My two months stint at big basket was one of the most enthralling and enriching experiences. A leader in online deliveries of fruits and vegetables big basket has had a very strong supply chain network. I could feel this being a resident of Bangalore that they never compromised on their time schedules. Big basket visited our campus for the summer internship process in November. The swiftness in conduction of the entire process and the fact that the result was announced hardly after 5-6 hours of the interview round did give me a glimpse of how fast-paced E-commerce business is. It all started with a group discussion followed by the personal interview rounds. The interview questions mostly revolved around our domain knowledge and how aware we are of the latest trends in the industry. I remember the national head asking a question to us saying “Which out of customer satisfaction or profit is more important to the company”? And most of us replied customer satisfaction to which he briefed us as to how Customer Experience and satisfaction was something they focused a lot on.
A seamless onboarding process was initiated where we were welcomed through calls and emails. We had interactions with the head of marketing and operations who briefed us about how things work. The first two days we were taken to the distribution center to understand how things work at the backend. There was no reporting time or a mandatory number of hours that we had to clock at the office. There was no hierarchical structure we were free to discuss our ideas with anyone. I was assigned a mentor who would help me navigate through my internship days. Our projects were assigned according to the interests we had shown in our interview process. I was given the role of marketing. The first thing I understood while working was identifying the Business need or in Marketing terms, what is the Value you are creating for your consumer through your product. Understanding the target consumer is the next key aspect. During my internship, I did this by interviewing consumers. A lot of focus was on understanding the assortment, categories and a thorough analysis of the competition followed by the recommendation to the company. All the work I did was deeply rooted in research and driven by data. The recommendations were based on the data which was collected by an understanding the past trends, competition and real-time interaction with the customer.
Coming to the preparation part. The knowledge that I gained in the first year of MBA helped me a lot in these two months. So before you kickstart your marketing journey it is essential to have a thorough understanding of basic concepts like 4Ps, STP, Branding, Customer Insights, Value Proposition etc. Once the theory part is done the focus should be on the application part of it keeping in mind the few frameworks like Crafting a GTM (Go-To-Market) strategy, making market entry decisions, Launching a new product, Market sizing / Opportunity Sizing (Guesstimates). As a marketing aspirant, it is imperative to keep reading blogs and books on marketing. This will keep you prepared not only for the interviews but also for the real-time experience while studying the market.
I was under the mentorship of Mr Vishal Aggarwal. He is the National Business to business Head currently at Big Basket. The attention to detail was something that he asked me to focus on from day one. He guided me through the whole plan of how systematically I have to understand the project and move forward with it. My learnings were not restricted only to my mentor but I got a lot of insights from other people in the department as well. The guidance that he has given me through these two months will stay with me throughout my career. So to sum it up this was my internship experience at big basket which was full of knowledge, experience, learnings and memories.
It’s been a month now that the internship is over and not a day goes by when I don’t want to rewind time and relive those 8 weeks.