An email popped up in my notification bar late at night while I was busy preparing the case for the next day’s lecture. It was the communication from the Placement Committee that P&G was visiting us for SIPs in the following week. Right from the pre-MBA days, I’d always been fascinated by the articles and internship accounts penned down by MBA students who had interned at biggies such as P&G during their SIP stints. I have always been awed by the multidimensional exposure at such an internship and the rich experience that inculcated one’s passion for marketing!
I was one of the lucky ones whose Resume was initially shortlisted by P&G, and thus began the arduous preparation of going through the entire gamut of Marketing concepts like STP, 4Ps, 6Cs, Case Analysis frameworks, marketing research fundamentals and revising the takeaways from the marketing assignments and live projects I undertook during the first 2 trimesters.
I interacted with the Associate Director of Marketing and the Executive Director of Marketing during my interviews and I was asked questions that tested the sanctity of my marketing concepts and the alignment of my fundamentals with a few real-life examples. Towards the end of the nerve-racking experience, I was elated when the results were declared and I found my name in the e-mail mentioning the list of final shortlisted candidates chosen to intern at P&G Health! I passed the litmus test after two gruelling rounds of interviews!
A trimester and several submissions later, I found myself at the corporate office of P&G Health in Mumbai, where all the interns were greeted by the HR team who facilitated our induction program. They gave a brief presentation on the illustrious history of P&G, the background of the business, the different verticals and brands of P&G and showered us with joining goodies and treated us to a delicious lunch.
Post-lunch, the onboarding team arranged meetings with the different marketing cluster heads with whom each one of us were supposed to work over the next 8 weeks. The senior executives welcomed us and guided us through the stepping stones of our inaugural week and introduced us to our separate projects with a briefing about the Consumer Healthcare industry. Their encouragement and vast experience made us realize that our next 2 months would be full of excitement and a roller coaster ride that ensured a trajectory of exponential learning!
On the second day, I was introduced to my project mentor, the Associate Director of Marketing who was also the Marketing Cluster Head of two brands, namely, Polybion and Neurobion. He laid down the project scope, objective and roadmap that I was to cover during my tenure at P&G. I was assigned to work on the brand launch of a new SKU of Polybion and was excited to have got this opportunity of building a brand launch strategy from scratch.
I spent the first part of my internship understanding the brand ideology, studying the existing literature and drilling down into the various secondary data points and previous research extracts. I drew insights and made notes on the important pointers I would pivot my objective on and the additional aspects I would need to explore by means of my primary research to supplement my project goal of formulating the brand launch plan.
The next part of my internship was spent planning my primary research objectives and soon enough, I was tasked to travel to West Bengal for a field visit in different areas to carry out a research on the brand Polybion. At scorching temperatures of over 40 degrees in West Bengal summers, it became a challenge to accomplish the entire research roadmap. Relentless and armed with a bunch of questionnaires and a bottle of glucose, I set out to accomplish my research objectives, realizing that I was at the mercy of the whims of a hundred individuals who formed my target audience. However, the excitement of doing something that shall strengthen the intertwining of my theoretical and practical knowledge of marketing gave me the impetus to make my learning as robust and flexible as possible!
I came back to Mumbai after a week with the bunch of inked questionnaires, only to realize that the scribbles on them were nearly incorrigible and required a superhuman capability to deduce! I somehow collated the behemoth data successfully and jotted down my research conclusions. Based on these perspectives, I went on to define my brand positioning, targeting, launch-budgeting, revenue forecasting, pricing, competitor analysis and made the necessary strategies for promotion and product placement at the retail level. I strategized on the final brand launch plan which was presented to the Marketing cluster heads and the Executive Director of Marketing in the last week of our internship.
I was overjoyed to have received acclaim for the work done by me and was appreciated for making a crisp plan that would be implemented from the next month until the actual launch of the product in the market.
We came to a close to the wonderful journey of 8 weeks by having an outing with the HR team, Marketing team along with other senior executives. As I look back, I realize that it is not just the project that I worked on, but the inclusive culture and the conflux of eminent leaders at Procter & Gamble who were never shy of guiding and mentoring us is what made the internship stint memorable for me. It helped me widen my bandwidth of strategic analysis, bootstrapped my concepts, emphasized on the practical implementations and reaffirmed my faith as to why P&G is revered as an organization that many MBA students look forward to interning at.
I couldn’t have had asked for a better opportunity for my summers and feel privileged at experiencing an opportunity of a lifetime at Procter & Gamble Health!
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