teachin n all that

sometimes i get an immense feeling that i shall some day teach. i know its not at all an easy task to make people listen to you especially if their hormones are raging and they're too busy noticing the opposite sex.

but yes, this is the first time i'm getting the hang of what a practical work environment looks like. and it seems completely off tangent to what i've been taught in many aspects. there are so many things that one can tell the learning generation to take care of, or to acknowledge so that they stand a better place in the job market.

and apart from that, there are certain notions that i would really like to clear them of. its necessary to make them realise that marketing is not just about big words like branding and advertising and all that. every single aspect in a product or service creation and delivery is a way of marketing your brand.

i remember my marketing classes during my under graduation were always filled with the mundane and long acknowledged examples. for examples related to luxury you immediately had mercedes and bmw names popping out, for cult followings you always had harley davidson and apple ipods as the most favorite examples, for any other normal question posed by the professor any damn FMCG brand would do just swell. that's how my marketing class ended (and we still thought that we did a pretty darn good job and learned a lot in it).

i really wish that i could make the students realise that there are a lot other brands, a lot many other marketing activities that might give a whole lot of learning than the regular mercedes and Lifebuoy. its not about bragging the fact that i know about brands that you've not even heard of; its about telling that there are products and services which are far more fascinating and technical than a regular FMCG brand.

HLL (or Unilever) has been a star recruiter at IIMs. No offence to the placement committee or the people who join the company, but clearly what they do is not marketing. because if you're trying to tell me that you make brands by letting it eat into your own market share of some other brand, that you make brands by making the holes of your toothpaste nozzle bigger, that you make brands by selling buckets free with your detergents, that you make brands by pushing inventory and pushing even more inventory to your stockist to sell, then honestly you're not really building a building. i mean as far as FMCG is concerned, today a time has come that the market has saturated. you cant make a person use more toothpaste than he previously was by more advertising. you cant make a person use more detergent more than what she previously used. the only way to expand market share is through geographical expansion. there might have been innumberable instances of IIM grads citing experiences of being sent to rural villages for the first 2 months after joining HLL or whatever. but bottomline, thats a sad place for getting to know what marketing is.

alright, enought badgering the FMCG giant.

but if i had the chance i would really like my students to explore about how to market cord blood banking... or i would ask them to study how to market a bottle like SIGG (hit google if you dont know.. but SIGG is probably one of the world's strongest water bottles. each bottle is made out of a single piece of alumnium metal. no welding, no riveting, no clamping of any sort. and one 500ml water bottle costs rs.1000)... or probably how to market an industrial good like motors or machine tools and things like that...

i would want to make them realise, that with websites like blogger, deviantart, istockpro, adobe's softwares, youtube, orkut and facebook, one has as much tools under his/her belt as a normal media powerhouse. i want to make them realise that if they really want, they can easily be a one man(or woman) company, if they know the right trades and techniques, that access to information has become easy that it has put everyone on the same platter, on the same level... you have as much information about the world and its happenings as much as the Prime Minister or the President would have. i would like to tell them that one can really prove his/her worth in this world if the person really has talent; that you dont need politics, or contacts to get to the top.

Today there are bloggers, in their late 30s or so, who are equally popular to the writing sphere as the contemporary people like Shobha De or Sashi Tharoor might be. There are people on youtube who've gained more fame by just uploading 20 videos of the songs they sung, than what Abhijeet Sawant could even imagine, and are far ahead than the ones who won/lost at Indian Idol and other such reality shows. today, most people think that the nearest advertising agency is the best possible solution for their media needs. little do they know that just a computer away at guru.com they'll have access to options far than they could even fathom and at rates which could put even the local ad agency to shame.

and even after such proliferation of information, such access to a wealth of knowledge, people simply overlook aspects that are right on their face, but fail to acknowledge it, or take it for granted.

an intruiging example would be the state transport of Gujarat. over the years i've been travelling in buses, and the upsruge of privately running buses have been increasing. but sadly the state transport which has the largest network under its belt is still incurring losses. why? we saw a turn-around in the railway sector, why not here?

or lets take something else. today cricket by itself is getting a make-over. Cricket is truly becoming the cricket it is supposed to become; where money is paid to cricketers to perform and not for their names. a cricketer is now finally being evaluated as a financial instrument; where he's judged on his Net Present Value, or the expected future returns over money put in right now. this means that any investor looking to invest in a cricketer would like to have a marketplace where he can have all the vital stats of all eligible investments (read cricketers). the first thing that struck to me was that this calls for a centralised data warehouse system which collects performance data of all the state run cricket associations. sure enough no investor would like to roam from state to state trying to hunt for a suitable investment. just a website that keeps a record of all the vital stats for all cricketers who play under the state banner or the national banner can be an ideal place for any investor to vsit. but i doubt if anyone thought of that.

there are similar such experiences that i've faced, and i've felt that all these anomalies that need to be expolited cant be done by me alone. and i need to make someone else realise that there are these many things and you can exploit them too. creaing value is a highly time consuming job. but if you can also help me out in making life simpler for everyone (and a little more richer for yourself) there's nothing wrong about it.