Mumbai:

Prof Seth addressed a select gathering on the new frontiers of marketing, growth strategies and their impact on brand building, and providing tactical options of organic growth as well as acquisitions. He also spoke on the implications of brand building including brand integration, brand creation and umbrella branding.

At the session on ''New Paradigms of Marketing,'' Prof Seth spoke on the 4 ''a''s of marketing — acceptability, affordability, accessibility and awareness.

According to Prof Seth marketing today has more to do with what customers actually require rather than the product-centric world that companies think they require. "The consumers'' is gaining power. There is excess supply and it has become the buyer''s market."

This change is due to three things — the end of the license-raj, which gave people choices among goods; the entry of outside competition and; the emergence of retailer as a powerful entity unlike when companies could dictate terms to them.

According to Prof Seth, in this context, the last ''a'' - awareness becomes very important as companies need to make the consumers aware. "For that, mere reliance on advertising is not sufficient. There is a need for an integrated approach using alternative media."

In the present scenario, he said, Indian companies needed to ascend the value scale. Citing the example of the IT sector in India, he pointed out that the combined strength of the top Indian IT companies was minuscule compared to that of giants like IBM and Microsoft. He said that though the Indian IT sector had scored well in the first step of sending competent people abroad at lower costs, the next step would be difficult, because Indian software companies had neither scaled up their competencies in the value chain nor had the investing ability.

"The next step for Indian companies is to create software products which would open up huge opportunities and should be challenging for IT companies," he said. Companies like Wipro, he added, should acquire second-tier companies in the country because companies had to be strong on their home turf since foreign companies would make a beeline for the country, sooner or later. "Companies themselves should decide the sectors that they have to be present in. It''s already happening in banks and the cellular industry and a fragmented domestic market gives foreign companies an advantage," Prof Seth said.

Speaking on the backlash on outsourcing in the US he said this was happening because the western countries still retained a colonial mindset and felt that only low end jobs were meant for the developing nations. Having spent close to quarter century teaching in institutes like Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Illinois and Columbia University, he said, he understood their colonial mindset.

The problem, he said, was that the US economy was growing but was not creating enough jobs. "Job creation is important as the economy grows," he emphasised.