Marriage Of Brands – IndiaMART & NDTV Get Together, HP Powers The Alliance!

Another news comes from the IndiaMART camp, they have launched a portal for SME in partnership with NDTV – NDTVSME.com. Objective behind this portal creation is to address the information, transaction & service needs of SMEs. This portal contains trade shows, leads, tenders, travel, IndiaMART Success Stories, IndiaMART clients, and HP Smartbiz as well. This will offer rich user experience to SMB and focus to provide global exposure & business enquiries to small businesses.

Dinesh Agarwal – CEO, IndiaMART said, “NDTVSME.com is a marriage of brand and reach of NDTV with the strong B2B recall and content strength of IndiaMART.com, which makes it a formidable property.”

However, Vikram Chandra, CEO, NDTV Networks is excited about the reach of NDTV to the SME community through this portal. And, Deepti Dang, Head, Marketing Commercial & SMB, Personal Systems Group, Hewlett-Packard India, said that SMBs contribute most to their business and they have made this association to protect & grow their business.

Portal Review:

• Free ads (only HP ads across the portal)
• SME information related sections (Trade Shows, Tenders, Business listing etc..) are captured by IndiaMART & News section captured by NDTV
• In logo – IndiaMART is not highlighted so well
• Separation section for HP
• No new technological development can be seen there. Its just a combination of three brands addressing to one segment.

IndiaMART & NDTV join hands to fulfill their own business motives (IndiaMART – to attract NDTV traffic, while NDTV – to leverage through SME segment and HP – grows business.

I won’t saying that this portal will go a long way, as NDTV launches portals without long term goals for development and brand building and a portal loses its value on long run.