Objectives of study:
Sample design:
For meeting the first objective, the tool used to collect data is structured questionnaires. the
questionnaire was used to elicit information on element of marketing strategy like, marketing
communication mix, promotion mix, product mix, channel avaibility, price, service quality etc. the
major digital money service provider in india is amazon pay ,bhim/upi , Oxigen Wallet, Mobikwik,
FreeCharge ,Vodafone M-pesa ,Airtel Money
The main sources of secondary data was published research papers/reports of DoT & World
telecommunication development , digital money policy, journal of marketing management ,
journal of service marketing, journal of advance management , magazines like advertising
express, business world, Book and various websites of digital money service providers.
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Statical analysis
The data obtained in the present study were analysed using suitable tools study the impact of
marketing mix on overall digital money sector and to study the impact of product and service
quality on customer satisfaction. The following statistical treatments were used for interpretation
of data.
Percentage
The various product and services, demographic variables were analysed through percentage
method with pictorial representation by graphs.
Chi-Square Test
The chi-square test was used because there were no independent values, as this is the only
method which can be used when independent values are not present. Furthermore, this method
was used to check the probability of occurrence and variation between different independent
variables.
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1. The sample is selected conveniently and in single phase so as the perception is influenced
by time in which data was collected and the context in which the respondents were at the
time of data collection.
2. The primary data and observational methods of research has its own limitations and
based on respondent the study is limited to delhi state.
3. The study is limited to selected digital money companies and selected revenue centers of
the state and there for the findings can not be generalize to whole industries.
4. There are many other approaches to study on marketing strategy of service sector; there
is no unanimous opinion among the experts. So the researcher has taken appropriate
approaches, which might be appropriate for the study.
32
CHAPTER – 3
MARKETING STRATEGY
OF PAYTM
33
Product in the Marketing Mix Of Paytm :
In the year 2015, it ventured towards new horizons and added travel booking for busses and in the
year 2016 for movies in partnership with Cinepolis. It acts as a portal to shop for
multiple productsfrom apparel to electronic items. Paytm has increased its operations to include
services like booking air tickets, taxis and payment at petrol pumps.
The government is propagating cashless economy system and this endeavour will be a step in right
direction. Payments bank will be opened and it will attain a separate entity with the founder of
Paytm Vijay Shekhar Sharma, One96 Communication and its subsidiaries holding 51%, 30% and
10% respectively. Paytm has gained approval from Bharat Bill Payment System and users can
easily pay bills through this medium from now onwards.
Paytm has a Pan-India presence and has set up its headquarters base at Noida in Uttar Pradesh. It is
actually a platform that can be used easily by anybody and everybody at his/her convenience. Paytm
launched a toll-free number which is first of its kind and was at that point of time unheard of. 1800-
1800-1234 was a simple number that was used for recharges. Paytm was launched as a recharge
website via a mobile application. It can be accessed via browser and its app is also on iOS, Windows
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and Android operating systems. Paytm Wallet was launched in the year 2014 and it became largest
service portal for mobile payment in India. By the end of November 2016, 150 million and 75 million
wallets and Android-based apps were downloaded respectively. It has signed a deal with InMobi, one
of the largest portals in online industry to increase its user base.
Paytm is a medium which helps to pay bills in an easy manner without going to that related office and
standing in the queue for payments. It has become one of the most successful ventures related to online
payment. In the year 2015 Reserve Bank of India granted it a license to start first payment bank in
India. The intention of the bank is to use existing user-base of Paytm to offer diversified new services
like online transfer, savings account, online banking and debit cards. Paytm has become easy-to-use
and innovative interface and this has been possible because of its features as well as its pricing policy.
The company was the first to start a trend of cashback and instead of discounts they offered a money
back in wallets.
Paytm has adopted an aggressive and unique marketing policy to create better brand visibility. They
initiated net banking and launched several schemes and offers as part of their promotions. Ad
campaigns were shown via multiple channels on radio, television, newspapers, magazines and
billboards. It also relied heavily on mouth publicity. Demonetization of currency notes worked heavily
in its favour and garnered huge publicity and an increase in active users. Paytm is the title sponsor for
every cricket series in India hosted by BCCI for four years since the year 2015. It is the recipient of
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several accolades and awards like Disruptive Digital Innovator Award in the year 2015 and The Most
Innovative Company of the year 2014.
Product:
Paytm is a leading online payment company and an ecommerce portal based out of India. Paytm offers
various products & services in its marketing mix like ewallet, online shopping etc. The name Paytm is
a short form for pay through mobile. Customers can access the portal on computers and apps on their
smartphones for making online payments like mobile recharge, bills, shopping etc. Paytm wallet
enables customers to pay bills like electricity, recharge their mobile numbers, pay for DTH services,
pay at restaurants, book air tickets, movie tickets etc. Paytm basically empowers the customers to
make payments instead of using cash or debit / credit cards. Payments bank from Paytm enable
customers to have bank accounts like any other bank and have access to services like debit card,
savings account etc.
Price:
Paytm is a free to use service as it is a medium through which customers can make payments for the
other services which they avail. The foundation of payment was because of series of investments they
received. Indian business tycoon had invested in Paytm as a personal investment in the brand. After
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this, a funding of $575 million was received by Paytm from China's leading business group Alibaba.
Paytm also received funding from Taiwan based Mountain Capital. These huge fundings enables the
company to get new customers on board and give them free service. Paytm is also parallely giving
discounts and offers to promote its online shopping ecommerce portal. This gives an insight in the
pricing strategy in its marketing mix. There are many other apps and tech companies similar to Paytm
but none of its competitors have a market share as strong as it has. Paytm earns its revenue from
commission which happen on the transactions. Also, money deposited and stored in the ewallets are
also used to generate income through interest.
Place:
Paytm, like any other app or website, is accessible everywhere through a smartphone or laptop having
internet connectivity. The Paytm office is headquartered in Noida, India. The service is currently
serving the Indian consumers and is available throughout the country for making payments and
shopping. Paytm is widely accepted as a mode of payment across various industries, sectors and
geographies. Several restaurants, groceries, supermarkets, hotels etc all accept Paytm as a part of
payment. Ticketing houses and tour operators use Paytm's service for rail, plane, bus ticketing. All
these show the extensive reach of the service, which is widely accepted by vendors and customers
alike. Paytm has also launched services in Canada.
Promotion:
Paytm has been aggressively advertising itself as a part of its marketing mix. Ad campaigns of Paytm
are been showcased through TV commercials, online ad banners, billboards, print media like
newspapers, magazines etc. These have enabled Paytm to become a household name, with a catchy
phrase of "Paytmkaro". Apart from this, the company has also been actively involved in sponsorship of
several events, competitions etc which have given the brand tremendous visibility. Paytm has also
been roped in as the official sponsor and partner of the Indian cricket team, which would give huge
publicity and visibility to the brand across the world. Retailers, grocery stores and supermarkets
accepting Paytm as a mode of payment also display wall hangings and posters, which give the brand a
strong visibility.
Since this is a service marketing brand, here are the other three Ps to make it the 7Ps marketing mix of
Paytm.
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People:
Paytm, being a service brand, gives importance to its people ie its customers as well as its employees.
More than 13000 people are employed with Paytm as a part of its strong people strategy in its
marketing mix. Apart from employees, more than 3 million merchants accept Paytm as a mode of
payment. The company has grown in leaps and bounces as it has in excess of 75 million app
downloads. Also, more than 150 million people actively use Paytm wallets for making online
transactions.
Process:
Paytm has several business interface and customer friendly processes for the ease of doing
transactions. The basic process of using Paytm is as follows. Once a user has registered with Paytm,
they have to transfer some money using netbanking, credit/ debit cards, IMPS or other ways
mentioned from their bank. Once the money is the Paytm wallet, codes and numbers of vendors are
used to transfer e-money from customer to vendor. As the brand is new and is growing rapidly, it had
also focused on customer service processes.
Physical Evidence:
Paytm's physical evidence is the presence of the brand with customers and merchants. The app
installed in smartphones is the biggest physical evidence for Paytm as the app interface is the most
critical moment of truth for the customer for making payments and vendor for receiving the payments.
Apart from this, the blue logo with Paytm written is easily recognisable. The presence of stickers,
hanging placards, posters etc of Paytm at outlets give the physical presence of the brand. Hence, all
this summarises the Paytm marketing mix.
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No matter how much modern people have grown day by day but transferring and paying money online
creates a bit of confusing thoughts among users that would it be safe or not. But Paytm made a
flowchart depicting how using their digital wallet is as safe as compared to credit and debit cards. As
digital wallet is not connected to bank account so its amount is limited and also if any case of hacking
occurs or fraud ones bank account remains untouched!
Infographics
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Just before you click on purchase option in any e-commerce site pops up a spartan warrior with his
shield giving the message that PayTm guards users bank accounts.
3. Facebook Live
It’s very important to make people believe and understand of how their account is protected and free
of hacking with Paytm digital Wallet. what could have been a better way rather than using Facebook
Live!
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6. Workshops
Parenting camp were introduced where the trainers spoke how teenagers nowadays tend to bad habits
due to use of free pocket money. This can be used by limiting their account and payments by using
Paytm.
7. Mumbai Dabbawallas
They tied up with Mumbai dabbawallas, rather with the lunch services to accept Paytm cash only for
more usage of app.
8. MBA Contest
A free video contest for MBA first year students were conducted. A team of four were asked to create
a video about how Paytm can be used and the video that would get maximum likes would win. This
became viral and gave more user retention to Paytm.
2. Celebrity Endorsements
Famous dancing stars like ShiamakDavar and Remo D’Souza were seen doin pocket dance in
television. In internet cartoons and GIF’s were made on famous people doing pocket dance that went
viral.
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CHAPTER –4
OBJECTIVES OF
MARKETING STRATEGY
42
CHAPTER – 4
4.1 OBJECTIVES OF MARKETING STRATEGY
To better understand how to craft a marketing plan, you should know its elements. A marketing plan
consists of several key pieces of information, which can be divided into sections based on your
preference. If you’re not sure where to begin, take a look at these sample marketing plans. As you start
yours, keep in mind that that you should include the following points:
Your target audience. It’s absolutely key that you identify your target audience. If you don’t
know your target audience, you may as well not be in business! Figuring out your target audience
takes a bit of guessing and some presumptions. Start by determining their general interest: rock-
climbing, gaming, cooking? You should then describe your target audience in terms of
demographics, such as age, sex, earnings, religion, or family composition, or by lifestyle (healthy,
active, sedentary, etc.) Then try to determine their thinking habits. Are they conservative,
modern? Introverted, extroverted? How often do they purchase your product, and in what
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quantity? Once you determine your target audience you can figure out the best channels to market
your business to them on social media.
Outline your marketing strategies. Which methods and outlets will you use to push your
product? Are you going to be using social media networks? If so, which ones? If you’re using
Facebook or Twitter, will you also be using paid advertisements? Consider other forms of
marketing you may not have considered: billboards, print advertising, promotion via influencers
and bloggers, etc .For more examples of marketing strategies for small businesses, check out our
previous post.
Set a budget. Every successful business has to have a marketing budget. You should dedicate
a percentage of your projected gross sales to your monthly or annual marketing budget. If you’re a
small business or just starting out, this may mean paying out of pocket or borrowing at first, but
it’s well worth it. Remember: marketing is absolutely essential to the success of your business.
Don’t think that marketing is out of your budget—with so many different marketing tactics
available, including digital media, you can find a mix of strategies to appease even the tightest
budget.
A marketing strategy helps you create products and services with the best chances for making a profit.
This is because marketing strategy starts with marketplace research, taking into consideration your
optimal target customer, what your competition is doing and what trends might be on the horizon.
Using this information, you determine the benefit customers and clients want, what they’re willing to
pay and how you can differentiate your product or service from the competition.
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Part of a marketing strategy is setting the right price for your product or service based on what you
learned in your market research. If you learned that customers want a high-end product in your
category, your pricing strategy might require you to sell at prices that create a high-end perceived
value. If your target customer is bargain conscious and is willing to accept fewer bells and whistles on
your product in exchange for paying less, your pricing strategy will require you to sell at or below the
competition’s price.
Once you know what product features you’ll offer, who your target customer is and what your price
points will be, you can select where you want to sell to maximize your marketing effectiveness.
Younger customers will be more likely to shop using a smartphone or on a website, paying with
PayPal or a credit card. Older customers might prefer to shop at retail outlets. If your market research
shows you need to be in retail stores but you don’t have a sales force, you can use a wholesaler or
distributor.
Your market research will help you create your brand, or image you want to establish about your
business. Without marketplace research and a strategic marketing plan, you might respond to
solicitations from advertising salespeople on an individual, reactionary basis, sending messages that
don’t fit in with the brand identity you’ve created based on your product development efforts. A
marketing strategy lets you determine if a particular magazine, radio station or website fits into your
selling plans.
Organizational Impact
When you have a marketing strategy, your departments can better work with each other, because they
are all working from the same plan. For example, your advertising people will talk with your product
development people to determine what message you should send about your benefit. Your sales people
will talk with the people responsible for managing your image to determine if they can offer discounts,
coupons or rebates without damaging your brand.
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Strategy ensures effective departmental co-ordination.
It helps an organization to make optimum utilization of its resources so as to provide a sales
message to it’s target market.
A marketing strategy helps to fix the advertising budget in advance, and it also develops a
method which determines the scope of the plan, i.e., it determines the revenue generated by the
advertising plan.
4.3 Scope
The marketing plan is a detailed road map that outlines all your marketing strategies, tactics, activities,
costs and projected results over a period of time. The plan keeps your entire team focused on specific
goals - it's a critical resource for your entire company.
It takes time to develop a marketing plan - from a few days to a few weeks, depending on your
experience and the depth of the plan - so it's a good idea to define the scope beforehand to manage
content expectations and deadlines.
Marketing plans can range from something as simple as a 1-page summary document to a 50+ page
document covering multiple product lines and distribution channels. "Traditional" marketing plan
templates can be intimidating for a business person without an MBA or a marketing degree, as they
contain a lot of theory that business people can't always tie to tangible results like market share goals,
profit and loss results and monthly sales and marketing activities.
There's nothing wrong with creating a very detailed plan; however, it's best to create a plan that
delivers what you need based on your company situation. Each company is different, depending on
company age, revenue, resources available and marketing and sales expertise.
Feel free to modify the process and the level of detail, based on your needs and your available time.
For example, if you need to prepare a plan very quickly, you may not choose to go through all of the
exercises in the supporting subjects. Instead, just respond to the questions in the exercise and do your
best. You can always come back and revise your plan if necessary.
4.4 Objective
Paytm’s objective has been to increase the market share of the Wallet, capturing the market.To achieve
this, it had to overcome several hurdles, the biggest of which is that the adoption of the Wallet as a
way of keeping money online and transacting using mobile phones is a challenge for many people in
India. The brand also had to figure out how to increase the number of Paytm Wallets, since success
depends on volumes.
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Paytm’s target market is all of India’s internet users and smart phone users. The Paytm mobile app is
available on all possible platforms including Android, IOS and Windows.
The publicity strategy was uniform and aimed at mass audiences across all cities. To truly reach
everyone, including those in regional markets, the brand even began using local vernacular with its
press ads, in an attempt to reach out to regional markets.
The number of mobile phone connections in India is increasing. The mobile phone is seen to be a very
convenient means of cashless transactions. Also the trust factor that Paytm has established through its
recharge and bill payments services had already been increasing its daily transaction volumes going
into the campaign. More importantly, its repeat user base was expanding and so Paytm was sitting on
an opportunity.
The creative across offline and online media was based on the variety of products Paytm offers its
customers, such as recharge, wallet, payments and online shopping. This encouraged new customers to
sign up for the Paytm Wallet, and for existing customers to use it again.
The offline channels of communication were television, out-of-home, newspapers and transit media.
Having tasted success with its TV campaign during the World Cup, Paytm released its new TV
commercial during the Indian Premier League Season 8 and major cricketing events. It was also
launched across other media like digital, print and radio. Paytm was an associate sponsor of IPL and
got 120 seconds of airtime during each of the 60 matches of the tournament & sponsor of BCCI.
This was planned with Paytm’s target market in mind, since the brand needed to reach a mass
audience. The strategy was to establish the brand image through offline and push the promotions
through online. Paytm’s online advertising strategy is simple – bring visibility to Paytm everywhere,
and motivate people to try the offers the brand runs.
Paytm allocated a budget of Rs 500 crore solely for marketing in the year 2015. The money was used
to finance marketing campaigns via online and mobile as well as offline channels. Out of the budget,
70 percent of orders on Paytm come from mobile. Though Paytm has websites for its services,
shopping using Paytm is a mobile first experience for sure.
The Paytm campaign’s mobile component included: mobile banner advertising, app-install pushes, app
notifications, SEM advertising and more promotion on Paytm properties as well as third party sites.
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Paytm Care works on the brief of resolving issues at lightning speed. The way it communicates is also
in sync with the Paytm personality. Every email carries a name and aspires to bring a resolution as
quickly and as well as possible.
Where other marketing channels miss out is in prompting app-installs. In keeping with its “storming
the market” strategy, Paytm has also been exploring co-branding opportunities. Such strategic
partnerships with Uber Cabs, Meru Cabs and many more brands brought the brand a significant
amount of new customers in cities and continuous loyalty to the Paytm Wallet.
Scope
Founded in 2010, Paytm started as a prepaid mobile recharge website. Currently its business is not
only limited to recharge but has expanded as online payment platform including mobile recharges,
utility bill payment, wallet payment and wallet to wallet and wallet to bank transfers for many leading
internet based companies like Bookmyshow, Makemytrip, FoodPanda, IRCTC and many others.
It was founded under the implemented idea of Vijay Shekhar Sharma and has got the first mover
advantage in the mobile industry. The company has been backed up by Alibaba group and Ratan Tata.
The firm raised $575 million from Alibaba group for a share of 25% in the company.
Paytm is growing faster and they have over 20 million registered users as per their current data. Their
website and mobile app has been transformed into a fully-fledged e-commerce marketplace offering
categories from electronics, mobile phones, sports & health, home & kitchen, books, baby & toys and
many more categories.
The app downloaded on various platforms has touched the mark of 7 million. The additional features
added like Bargain power which is not currently available at any other marketplace and unified
dashboard has made the selling and buying more interesting. Monthly order of over 15 million is
completed over here.
4.5 Significance
With over 100 million users a year ago, PayTM was already ahead of its digital payment competitors
before the Nov. 2016 demonetization of high value currency notes in India. On the back of the push
for #CashlessIndia consequent to #CurrencySwitch, the Alibaba-backed mobile wallet has increased
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its lead over its other mobile wallets (e.g. MobiKwik, PayZapp) and account-to-account money
transfer apps (e.g. UPI). Today, PayTM boasts 150M users (Source: Wikipedia).
Based on my personal experience and anecdotal evidence, I advance five reasons to explain why
PayTM is miles ahead of its rivals.
Merchants can sign up for PayTM without a bank account. They can receive money into their PayTM
wallets without a bank account. They can even spend their wallet balance by shopping at other
merchants that accept PayTM payments. It's only when they want to cash out their money from their
PayTM account that they need a bank account.
As a result, PayTM was / is able to sign up hundreds of thousands of merchants that don't have bank
accounts. These merchants could sign up for PayTM as soon as they had a compelling need to accept
cashless payments i.e. immediately after the demonetization announcement, start accepting payments
and visit banks later to open their accounts after their PayTM account balances started growing.
Contrast this with competing e-wallets, which insist that merchants link their bank accounts (or debit
cards or credit cards) to their apps right at the time of installing them. As a result, financially-excluded
merchants couldn't sign up for them when they had a compelling need. PayTM's rivals lost this market
to PayTM.
2. Viral Distribution
When PayPal launched in the late 1990s, it incented existing users to send money to non users. When
users sent money to their friends and family members (that were not on PayPal), PayPal sent them an
email saying “Collect $$ by signing up for PayPal". This give non-users a far more compelling reason
to join PayPal than any direct advertising or PR efforts could have and generated a massive amount of
viral distribution for PayPal.
PayTM has copied this approach. And has probably reaped the rich rewards à la PayPal. Surprisingly,
PayTM’s competitors haven't followed this approach. They insist that payments can be made only to
people that have already signed up to their e-wallets. They probably think sending money to a non-
user would be tantamount to putting the cart before the horse. Indeed, it would. But, as I’ve said time
and again, Putting Cart Before Horse Does Work (hyperlink removed to comply with Finextra
Community Rules but this post will appear on top of Google Search results when searched by the
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title). PayTM and PayPal get it. Their competitors don't. Instead, they put their prospective users at the
mercy of their respective banks to gain signups.
To take UPI as an example, to receive payments, you need to have a Virtual Payment Address (VPA)
from your bank. Assuming that you're thorougly sold on UPI and decide to create your VPN, you'll
need to contend with your bank's systems to actually generate one. This adds a big moving part, which
doesn't always work. Just today, I got an SMS from my bank saying they can't issue new MMIDs - an
integral part of IMPS, the payment rails on which UPI works - for the next five days. There's no
guarantee that you'd still be interested in UPI five days later.
In the weeks following #CurrencySwitch, PayTM salespersons made daily rounds in retail hotspots
asking storekeepers if they wanted PayTM.
I’ve seen this personally in my building storefront that’s dotted with tea shops, fruit stores, cigarette
sellers and other micromerchants.
I've also heard more about PayTM's aggressive merchant acquisition drive from a couple of Uber
drivers. According to this cabbie who accepts PayTM on his personal name – PayTM is also Uber’s
official digital payments partner - PayTM sales reps ride on their motorbikes up and down a street near
Pune Airport where hundreds of Uber and Ola taxis are parked, asking drivers if they want to sign up
for PayTM. When a driver says yes, the rep connects the driver’s smartphone on his own 4G network
using tethered WiFi hotspot, downloads the app, installs and onboards the driver on PayTM. All this in
5-10 minutes. Without being judgmental about whether the driver is tech savvy or not. And at no data
charges to the cabbie. This Uber driver is so conversant with PayTM’s merchant acquisition program
that he actually knows the PayTM rep's sales quota (10 merchants a day)!
In sharp contrast, most competitors of PayTM haven't harnessed the power of feet-on-street to recruit
merchants. Instead, they seem to expect merchants to sign up in self-service mode. An investor in one
of these PayTM competitors actually said this in a MEDIUM article:
As a result, most micromerchants I’ve quizzed are not even aware of UPI, BHIM and other competing
e-wallets.
4. Frictionless Payments
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By design or default, the Sign Out link in PayTM’s mobile app is buried deep inside the app. As a
result, many users have never seen it and stay logged into their app all the time. This means they're
able to make a payment without a password or PIN.
This creates a significant security vulnerability in PayTM. But it also makes PayTM's CX that much
more frictionless, which makes a lot of difference when people use it many times a day.
PayTM has understood and capitalized on this element of consumer behavior. Its competitors have
totally missed it.
5. Miscellaneous
PayTM is very well funded and is able to spend big bucks on advertising as also absorb losses on
virtually every transaction.
PayTM makes every effort to enhance UX. For example, as I’d highlighted in Hiding Your Secret
Sauce, PayTM preloads its wallet on the fly without user intervention. As a result, users wary of
having to topup prepaid mobile wallets before initiating payments find the PayTM experience superior
to that of other mobile wallets, which bump them off with a message asking them to load enough
money into their wallets first and then reattempt the payment.
CHAPTER – 5
LITERATURE REVIEW
51
CHAPTER -5
LITERATURE REVIEW
Paytm is India's largest leading payment gateway that offers comprehensive payment services for
customer and merchants. We offer mobile payment solutions to over 7 million merchants and allow
consumers to make seamless mobile payments from Cards, Bank Accounts and Digital Credit among
others. We pioneered and are the leader of QR based mobile payments in India. With the launch of
Paytm Payments Bank, we aim to bring banking and financial services to half-a-billion un-served and
under-served Indians. Our investors include Softbank, SAIF Partners, Alibaba Group and Ant
Financial. We strive to maintain an open culture where everyone is a hands-on contributor and feels
comfortable sharing ideas and opinions. Our team spends hours, designing each new feature and
obsesses about the smallest of details. Paytm was founded in August 2010 with an initial investment of
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$2 million by its founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma in NOIDA, a region adjacent to India's capital New
Delhi. It started off as a prepaid mobile and DTH recharge platform, and later added data card,
postpaid mobile and landline bill payments in 2013.[6]
By January 2014, the company launched the Paytm Wallet, and the Indian Railways and Uber added it
as a payment option. It launched into E-commerce with online deals and bus ticketing. In 2015, it
unveiled more use-cases like education fees, metro recharges, electricity, gas, and water bill payments.
It also started powering the payment gateway for Indian Railways.
In 2016, Paytm launched movies, events and amusement parks ticketingas well as flight ticket
bookings and Paytm QR.[ Later that year, it launched rail bookings[11] and gift cards.
Paytm's registered user base grew from 11.8 million in August 2014 to 104 million in August 2015. Its
travel business crossed $500 million in annualised GMV run rate, while booking 2 million tickets per
month.[12]
In 2017, Paytm became India's first payment app to cross over 100 million app downloads. The same
year, it launched Paytm Gold,[14] a product that allowed users to buy as little as ₹1 of pure gold online.
It also launched the Paytm Payments Bank and ‘Inbox’, a messaging platform with in-chat payments
among other products.[ By 2018, it started allowing merchants to accept Paytm, UPI and Card
payments directly into their bank accounts at 0% charge. It also launched the ‘Paytm for Business’
app, allowing merchants to track their payments and day-to-day settlements instantly. This led its
merchant base to grow to more than 7 million by March 2018.
The company launched two new wealth management products - Paytm Gold Savings Plan and Gold
Gifting to simplify long-term savings.It launched into gaming and investments, partnering with
AGTech to launch a mobile games platform Gamepind, and setting up Paytm Money with an
investment of ₹9 Crores to bring investment and wealth management products for the Indians.
Paytm led in Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions in January, closely followed by Google
Pay and PhonePe, according to people with knowledge of the matter. As UPI gains further ground, the
field is turning competitive – Paytm clocked more than 221 million transactions, while Google Pay
and PhonePe were at about 220 million each, said the people cited above. PhonePe, however, told ET
across all payment modes it had 225 million transactions worth Rs 30,000 crore in January.
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While the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) issues overall UPI transaction numbers, ET
has sourced the individual split of the top three largest payments players from multiple sources.
Overall, UPI clocked around 672 million transactions last month, up from 620 million in December.
Google Pay did not provide specific numbers and Paytm didn’t respond to queries. Even as the number
of transactions has jumped, peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions still dominate. “As per internal
calculations, the total number of merchant transactions is not more than 100-120 million per month,”
said a senior banker on condition of anonymity. “However, merchant payments are growing as non-
bank entities are pushing those transactions. Even the number of UPI payments for cab rides is
recording almost 2 million per month, growing at a considerable pace.”RohitChomal had taken the
names of Sonia, her husband Rupak Jain and an employee of Paytm, Devendra Kumar, stating that
they were the people behind the extortion.
In another move to make digital payments safer, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) proposes to regulate
payment gateway service providers and payment aggregators. This would mean that payment
gateways such as Paytm, Mobikwik, Bharat Bill Pay and so on would have to adhere to RBI guidelines
just as many other financial entities have to do. Consequently, these gateways can be expected to
become more transparent and accountable in their working thereby benefiting common people using
them.
As per RBI in its press release dated March 30, 2017 regarding advisory on e-walletshas said that
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intermediaries, like aggregators and payment gateways, which facilitate payment services, though not
authorised by Reserve Bank under the Act, are however required to route their transactions only
through a nodal account opened with a bank under Reserve Bank's guidelines of November 24, 2009.
The 2009 guidelines issued in this regard asked for the maintenance of nodal accounts of
intermediaries like payment gateway providers and payment aggregators. As per the 2009 guidelines,
all accounts opened and maintained by banks facilitating collection of payments by intermediaries
from customers of merchants, shall be treated as internal accounts of the banks. While it is left to the
banks to decide on the exact nomenclature of such accounts it shall be ensured that such accounts are
not
.
Banks shall ensure that the process of converting all the existing accounts maintained and operated by
intermediaries for the purpose covered in these directions shall be completed within three months of
issuance of these directions, as per the guidelines.
Earlier, the apex bank in its "Payment and Settlement Systems - Vision 2018" has mentioned about it.
As per the document, "The increasing growth of electronic payments, especially online payments,
riding the growth of e-commerce and m-commerce transactions, has brought to the fore the increasing
role and importance of entities that facilitate such online payments such as payment gateway providers
and payment aggregators. The current guidelines on maintenance of nodal accounts for such
intermediaries (monitored through banks) are indirect and address only a few specific aspects of their
functioning. Given their increasing role, the guidelines will be revised for the payments related
activities of these entities."
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5.1 Research Question:
What is Competitive Marketing Strategy?
How can company use these strategies to survive in recession economic condition?
1.4 Significance of Research: Recession economy is very impotent in this present situation for
all the company all over the world. So, it is very important to find the way to survive the
company. This research is important because it's showing importance of marketing strategies to
survive the company and make succeed in the market during the recession economy.
1.5 Limitation of Research: This is very difficult to collect the data from the firm what strategy
they are using to overcome the recession economic condition because different company using
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the different strategy and also its very confidential for the company so the company don't want
to flash their marketing policy or strategy.
Lake of enough knowledge, which step should be take in this economic condition
The objective of this report is to acquire the practical knowledge about the market to conduct a
Business run successfully and also develop our knowledge how can Firms survive in down turn
economy or recession economy by changing competitive marketing strategy. Recession affects
different company differently. So it's necessary for the Firms change their marketing strategy to
survive in the recession economy. They should aware about the shrinkage of the Firm, follow the low
cost strategy, improve the employee effectiveness by proper training and reduce the wastes of the
Firms.
CHAPTER – 6
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FINDINGS & ANALYSIS
CHAPTER – 6
FINDINGS & ANALYSIS
When we were asked to build a recommender system for our marketplace, the first thought was to use
an out-of-box implementation from spark MLlib like ALS (alternating least square based matrix
factorization) or an equivalent off-the-shelf solution.
However, as we explored our data and business need, we understood that a more tailored solution will
be required. Our catalog had upwards of 50 Mn unique items and only a small fraction of these
products had view or purchase history. There was a cold start problem on the user side as well – most
users don’t view or purchase enough products to reliably generate recommendations with user-item
collaborative filtering methods.
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In addition to that, we required recommendations for a widget on the homepage that was previously
“hand-curated” by editors scanning the entire catalog and finding the best selection for customers to
delight them and help drive traffic to other parts of the marketplace. Since editors couldn’t build
selections for every customer they picked broad market trends and built one assortment to show. To
automate curation, we had to find the best deals in the catalog, find deals that match the taste of every
user and ideally find deals that would eventually make that product popular. We also wanted to
recommend products from diverse categories in order to prevent any one category from dominating
sales, and to maintain a ‘freshness’ factor. Here is how we decomposed this problem in 3 basic parts
and how we came up with a modeling scheme:
1. Finding the best deals from the catalog (Product Pool Selection):
We used a forecasting model for predicting the lift in sales for a given
product based on its historical data and discounts offered on it. Initially, we just used a simple price
elasticity model by calculating an elasticity coefficient based on the ratio of quantity change and price
change and then multiplying it with price change to get new predicted quantity. In a few days, we
found that this is modeled better as a multivariate problem and regressing on price only gives a very
high variance. There are other factors in forecasting like lifecycle of product, visibility, promotions
etc. Based on this finding we replaced this model with a random forest regression model that took time
series data for product sales and some product features into account and predicted net lift over baseline
sales every day. In addition to improving prediction accuracy, it gives us flexibility to add more
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features in the future like the location of product placement, the number of views, searches for similar
products etc. Based on this model we were able to filter the best deals in every category not just based
on discounted price but likeability by customers. We have used this information in other areas of our
business as well but that’s for later.
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4. Ensemble! (recommendation assembly): To recap, we now know the most likely purchase
categories for each user, the most attractive deals in those categories and the products most correlated
to each user’s last product view. We can go to town with this. We mix the probabilities from the three
models to generate the sequence of products we show each user. Using the ensemble method described
above we have powered 15 widgets on different parts of the marketplace that were serving similar
objective. Though we have already seen very promising results like 3.5x lift in CTR and 2x lift in
conversion rate coming from the widgets where this went live, there is a long way to go in improving
these algorithms. Here are a few results showing how we have been able to improve our algorithms
iteratively and drive more transactions
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We also faced many challenges like class imbalance, data sparsity, huge differences in categories and
figuring out similar feature sets so we can operationalize this easily etc. We will do some future blog
posts focusing on challenges faced and what we did to solve them.
In summary, always think about the use case and think how to scale the solution. When you can
decompose the problem into small parts and build solutions like frameworks, you can always scale
better and repurpose solution to serve many similar use cases
Team Profile: The Midgar team is tasked to deliver a highly personalized experience on Paytm. The
team is looking for super talented software engineers, machine learning engineers and data engineers.
Check out other open positions as well. To know more, write us using the contact form.
CHAPTER – 7
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CONCLUSION
CHAPTER – 7
CONCLUSION
PayTm supports their customers to transfer their payments with the usage of their mobile phones in
the easiest way. PayTm is a good app to download due to its wide network of partners which makes it
convenient whether you're taking a cab ride with Uber, or ordering a meal via Foodpanda. PayTm has
to work upon the Payment gateway to improve the transaction efficiency as 70% people faced problem
with payment gateway. Only 5% people claim to have got assistance every time they had a failure so
the service could be improved to cater the needs of maximum customers. PayTm is currently
performing well in terms of privacy but it has to work upon discounts/offers, transaction time and
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bring about innovation to increase customer satisfaction.
a. Social media has become an integral part of the algorithms that decide where a particular
website is placed in the search rankings. The higher the ranking the more visible it is to the
consumer. One of the core questions behind this research was to find out what impact
social networking sites is having on the hotel sector.
b. The ability to interact with the guests of the hotel should be viewed as a very positive
aspect by Hotel business. It offers very real insight into how the hotels are viewed.
c. The feedback shared on the review social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, Google+, holidayiq.com & Trip Advisor is an opportunity to improve the service
offering.
d. Measuring the affects that reviews, Wall-posting, Blog, Photo Video, Pop-up, tweets and
posts can directly have on bookings could be quite difficult.
e. In conclusion the ability to reach out to such a huge volume of potential guests would make
ignoring social media a poor business choice. The other side of the coin is that potential for
damage to the brand by reaching out in a haphazard fashion could be quite destructive and
costly torepair.
f. A well planned and coherent marketing strategy is needed to limit potential damage and
give the chance of succeeding greater odds. It would be wise to consider hiring a qualified
dedicated member of staff or to consult with an outside agency or expert from the earliest
stages to avoid negativeoutcomes.
g. Social Networking Sites creates a real Connection between companiesand
customers; that connection creates a trend for purchaseintensity.
h. Social Networking Sites provide ample of opportunities for interacting with Hotel
industriespartners
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i. Social Networking Sites provides a platform to innovative advertising to be effectively
used for business growth of Hotelindustries
j. From data interpretation we observed that hotel industry in Pune prefer Facebook and
Tripadvisor.in more than any other Social Networking Sites for their Promotionalactivities
k. Hotel Industry with use of Social Networking Sites can gain competitive advantage by
reducing advertising cost , create awareness, capture large market, able to transact globally.
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CHAPTER – 8
RECOMMENDATIONS
&
SUGGESTIONS
CHAPTER – 8
RECOMMENDATIONS
It would be wise not to underestimate the costs associated with marketing on social media.
Though the potential to reach a wide audience is both immediate and as simple as opening
a Facebook account it should not be undertaken lightly.
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a. A serious point to be remembered is the potential for damage to the brand going viral
across the internet. Repairing this damage could cost considerable money and effort.
b. Sufficiently qualified staff would need to be hired plus the costs associated with training
other staff using the company accounts would need to be factored in. These costs are
beyond the purview of this report and further research in this area is highly recommended.
c. A very minimum interaction that Hotels should consider is to treat Trip Advisor and
holidayiq.com as an influential means of reputation management.
SUGGESTIONS
a. It is suggested that offline and online marketing strategies be brought into alignment to
prevent mixed messages and to promote the availability of the online forums for
interaction. Offline advertising should be used to complement the online media. Adding
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“visit us on Facebook” and other such texts to promotional material will help to raise
awareness.
b. The social networking strategy should sufficiently flexible to allow it to adapt to new
developments and to determine what works and what does not work.
d. The reviews and complaints raised by the customers on the SNS should be effectively
managed and proper actions should be taken by the hotels management and the action
taken should also be communicated to the customer.
e. The promotional offers during season on should be displayed on the SNS on regular basis,
so that large number of customers is captured
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CHAPTER – 9
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND
REFERENCES
CHAPTER – 9
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
Anita Seth (2007), “quality of service parameters in cellular mobile communication”,
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international journal of mobile communications, vol-5, issue 1, jan-2007.
Bailey, J.P. and Bakos, Y. (1997), “An exploratory study of the emerging role of electronic
intermediaries”, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, Vol.1, No.3, pp.7-20.
Associated chambers of commerce and industry of india 2005. Bagozzi,R.P. &Dholakia, U.
(1999) “ Goal setting and Goal striving in consumer behavior”, Journal of marketing, special
issue.
Akhil Gupta (2001), “Telecom – Is the Future Finally Near?”, 2001 Asian venture forum,
India, Dec.
Akhil Gupta (2002), “Importance of Competition in Telecommunication”,
Akwule R U (1992), “Telecommunications in Kenya; Development and policy issue” in
telecommunication policy, Sept- Oct.pp.603-11.
Achrol, R. (1991), “Evolution of the marketing organization: New Forms for turbulent
environments”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 55, No. 4, pp. 77-93.
Adrian Payne and PennieFrow (1999), “Relationship Marketing: key Issues for the Utilities
sector”, Journal of Marketing.
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