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"