We have often heard of organizations professing on the go green campaign but today we have a bunch of management students practicing this in order to support this cause of promoting cycling as an eco-friendly means for commuting.
As a part of this initiative, which these young to-be-managers call “Whee’ll Meet”, the management along with the students intend to incorporate management training by having a blend with eco-friendly efforts. Whee’ll Meet is not just an interface, but it also has a social message. The event believes that the corporates have responsibility towards the environment.
The event would start with the flag off by the Director of Christ University of Management at 8 am on 4th Dec, 2011 from the Koramangala campus. They would be accompanied by the chief guest of the event, speaker Mr. Dwarkanand C., Marketing Manager of Hathway, who is also an avid cyclist. The students would be cycling a distance of 70 km and reaching Christ’s Kengeri Campus and participating in the corporate interface.
Cycling is a passion. It is real joy and the most efficient way to move around the busy streets of a big city. The Marketing Club students at Christ University Institute of Management have been known to come up with exciting events in the past and ‘Whee’ll Meet’ the cycling extravaganza, is the latest addition to the list. It is an event where eminent industrialists and entrepreneurs come and share their thoughts and experiences not only with the students but also with their counterparts and colleagues from the corporate world.
The Inaugural session of Whee’ll Meet will be witnessing the presence a charismatic speaker Mr. Dwarkanand C. He will share his thoughts and experiences with the students and other industrialists on networking and socializing and the need for these skills is much required in today’s competitive environment.
The meet will enrich the students and will aim at bringing them on par with the corporate world. Whee’ll Meet is a sustainable initiative which would be held quarterly with many astounding speakers to come and would also explore new horizons in future.
Stand up. Take a deep breath.... annnnd.... exhale.
What did you see?
Was your stomach pulled in or pushed out when you inhaled?
When you’ve got the basics wrong, how can you create a success out of it?
Such was the essence of the astounding talk by Mr. John Kuruvilla, at the corporate Interface of Marketing club on Saturday, 20th Nov 2011. A moment of peace to catch our breath, before we begin looking back on what was a roller coaster ride of John Kuruvilla’s interaction with students.
3.... 2.... 1..... OK. Let’s begin!
Out of the box thinker,Innovator and Turnaround specialist, John Kuruvilla has been associated with big names like Air deccan, Oberoi Group of hotels, J Walter Thomson and Lintas (Lowe). He’s been instrumental in launch of successful brands in the country and was part of the team behind memorable campaigns like Humara Bajaj, Maruti Omni, Toyota Qualis, Air Deccan to name a few. A survier, Mr. Kuruvilla battled Steven Johnson’s syndrome in 2008 and came out winning. He’s the founder and chief adviser to Taggle.com. Taggle is the culmination of 24years of experience of marketing, sales, brand building, customer relations, Revenue management and Pricing.
The three and half hour session with John Kuruvilla was packed with real life, real time lessons for every marketing aspirant. Here are a few:
·India – is the most complex market. It is a marketer’s nightmare. From Nanded to Chennai, Calcutta to Guwahati – what works in one market, will not work in another place. You cannot reach everyone in India through a TOI. And.. India is suddenly gaining the rightful place in the world. There’s serious business here, which throws up challenge for change. With an appetite of a giant, It is resplendent for luxury market... but with a limited budget. How will you make it work?
Monopolies will collapse. In the complex market like India, there are same brands, same products, but consumption patterns are different everywhere. They need to figure out, how to reach SMEs, and small town.
Therefore, sink your teeth in India. It is the place to be in... Forget the big American dream.
A bunch of enthusiasts with a penchant for innovative strategies came up with the big idea of selling Rs.500 tickets in an airline... giving wings to the small-town-India-dream. Result: Air Deccan’s server crashed with number of hits, front page story for every newspaper in country, became the 2nd largest airline in 3years.. and the bunch of enthusiasts were rockstars!!
So “if you succeed in India, you’ll succeed anywhere”
·Innovate or just exist. The difference between success and SUCCESS is in the details. Look beyond.
A challenge from Kawasaki Bikes can lead to making of an advertising campaign focusing on pan Indian appeal, intead of the technical expertise of a falling brand, and result in the most love Indian Commercial of all time – Humara Bajaj!!
·Marketing is NOT a magic wand. It’s hell lot of hard work, costumer insight and making sure all the nuts and bolts are in place. So, numbers speak. Ask questions.
Taggle separated its target buying customers from registered ones to focus on revenue by serious number crunching research along with innovative ideas like shop for Rs.199 to get a chance to buy an iPad at Rs.9990!!
·Reach customers directly. Customers are your research teams. Gain insights from them.
The Oberoi group gave an Indian luxury package with an Indian with the know-how of operating things!!
Air Deccan reached the customers directly, facing boycott by travel agents. And succeded!!
·Distribution is very necessary. A happy customer will get you 5 more. A happy network will get you new customers.
·Survival instinct is a killer. Be as mad as you can. You’ll never know what can sell.
Setting up a pizza parlour in HP petrol pumps and selling Air Deccan tickets through them! In the economy when both pizza parlours and airlines were luxury items. Result – We have all seen it!!
Decide to get Indian Railways to sell Air Deccan tickets! And it did work!!
·Revenue management is the difference between success and failure today. Learn your fixed costs and marginal costs, for incremental profit. Ask if you can measure the impact of it. And don’t take no for an answer.
Surat Diamonds can be sold online to generate new market and revenue!!
·CRM is dead. It’s CEM (Customer Expectation Management) today. Understand customer behaviour and deliver on them. Relationships are win-win only when expectations are met or exceeded.
Air Deccan customers never complained of Bad Coffee, because they were told Air Deccan does not provide any!!
The realistic approach to customer expectations is a winner.
It is not always that a personality comes in amongst us whose entire life can be seen back as a management course. We at CUIM Marketing club are deeply thankful TO John Kuruvilla for sharing his time with us, giving us precious insights. The ability to mesmerize 120 people for 3and half hours on a Saturday afternoon, and leave them wanting for more – is the mark of a real hero. His informal, casual and personal approach won us all. We’ll look forward to having him with us again, for a lager audience. Till then Marketing Club, CUIM says – Thank you, John.
Top 5 learnings from John Kuruvilla:
·Work backwards. Look at where you want to be in xx years, and gain the knowledge of your path accordingly. DO a SWOT on YOURSELF.
·When you keep hitting against a wall, pull out. Walk around it, you will find a solution. Think Simple.
·Do not jump jobs in less than two years. You’ll never learn the basics of the trade. Take time.
·Marketing is not a magic wand – it’s a lot of hard work and knowing the pulse. So – Insight, Innovate, Implement. Keep a tab of those
John Kuruvilla being thanked from marketing club
·Dream big for your company first, then for yourself. It’ll grow -> your ideas work - > you’ll grow.
Corporate Interface- A session on Brand Personality
Ms. Harmeet Kaur Brand Manager, Britannia Nutri Choice.
The corporate interface session has been consistently witnessing some of the best brands and eminent personalities from different sectors in the field of marketing for the past few weeks.
The corporate interface session on 12/11/2011 was no exception to the tradition of the marketing club. A young, dynamic and hardcore professional, Ms. Harmeet Kaur, Brand Manager, Britannia Nutri Choice handled the session providing great thoughts on branding, brand building, advertising, distribution and about various marketing strategies adopted. Marketing major from Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development in the year 2008, she has been associated with some of the ‘big names’ in the corporate world such as MADURA GARMENTS, YUM! BRANDS and at present with BRITANNIA INDUSTRIES. Her profound knowledge in the area of her interest, and the personality that she is, is what we believe the force that has helped her climb up the ladder of success.
The students and the faculty members were equally competing for a chance to ask questions, which helped all of us to get a better insight on branding. And it made the session interactive from the very beginning to the end. Some of the concepts quoted by her through industry examples on image makeover, graduation to higher target customers, importance of fonts in branding etc were new thoughts and gelled into the minds of the audience.
Brand Identity was the core subject of the session. She was also very keen in explaining various perspectives of brand identity (as a product, organization, person, and symbol), the various brand identity traps and brand identity planning model. Her romance with the FMCG sector was evident with her responses to questions that were popped out from all angles. She also spent time in sharing experiences as a Brand Manager, how much one has to travel and know places and the tradition to perform well in a country like India, where there are differences in tastes and perception from region to region. She also shared some insights with us such as:
“Be ready to unlearn everything you learn in a B-school, because the people out there, the hardcore retailers means business, and they will punch your ego”
“Getting a job is very easy, after a while maintaining the passion for it is the real task”
MARKETING CLUB salutes Ms.HARMEET KAUR for taking out time for us and wishes her the VERY BEST
Top 3 learnings:
·What values of a brand are to be picked up and what left behind, ultimately decides the brand re-invention, image and sales.
·Tracking competition, every fortnight, month, and year. Real, concrete data. That’s what matters for selling. At the end it’s pure business.
·In the end, it’s just a job. Make time for life and hobbies. That’s what saves and sustains you in the toughest part of job life – the first 5 years.
Mr. Sumanth is the co-founder of “DrumAroo.com” – a location based social discovery platform that is working to connect online world with the offline world. He is a MBA from Kellogg school of management, Northwestern University. He has previously worked at Apple Inc., Booz & co, and National Instruments.
Small token of appreciation from Christ University
He started the session with focus on entrepreneurship and talked to students about the motivation a person gets by working for himself and taking up challenges to succeed in life. He also mentioned about his own interest towards entrepreneurship since his engineering days and experiences outside campus after passing MBA.
The purpose of the interface was to discuss and make students aware about connecting people through social media like Facebook from context of location based service like” DrumAroo.com”.
The session included:
1.What is DrumAroo.com and what it does?
2.How can DrumAroo.com enhance shopping experience?
3.How can local business benefit from DrumAroo.com?
4.How different is DrumAroo.com from other similar social platform?
During the session he also coined a discussion on CRM with students and provided valuable insights on businesses rolling out loyalty programs to their customers and peer local businesses.
The session concluded with his take on market segmentation and customer retention and responding to questions by students pertaining to the session
Mr.Ankur Sharma, is a professional from Digital Media industry. He had his major in International business form IIM, Calcutta, B.Tech from National institute of technology, PGD in advanced computing from C-DAC.
He says that besides gaining the subject knowledge from your education it is important for a person to improve his attitude in looking at the world.
Regarding his work experience he initially worked as a software developer for Mphasis and then he moved to Travelocity. He worked there for 5+ years as a software developer and was into partner marketing, product marketing. He is now working for ESPN.
The one hour interactive session was filled with insights about Digital Media and the contribution of digital natives to digital markeT
DEFINING DIGITAL MEDIA:-
The creative convergence of digital arts, science, technology and business for human expression, communication, social interaction and education. Mr.Sharma enriched the audience with live examples of varied Digital Media contents and how it has its impact on the society.
- Digital Media alliance
It is nothing but the conversation that happens over the internet. Anyone who has a facebook account could be a stakeholder in Digital Media. Three pillars of Digital Media are content, social, relevance. Content takes various forms such as text, image, audio, video, podcasts, blogs, profiles, Google maps. Producers of Digital Media are SMEs and users.
Digital immigrants are those who are not born with internet. Digital natives are those who create innovative contents on Digital Media. They form the future of Digital Media. They are the editors and curators. They just publish the content and let it grow. Digital natives create the user generated contents such as blogs, wikis, reviews, profiles, and photo/audio/video. More and more relevant content in Digital Media are created by digital natives. For example in istockphoto user generated contents outweigh the subject expert’s contents. Many people are now coming forward to create contents.
SOCIAL ECOSYSTEM
Where? Social networks
What? Social content, Social search, Social shopping
How? Social gaming
Why? Social impact
Social behaviour of every user is different. Social currency is created for a brand. Brand equity should get built out of social currency.
Example for social impact is that during Anna Hazare’s fast, a 16km human chain was formed from white field to outer ring road. This event was coordinated via facebook.
Digital Media enables customised content aggregation.
Ex: iGoogle – create your own google page
All top – create own news website
To sum it all up – having right Digital Media communication could be achieved by having the right sender, right receiver, right content and the right channel.
To be ethical may sound expensive but in fact nothing can stop us from being so. Mr. Saxena questioned the moments when we were not ethical. He told the simple fact that when thousands are looking for a good job, an employer finds it hard to get an employee with the right gene. He sarcastically quoted that an employee who comes to us for money would leave us for money and this is what we call as a rat race in daily lives.
Mr. Saxena spoke about the value each individual should posses when we go to the real world. He quoted that “Be in a system to change the system” and stressed on the fact that escapism is not a right solution for problems but remaining there and fighting against the odds and hence finding the solution for our problem must be the success mantra of an individual.
We should realize that our habitual way of seeing and acting won’t get us anywhere we need to redirect our attention to the edges of perception. And after the enlightening talk he left the crowd with a smile asking us to sit back and think and also alarmed us that it’s high time we take a ‘U’ turn in our lives, thoughts and perceptive.
Inquisitive Christites quiz Mr.Saxena
Mr. Saxena,CEO at Professional Expertise Group addressing the gathering
He also mentioned about how job role will make you grow than money. He stressed on point that when corporate very well know that the person joining for money will leave them for money.
It all started with a title of “35 tools for digital marketing”, kept some students like me really wondering is there really that much of it happening around. Mr. Suresh Babu of Web Marketing Academy then took us over the wave ride of this upcoming horizon, the era of digital marketing, especially the social media marketing. OME or the Online Marketing Enthusiasts is a regular monthly meet up of digital marketing enthusiasts at CUIM, to discuss over the latest happening over Digital marketing.
The meet started up with brief introductions from all the participants and Mr. Suresh Babu started explaining the free online tools that are available, especially from google. Google Alerts, Back Type, Disqus. Google trends and Google insights two wonderful tools for comparing key word based trends and obtain analytic information. To our amazement, digital marketing analytics gives us customer demographics based on user searches and preferences online. Further twitter Tools like Twellow, Local tweeps and Journalist tools like We Follow, much ruck were discussed.
Quite a new experience for marketing students who saw marketing in an all new dimension online, where the trend is changing from traditional marketing to digital marketing and the focus of the marketers being harnessing the power of social media and conversations among people happening online. Companies are more focussed on search engine optimization to get greater visibility in the user searches. Online marketing tools are definitely the trend setters of the Facebook era.
Seattle University students with CUIM MBA students
Students of visiting university interact with CUIM faculty
September 12th 2011, CUIM hosted MBA students of Seatlle university
who were on a visit to Bangalore. The purpose of the interface was to
discuss broadly some of the issues and challenges what the Indian
economy and the businesses face. CUIM was represented by 20 students
from the Marketing stream and 20 students from Seattle University
Deep Discussion on things that matters
MBA program.
The topics that were discussed include :
- What are the challenges India has to face to uphold its leading
position as a global outsourcing destination
- How will India manage the Digital Divide between the urban and
rural population
- Which countries will pose greatest competition to the Indian BPO
industry? Why?
- The status of e-Governance in India and its future
student interaction
The program was received well by our marketing students as the
learning and networking was immense.
Mr Ankur Dasgupta,the Director and Head of Marketing for Keane India Ltd addressed the students of the marketing club of Christ University Institute of Management on this Friday.His power packed session evolved around the importance of "Social Media Marketing" which is already here and is to stay.An industry growing at a CAGR of 34% is much more than just a platform to connect with old friends and colleagues,it is a platform to set up a networking web with individuals working across industries and continents.
The session expressed the need of having a profile on Linkedin,Facebook,Twitter etc. Mr Dasgupta also mentioned the need is not always for the individuals but has proved to be beneficial for companies as well, in increasing brand visibility,customer interaction and controlling brand.He cited the example of 'Beazely House',an American bed and breakfast inn which has successfully used social networking for attracting new customers and build customer loyalty.
An insight about the volumes of revenue generated through online advertising(especially on social networking sites)was too important to be missed.According to him,advertisers have recognized the phenomenon of the world moving towards digitization and have invested accordingly.The figures were astonishing to each member present and aroused an ambition amongst young students to be a part of the online advertisement industry on completion of their course.
Mr.Dasgupta answering students queries
Mr.Dasgupta sharing his thoughts with students
A full house all ears for what Mr.Dasgupta had to say
The interaction concluded with his opinion regarding improvement required regarding the presence of Christ University Institute of Management on the digital socialised media platform.Development of specific management website(not subsite),faculty blogs,alumni details,faculty and students tweets after every class amongst the key pointers to start off.
Words:Dhaval Kamdar Clicks:Piyush Keshari Final Touch:Sumantra Chowdhury
·Innomantra Consulting - Transforming Imagination - Deepu Chandra (Graduated from IIM, Bangalore), Director - IP Management, Innovation Management, and Strategic Business Incubation
·Projects in : LM In Power, L&T, Titan, Siemens, Nokia, Honeywell (Application of innovative tools and practices in business); now want to come with a plan of a B-school in order to channelize best brains
·Where should a company innovate? A model comprising the internal environment of a company (Leaders and Managers; culture, system), and (Business model, product and process- functional components in innovation)
·Invert : as a tool:
oInvert action – 1. Can a function be inverted for the same result? 2. Can a function be interchanged (heat, cool, fix or more) 3.Can something top-bottom be made bottom top?
oAssumption: Can a basic assumption about the product be inverted?
oGoal: Invert your basic goal & brainstorm of ideas to achieve the positive result.
Word of Advice
·Classroom teaching is important but do not forget to open your minds, the factors which we ignore while on the campus. Know your batch, it is important to know every batch mate.
Date: 22/07/2011
Speaker: Deepu Chandra, Entrepreneur
Topic: Innovation - Tools & Methods
Discussion: 1. Discussion on innovation 2. Tools and products of innovation 3. Invert Action as a tool
We have often heard of organizations professing on the go green campaign but today we have a bunch of management students practicing this in order to support this cause of promoting cycling as an eco-friendly means for commuting. 
