Extract from Chapter 1
Management trainee – Joining the company
(The MT has just joined work, and started his sales training)
‘How did I get into this mess?’ Mr. Ramesh Gopalkrishna, BE, MBA asked himself.
It was nearly noon, the temperature in the early forties, and he was standing in the middle of a dusty street with a heavy ‘Salesman’ bag cutting into his shoulders. He had already been on the streets for three hours, and his shirt was soaked with sweat. But the beat was only half over, and he was nowhere near his daily sales target. As he stood there, a truck zoomed past him, and he had to jump for his life.
Damn! He had stepped into a gooey mass of cow dung.
This was not the life he had expected as an MBA, he thought, as he tried to scrape his shoe clean on a stone. Why was he in a dusty street in a one-horse town, sweating like a pig, and getting insulted by small time shopkeepers? He sighed, wiped his streaming face with a soaked hanky and continued on his beat.
Oh Lord, how did I get into this mess?
When Ramesh was completing his graduation in engineering, he glumly observed that the horror of education was not behind him after all, and he would have to slog all over again to enter an MBA school.
He slogged, cleared the entrance examinations to an MBA school, and observed with more horror that he would have to slog even more for two more years. And he did. ‘But look on the bright side…’ he said to himself, as he was working on an ‘Operations Research’ presentation in the early hours of a morning. ‘At least I will not have to wear a dirty overall and move around in a smelly grease stained factory like my batch-mates who remained in engineering careers. I will be wearing a nice tie and sitting in perfect comfort in an air conditioned office once I become an MBA.’
Yeah, right.
Then finally came along the ‘Placement week’, when all the companies came to campus and selected students to join them. It was the raison d’etre for the two years of MBA. Mr. Ramesh Gopalkrishna, BE, MBA managed to get a coveted job in a leading FMCG organisation.
‘Eff Em Jee See? What’s that?’
‘Oh come on dad! Not GC…CG. FMCG! Fast-moving consumer goods.’
‘What do they do?’
‘What do they do? They make fast moving consumer goods…soaps, toiletries, detergents, toothpaste…stuff like that’
‘Oh! Grocery walas. I paid for eighteen years of your education so that you can sell stuff to Grocery waalas! God almighty!’
‘Its OK yaar.’ His friend consoled him, as they were having tea at a dirty roadside stall. ‘Just tell your father how much money you will be making. That will make him feel better.’
‘Yeah, that’s true. Some money at last. Soon I won’t be forced to have cheap tea at roadside stalls.’
‘Aaah!!’
Ramesh took a sip of his hot chai from the dirty roadside vendor and sighed with relief. Finally the day was over.
He had reported to work at the head office of the company, and had received an effusive welcome from the Human Resources department. The HR department organized a few days of induction training at the company training centre, where the management trainee batch of that year were introduced to the company and its various departments.
After the induction, it was time for their training stint in the Sales department. Ramesh had to start work as a frontline salesman in an upcountry area, which meant that he would be hitting the streets and selling directly to the shopkeepers in small towns and villages.
‘At last, the day is over.’ He thought as he went to a phone booth and called up the distributor to report the sales he had booked in the day.
‘Yes, OK, I will deliver it tomorrow. By the way saar, message for you from the boss.. Please attend at the regional office tomorrow for Sales review.’
Oh no! A review again!
Sure enough, the review went well into the night, with all the sales people being roundly cursed by a succession of bosses. The abuse started with poor sales performance, and then continued to poor reporting, late expense reports, poor appearance, poor merchandising and everything under the sun. They ended up sitting in the office till the crack of dawn filling up all kinds of forms and reports, and the last thing they heard as they filed out was their supervisor bellowing at them ‘And I want you to be in the market at nine o clock sharp, you understand?’
How did I get into this mess?
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Extract from Chapter 6
Media – an overview
(A senior is explaining the basics of media to the MT)
Now, let us discuss media from a marketing viewpoint.
For us media is the fourth level of objectives in our communication plan
1) Business objective: The first thing you need to figure out is your business objective - What is the business goal you want to achieve in the year. This could be Top line- increase overall sales, Bottom line- increase profits; or Strategic – where you may want to block competition or occupy a market niche.
What is your goal?
2) Marketing objective: In order to achieve the business objective, you would split it into smaller ‘marketing’ objectives. E.g.: What do we want to do? Do we want to launch a new brand? Do we want to launch a new campaign for an existing brand? Do we want to launch a short term specific promotion to increase sales...E.g. – giving a price off or an item free with our product to increase sales in a two month period?
What is it that you want to do to achieve that goal?
3) Advertising objective: Having decided what we want to achieve in marketing terms, we then decide our advertising objectives. We could decide to tell consumers about our new packaging. Or we could decide to talk about how we are better than the competition on some specific point. Or maybe just give the same message, but with a new ad.
What is it that you want to say?
4) Media objective: Then, having decided on our message, and in which way to say it, we have to decide to whom are we going to talk, where will we find that person, how much are we going to talk, and how many times will we say the same thing to him to ensure that he gets the point.
How will you get the message across?
Let me put it in another way.
Think of yourself as a boy who is looking out for a girl friend.
Business objective: Have girl friend.
You are single and you want a girl-friend, so you hang around your college campus, and see all the girls around, until you find one whom you like. So you have done a market study, and found a likely target segment.
Then you ask around in the college to get some information about her, maybe you will talk to her friends and find out what kind of qualities she likes in a boy.
You have just done Marketing research.
Marketing objective: To attract the girl you like.
Now you think of what special qualities you have, or can acquire, or can pretend to have. If she likes leadership qualities, you can join some student association, or if she likes stylish and macho boys, you can think of buying a motorbike or start going to the gym. You are trying to get a Unique selling proposition. When you have put together some selling points, you will figure out how to show these points to her.
Advertising objective: To show off your best points to impress her.
You want to tell her how unique you are, and different and better than the other boys.You may decide to race your bike in her presence, or flex your muscles when she passes by, etc.
Media objective: To talk to her and convince her to accept you as her boyfriend.
But the moot point is, you can get to talk to her only if you know what kind of places she goes to, where she hangs out, whom does she talk to, etc.
So you go where she goes, and you communicate with her, and tell her about yourself.
Then you have to talk to her, tell her about yourself. Maybe the first time she will not be impressed. But if she hears about you from her friends, sees you around the place, talks to you a few times, only then will she start to think seriously about you.
So in media terms you could say that
Target audience: Who is the girl you want to impress?
Geography: Where you can meet her?
Scheduling: When is the best time to talk to her?
Creative: What will you say to her?
Frequency: How many times does she have to see you, in order to be impressed?
This is called a media strategy. Got it?’
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Extract from chapter 10
Role of marketing in business
(The big boss is explaining that there is more to marketing than the MT thought)
‘So tell me Ramesh, do you think that you have a fair grasp of Marketing now?’
Ramesh paused. This sounded too much like a trick question.
‘Well…not a grasp… but I think I have been through all the basics..’
‘Nonsense! It just shows that you have learnt nothing at all!’
Ramesh winced. It was a trick question after all.
‘What did Shailesh tell you on the first day? About the role of Marketing?’
‘Er…he said…he said’ Ramesh flipped through his notes
‘Shailesh said that
1. Marketing owns both – turnover and profitability.
2. Marketing has a holistic responsibility across the organization
3. Marketing has the responsibility to talk to and try to understand consumers’ wants and desires and meet them.
4. Marketing has a long-term focus.’
‘Quite right. And where does all that you have learnt over the past few days come in, in that list?’
Ramesh thought about it for a few moments. Then he understood what Sunil was trying to say.
‘All of it comes in the third point Sunil.’
‘That’s right. You have worked hard on understanding the consumer aspect of marketing. How we try to understand the consumer, figure out what he wants and how to talk to him. But you have yet to be exposed to the business aspect of Marketing.’
Sunil picked up a white board marker and walked to the whiteboard.
‘Tell me – why does this company exist?’
‘To make money.’
‘Right. How does it make money?’
Ramesh thought for a second. ‘By producing and selling goods at a profit.’
‘Okay.’ Sunil wrote ‘Producing’ towards the left and ‘Selling’ towards the right of the board.
‘But how does the company produce. No-don’t say, in the factory…Let’s put it this way-what does a factory produce from?’
‘Raw material.’
‘Right. So you need a department to buy raw material-that is Purchase.’ He wrote ‘Purchase’ to the left of ‘Production’.
Ramesh began to get what Sunil was saying. ‘OK, I get it- You need to dispatch goods from the factory to the depots as well.’
‘Very good.’ Sunil wrote ‘Dispatch’ between ‘Production’ and ‘Sales’. ‘Now, you mentioned something about ‘Profit’, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do we know whether we are making a profit?’
Ramesh again thought for a few seconds. ‘We calculate the cost of raw material, and the cost of running the factory and producing goods, and the cost of dispatching it, and the interest, salary and cost of running the business and deduct it from the net realization. What remains is the profit.’
‘That sounds like a lot of calculations. Who does all this calculation?’
‘The finance department.’
‘OK.’ Sunil wrote ‘Finance’ below the other words. ‘And where does Marketing come in all this?’
‘Er…somewhere near Sales?’
‘Why? Does it start after goods are dispatched?’
‘No.’
‘After production? After purchase?’
Ramesh thought about that. ‘No.’
‘Correct.’ Sunil wrote ‘Marketing’ on top of what he had written. Now it looked like this
‘Let us consider other departments to be part of this structure. ‘R&D’ to be part of ‘Production’ and ‘Legal’ to be part of ‘Finance’.
So you can see that Marketing has to interact with and influence deliverables of all parts of the organization. You are the Chief Executive Officer of the brand – you have the end-to-end responsibility of seeing that your brand is produced, distributed to all markets, sold well everywhere, and at a good profit.
You have to work with sales, because they are the ones who will help you fulfill your targets. To ensure that there are sufficient stocks you have to prod the logistics department to send, production to produce and purchase to buy. If you want any legal clearances, you have to work with legal. To get your new product development work on track, you have to follow up with R&D. There is always a lot of packaging rework, so you have to interact with packaging development and quality assurance.
And how will you do that? You have no authority over any of them - None of them reports to you!
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