This is a time of immense opportunity.

From managing the Kelvinator brand in the days of mass marketing to putting LML on high rev or setting the operations of Samsung India ground up - R K Caprihan has handled the most spectacular range of issues in consumer marketing. Now he has chosen a new medium to put his 30-years of marketing experience to play. In an exclusive interview to Alokananda Chakraborty of agencyfaqs!, the 54-year-old CEO of Jaldi.com talks about nuances of brand building on the net and how Jaldi plans to bridge the gap between the consumer and the manufacturer.

Edited Excerpts

Window2Shop.com was a site run by N T Electronic Shopping Pvt Ltd. Post merger, the assets of N T Electronic Shopping Pvt Ltd have been acquired by Jaldi E-Commerce Ltd. It is a cash/stock deal. While I do have a stake in the 'new' company, I can't talk about the exact shareholding pattern of Jaldi at this point in time.

Jaldi had a good brand name, sound technology partners, an excellent management team and lots of ideas. After KLG acquired the site and it became a subsidiary of KLG, it started looking more focussed and committed. But what Jaldi was lacking in, was in the execution of those ideas. And it is because of this that the merger with W2S made sense.

W2S had a lot of domain experience and an excellent back-end. Over the few months that it has been in existence, we managed to build up a network of over 100 dealers. So you see Jaldi had this huge bouquet of products, and we had a readymade support network. It all fell into place.

In addition, I always had a good equation and a feel-good factor with the promoters of KLG. All in all, I thought this was an ideal recipe for a merger.

The merged entity will continue to be known as Jaldi - it's too well known a brand name today to even consider a change. You will see a lot of other changes however. The site will be far more focussed and will concentrate on particular areas and have depth in content. We will be adding more revenue streams and make shopping a far more pleasant experience for the surfer.

One major development in Jaldi's recent history has been the fact that some major horizontal portals have signed on Jaldi.com for its e-commerce experience. These include Mantraonline, Rediff.com, Go4i.com and Gharapna.com. Each of these web sites will use Jaldi.com as the back-end for e-commerce procurement and fulfillment. In return, Jaldi.com will feature links to the websites on its home page.

We are not in the game for bargains. Some of the so-called bargains you get on the net are on MRP, which is higher than the market operating price and the only bargain you get is the word bargain.

Our effort will be to emerge as the true micro marketplace. This micro marketplace is a term coined by the Gartner group - it's an aggregation of everything available in the market. That's what we are driving at.

That's how Jaldi's going to be - a micro marketplace for all kinds of products; a place where you could compare prices, features and other qualities of all products and under one umbrella. Call it a competition guide or a buyer manual… the idea is to have all the information up there in one place.

This is all about consumer knowledge and empowerment. I'll give you one example. People in India generally set the temperature of their air-conditioners at 17 / 18 degrees and reach out for a quilt in the middle of the night when they start feeling chilly. No manufacturer will ever tell them that they can set the temperature at 26 / 27 degrees and switch on the fan at low speed. It won't be chilly and it would be more comfortable. This is what I call consumer education and we want to do that. We want to tell them where to install their ACs, how to save on power - everything they ought to know about the products they buy.

I always wanted to do something on my own. Some years back I wrote a software for making personal portfolios. But due to lack of time and other concerns, I didn't pursue it any further

However, one thing is obvious now: it was never so easy to become an entrepreneur as now. But you see most of these entrepreneurs today don't have any business sense to speak of. I thought I might be able to bridge that gap.

Most of the change has taken place in the investing environment. And it is so much tougher now. Take the outlook of the investors - a whole lot of them have burnt their fingers in start-ups in India. Now they are so much more careful. Earlier the investor would only look at the idea and the management team. And he would put in the money. Now he wants an idea plus a management team plus a sound revenue model and he wants to know how scaleable the operations are. Earlier the breakeven point for such operations was 30 months perhaps. Now it has come down to between 15 and 18 months.

But all said, one has learnt a lot in one year and that is why we are constantly changing. Our new Jaldi will have more revenue streams and when we see the destruction all around us, it makes success seem all that closer.

Worldwide, the top three categories where e-tailing has taken off have been books, music and electronic goods. The reason is simple. When you go to buy a book, you already know which one you want; you are not really looking to touch and feel and so on. So with music, and if you want to sample the music you can do that on the net. Electronics is a big gifting item worldwide and we have seen that happen in India as well with our Panasonic experience in Diwali this year.

However, all this is related to Internet usage and I am sure that within a year or two e-tailing will boom. It will take off for the new generation - a generation that spends money to save time, unlike us, the earlier generation, which used to spend time to save money.

I believe the ones who have a sound strategy, the ability to grasp opportunities, the ability to do mid-course corrections, the ability to scale operations will have a chance of success. The early mover advantage will of course be there.

What Jaldi did was right in that environment - but that environment is changing. So Jaldi has to change. This happens all the time - the cost of entry for the early mover is always high.

There's one very basic difference between the Indian society and the societies these companies were coming from. In India, you will see that families that have a strong father figure go on to do well. So with companies. Basically, we need somebody to identify with, somebody who would empathise with us. But these companies were coming from credit card societies, faceless societies. In India, even the dealer wants a face to interact with.

At Samsung, we realised that this human, emotional interface was very important. We tried to make every experience with Samsung a new one, an emotional one. I tried to do the same thing at W2S. When the registrant logs on, he / she gets a personalised message, like "Hello so and so… we haven't seen you for a long time" … something like that. We wanted to take that a step further. We would have liked to ask him, "Hope you enjoyed your sister's birthday!" And I sincerely believe that surfers are willing to spend the time and give us the information because we can make them feel special. I guess we are a very egoistic people.

Brand building is basically the same. Fortunately Jaldi is a known brand and I shall be adding some teeth to the brand. And I think it's easier to build a brand on the net than on ground. On the net you can find out immediately whether you're doing the right thing or not. There are various ways of tracking traffic and surfer behaviour. So you can make early corrections. But on the ground you are looking at a very big audience, very widely spread, with very different needs and preferences. You know the customer is not the same in Mumbai and in Agra. But here, at least you know that you get a very specific kind of audience on the net. Knowing this is very crucial, and a major part of the battle won.

The simple truth is you have to have a sound business model and a sound strategy to be there and make money. Shakeouts are bound to happen and you shall see more dropouts in times to come. But let's look at it this way. This is the time of immense opportunity, when there is fear all around. This is the time to make money when there is destruction all around. That's the way I would like to look at it.

I'll just say this. We are on the path to breaking even in the next one year.