Introspection!

This is a deviation from current series of posts. 

My college was almost off for last three days. There were no classes and companies on campus. I was free and alone because my best friends went to a tour and I could not make because of some strange reasons. I was upset since I was terribly missing friends, but fortunately I got the chance to meet my engineering days in Gurgaon. We had a great time but these three days gave some time to think about me and myself. I claim to be a good judge of a person but can I judge the face which I see everyday in front of the mirror. I tried to remember various incident in my life and especially some recent events which helped me to understand me better. Here are some of the findings..

First thing I realize about myself is that I am very weird person. The problem is that there is no coordination between the feelings of my heart and my facial expression. My face do not convey the right things. But that does not mean my face always works in reverse gear. Now this is weirdness. It is something like tears in Hindi movies - dhukh ho ya khushi dono main aansu behte hain. I am still trying out to solve this issue.

I am an emotional person and also egoistic. One day my senior made some negative comments about my communication skills. I abused him and never spoken to him. One line can make me feel bad. It is not anger but ego. How could a person say to me like that. My father did for once and I stopped talking to him for 3-4 days. Finally he had to broke the ice.

I do not believe in God but I respect my religion and values of my family. My father told me not to go a temple unless you are fresh and I follow religiously. 

I believe in love and for me it is the most sacred thing in this world. For me God is love. I love my parents and therefore they are GOD for me. I love my sister and brother and they are that part of my heart where God used to live. There is only one girl which I love the most apart from family. She is in my heart for the last 5 years. I know I am coward because I could not tell her that I love her but the fact remains same that I was afraid to loose her. I cannot forget her. I never looked to any other girl in this world with same feelings. I never get attracted (except for some stars especially Deepika) towards any other girl because my heart never gave me the permission to do so. I still love her a lot.

I usually do not have long list of friends. I make few friends but very good friends. I never call them best friends because they are always greater than best friends almost like my brothers and sisters. It made me proud to have such friends. They are my Raazdaar and begaraz mera yaar.

I always tried to help my friends. I did it recently for my best friends. But still I have apprehensions. I don't know whether I did the right thing or not. Sometimes I feel guilty that I have no right to interfere in their friendship. I don't know. 

Whenever I met these two people I have two kinds of feelings. First - ooh! I did a good job. Both are smiling again. 

Second - O0h! What I did? I am such a fool? Am I worsening the situation? They might be thinking negative about me. 

I know you people don't know the story behind it and I cannot disclose it but still you can understand the human nature residing in me - a confuse person.

I am writing all these things on my blog because there are so many things buried in my heart that it started ruining me. I need someone to whom I can share all these things and the best friend I could find is my blog. 

10 Principle of Marketing: Third is very emotional!

I joined this college one and half year ago with only one aim in my mind to get a good placement. This is what my parents expected out of me and this the dream of many eyes of CAT aspirants. You can call it following herd but this is what I want to do in my life. It is just not proving my capabilities to others but also to me. My dreams were not just broken but were trashed by the bulldozer called 'RECESSION' and what is effecting more is the act of atrocity by our beloved ones. Sometimes I think to kill myself for the grave mistake of joining this institute but that would be coward and I know I am a fighter who can flow upstream- against the flow of water. Therefore, I started this blog so that I can vomit all detestation inside me and make myself pure.

So phir dukaan kholte hain,

6th January 2009

Yesterday was a history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift and therefore it is called present. I started the day with fresh mind and hoped that it would bring more happiness than ever. Again dressed up in my newly tailored made suit from Raymond's. It was the best I could have. A blue-black colour with self stripes - luxury product from Raymond's. I also purchased an expensive matching tie. A dark blue colour with chromatic cyan colour diagonal stripes matching with my blazer and shirt. I was looking attractive - I know that!! - in the suit with tie and black shining shoes. 

The day was not going to be give enough opportunity because there were only four companies on the campus. I need just one out of it - that is enough for me but a big question mark hung on my head - "Am I going to get shortlisted?" As I entered the campus auditorium, I heard the announcement about the students placed the day before. All the students were required to sign at placement office to accept the offer. Suddenly, my eyes were filled with water. I thought my name would be there on some day.  I sat with my friends and was chatting doing lot of bhasad. My friends and our friendship is the only asset I have in this college. I could stay away from my parents, brothers and sister because my friends were standing by me. They are my inspiration. I love them a lot and I don't know what will happen when we leave the college.  Friendship is the first relationship we build on our own, every other relation is inbuilt from mother, father to uncle, aunt. We never choose mother or father but we always choose friends - one of the biggest decision we make in our life and I know I never made a mistake in these decisions.

I was shortlisted only for one company and for the devil sake they were not declaring the results on that day. They are not going to come back - I thought. The day ended with no results for me - back to square one. I came back to my room and watched a movie. My sister called me in the evening. She had joined SBI a day before only. She was very happy and I did not want to upset her mood with my tragedies. I talked some light things and then finally I decided to go for sleep. 

My nights are longer than my days not because it is winter season but I could not sleep well. "Karbat badalte badalte raat guzarti hai." I know my weaknesses but I don't know how to remove it. I see myself as helpless. 

So where is the dukaan ...... I mean where is marketing funda? Indians are emotional fools, just like me. They are not driven by rationals but they are influenced by emotional appeals. The fact state that most of the advertisements in India are going for emotional appeal. There are two reasons for that - 1. Indian are considered as people with high EQ and 2. advertisement with emotional appeal solves the problem of diversity in India. One thing which every person from nook and corner of India understands is humour, fear, love, relationships etc. 

Earlier, very few ads  like Dhaara (jalebi and kid), concentrated on emotional aspects. Dhaara ad, Cadbury Dairy Milk(kya swaad hai zindagi ka) ad, Airtel (express yourself - border) are big hits because they broken the boundaries of language and religion.

So the third principle is "Sell your product with emotional touch".

10 principles of Marketing: Core lie in Second

Welcome back!!

I got lot of criticism for the first part. Keeping all the criticism in my mind, I remember a dialogue from the film Guru where Abhishek Bachhan say, "Jab log burai karne lage to samjho tarraqi kar rhe ho" (if people starts criticising you that means you are progressing). Never the less, I am back with my second principle of marketing.

Chalo phir dukaan kholte hain!

5th January 2009

I wake up early in the morning around 7 a.m. For me it is very early because I used to sleep around 4 a.m. in the night (or almost dawn) and used to get up around 10a.m. It is very common routine of any MBA graduate - late to bed and late to rise makes a man MBA-wise (its a PJ). Since I have to wake up early in the morning therefore I slept one hour early. 

I was filled with full of enthusiasm and confidence. I was already shortlisted for one company as if now. I have to fill the form of the company in the night only and submit it before 8 a.m. I worked very hard for last one and half months. I read newspaper daily - the most boring and time consuming task. I never like reading. Reading was used to be my sleeping pills but this time it has to be winning pills. I brushed important subjects and specifically marketing subjects. I already talked about Mr. Kotler in my earlier post, thus no need to give another brownie points to Mr. Kotler. I visited some news sites regularly - (apart from my favourite one - buzz18.com, afaqs.com, ibnlive.com and some erotic site). 

One of the important part of my preparation was of HR questions like "Tell me about yourself". I think it is the most useless and meaningless question in an interview. Why the hell any company is interested in my personality and why they want to find out logical reasoning behind any job performed in my whole career - whether it is academic or personal? Why MBA after engineering? Why not M-Tech? Why Marketing? Why not join your father business? Why you want to join the company?

I am sitting in your company that suffice my point of joining your company. I am not spy of your competitor - be sure. Look for knowledge and capability and not for personality fit. Why the hell any company care about my personal life. Raat ko ghar aane ke baad kya karta hoon tumhen kya karna. I know most of the readers might disagree with my stand but does it not make sense - think for a while.

Lets not deviate from our core issues. I prepared all such stupid questions. The day started on good note with some more shortlistings. But slowly peril was starting to enter my life. Out of 9 companies on the campus I was shortlisted only in 4 and the worst part was that I could not clear any GD. I thrust my life of MBA in building my cv with lot of extra-curricular and I could not excelled in GPA. It still hurting me a lot. 

Never the less life goes on. But there were many things which caused me to regret for going for mba. Recession has already hit the job market very badly and icing on cake was done by our authorities. Inefficiency and mismanagement was the call for the day. We are all humans and therefore we entitled to make mistakes but there is something called scruples. If you care just for friends and beloved then no point in doing social work where you have to take care the whole society into consideration.

Though I miserably failed in GD rounds but it gave me another perspective of marketing. GD is like a marketplace or sabji bazaar where each aloo is screaming on top of its voice. Mujhe le lo, Mujhe le lo - I am the best! - This is what I can make out of discussion. Now if you ever been to sabji bazaar to buy potatoes, you would consider two things before purchasing any potato - first, potato should not be rotten and second, it should be suit my budget.  First condition is lower limit whereas the second condition is upper limit. Out of both conditions, first is very important because any buyer does not want to make Type II error. He can reject a good potato but he never want to buy a rotten potato. Second condition is more like constraint for a buyer than a condition. The whole situation describe above is exactly similar to GD process where an HR looks for good potatoes but keeping the upper limit in his mind and for him the upper limit is just not the compensation but also the cost of training and above all the cost incurred by the company if he leaves the job. So an HR is not looking for the best people, he is looking for the right people. 

We can conclude from the above discussion that to get sold, you need to be the right person instead of the best person. How can you be the right person? This is very subjective question and definition will differ with each company. But certainly we can have some kind of generic approach. There can be two ways to make you a right person.

First is be what you are. Some company will purchase you as they find you fit with their organization. The problem with this way is you have to wait for your company and sometime your cv would not get shortlisted in the initial phase only forget about GD. Another problem is that you may not get the best company and you only get the right company. The biggest advantage is that you don't have to work hard because you have to just yourself!!

Second way is to mould yourself according to a particular company. It requires lot of diligence. You have to search for each company's in and out details, latest happening in the company, work culture and especially organization structure. This method is quite powerful but sometime you will  get caught in the interview. 

I always try to follow first way and there still I am looking for my right company. This is actually a product concept in marketing. A concept in which you have a product of best quality but that cannot satisfy the need of any customer. Thus it is better to go for second concept which is Marketing Concept where you become customer centric. First you identify the need of customer and then develop a product to fulfil that need. It is important to sell the product but how can a person buy it if the product does not satisfy his needs?

So the second principle state that "Sell Customer needs rather than a product"

10 Principles of Marketing - First and the most important!!

When clock struck 12 on 31st December 2008 night, it brought lot of hopes and aspirations. We all celebrated the movement of new year into our lives with our friends.  We hugged each other wishing everybody to get placed soon because we had only one thing in our mind and that was "Placement". We were having our placements from 5Th January and I never thought that it was going to be the toughest time of my life. Being a part of one of the best institute of the country and in a stream which is least effected by recession. I thought it would be quite easy for me to get a good placement, but I was wrong. It also gave me inspiration to write a blog on my current situation instead of describing what I did 10-15 yrs ago. I am sharing some of my experiences - good or bad - with all of you and each experience highlights one of the principle of marketing.

So dukaan kholte hai - 

1st January 2009

This is the most crucial year of my life. I am going to be out in this cruel but interesting real world. I woke up around 12 in the noon after long bhasad in the night with friends. It was more or less a normal day where I started noting down the important points from the 'Bible of Marketing - Mr. Phillip Kotler - 12th edition' - book which all marketers must be well worse with it. I already read this book three times before and it was Fourth time I was reading and this time I was also writing points on my lappy. I though it would create a competitive advantage for me in GD and especially in interview.  Vaise, I never understood the meaning of competitive advantage till now. Am I competing with anybody or I am vying with myself? And if I am vying with myself then where is the advantage. How can a person have an advantage over himself/herself? ---- a mind wobbling  questions?? like what comes first egg or hen?? or is the glass is half full or half empty??

The day also marked the first open house of our beloved placement committee of the year. PlaceCom a acronym for our placement committee is the most prestigious and hard-working student body in our college. We take their words as "pather ki lakeer" and we treat PlaceCom people as our "Mai-Baap".  They have their own office with everyone on the campus to assist them. We always support them. We stood by them because we know they are the best people on the campus and they are devoting their precious time for our placements. It is a selfless social work. We all trusted them from our hearts. But things are not always remain same. Daylight turns into darkness and spring turns into hot and itching summers.  

The slotting details of the companies was discussed ........ sorry .......... was announced in the open house. I was very confused. Should I get excited or should cry or should blame my fate. Though the number of companies were 50+ but I was worried about the certainty of the companies turning on the given day. It was a mixed feeling. I thought it was best to get placed on day 1 only because the chances of getting good companies with good profiles and packages would be narrowed as the placement week reaches its end.

I slept with lot of hopes in the heart and pray to God to provide me the best opportunities.

It is the hope and aspiration which one sells and other buys. Placecom sold us the hope and aspiration of getting placed and we bought it. It is the hope that creates your world and it is the aspiration that makes your world. It is the hope you communicate to others and it is the aspiration that receives from others. This stands true for every product and service and therefore every marketing activities. 

This is the first principle of marketing - "Sell Aspiration in the package of Hope"