A Marketer’s Fallacy: A Case of Ekhanei

A marketer’s fallacy: A case of ekhanei.com

The rapid proliferation of mobile phones throughout these markets, along with increasingly affordable services, created a large opportunity to take the benefits of such applications to the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) segment in these markets, through e-commerce websites. This article considers the case of Ekhanei.com. As the first e-commerce portal in Bangladesh, Ekhanei.com is not living up to its promising gains in the early years of its inception. Rather, it has let itself become outshined by Bikroy.com and some other online buying and selling destinations. Can the firm leverage its resources and prowess to catapult itself in the top as far as consumer top of mind recall is concerned?

Shadman Rahman, the marketing head of Ekhanei.com, spent his first few minutes in the office on Tuesday Googling the weather in Phuket. He, Saara, and the boys were set to fly there on Thursday night. The prospect of two weeks on the beach seemed heavenly. No questions from his CEO about why the new customer initiatives were behind schedule. No excuses from the landline, mobile, and broadband division heads about why their respective service centers and billing systems couldn’t be integrated. No meetings to run, no presentations to prepare. He couldn’t wait to step out of his chief marketing officer suit and into his Daddy sandals and swim trunks.

Only 72 more hours, Shadman thought, smiling. Right at that moment, Rahim, the personal assistant to the CEO rushed into Shadman’s room and said the CEO called an urgent meeting. Shadman’s lips narrowed. He went to the CEO’s room; it was dead silent and he was greeted with scrutinizing eyes. As soon as he entered, Arild Klokkerhaug, the CEO stood up and threw a copy of the business section of The Daily Star on the table and said “Read aloud!”. The article on the first page of the business section was titled “Bikroy.com, the top internet site”. Shadman started reading the article. “Bikroy.com, the largest online marketplace in the country, is ranked the number one internet site identified by consumers, a recent survey reveals.Bikroy.com stands first in customer awareness with a 23 percent` response rate, where Gmail received only 4 percent referrals, according to the 'top of mind awareness' study by MRB Bangladesh, a market research company. Bikroy.com received 76 percent of the respondents' top-of-mind answer and secured the top position as the most reliable online marketplace, followed by OLX with 13 percent and Clickbd’s 10 percent.”

Arild was furious. “Would you care to explain why we are not of the top classified ads website with the highest ‘top of the mind awareness’? Why is Bikroy.com, a late entrant at the top of the list?”

Clearly not expecting this situation, Shadman was startled. “I knew that Bikroy.com