A memorable classroom experience at IIM Trichy
It was fest time: Dhruva 2.0 – the management-cum-cultural fest of IIM Trichy. As part of the Guest Speaker Series, MAC – our Marketing Club had organized a lecture by the erstwhile Business Head of a major Indian conglomerate. Keen on gaining some much-needed insight on Digital Marketing straight from the horse’s mouth, I reached CR-001 just in time to claim one of the better seats.
Once the session got underway, we were systematically introduced to various aspects of marketing on web-based platforms & social media advertising that come into play in the world beyond course material, where the real action takes place. As we arrived at the subject of social intelligence in marketing, we were acquainted with how businesses are able to extract actionable information from users’ interactions on the highly pervasive social
networks of today.
In the coming days, we ourselves would be entrusted with the responsibilities of making the most of these tools & techniques and hopefully, extending their utility quotient even further. For an empirical demonstration of one of the concepts just explained, the speaker invited us to take part in a simple in-class exercise. He listed down ten celebrity names spanning different fields, nationalities and popularity levels. Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Dalai Lama, Rahul Gandhi, Virat Kohli, Lata Mangeshkar and Sunny Leone are some of the names that featured in this list. Subsequently, he picked two five-member groups of volunteers, each member to assign a score between 0 and 10, 0 representing least liked and 10 the favourite, to the names written on the board.
Once everyone was done giving his/her preferred scores, the class settled and the speaker went about delving deeper into the results of the exercise. Virat Kohli and Bill Gates emerged the highest scorers with minimal standard deviation while ratings for Sunny Leone, unsurprisingly, were all over the place. What unfolded next, figuratively, blew our minds.
Despite few outliers in ratings, the aggregate scores of the two groups for all ten names happened to be identical. Detailed profiling revealed something even more fascinating. Two sets of individuals from my class, say, A & B and P, Q & R, who had earlier been perceived to possess similar behavioural characteristics, had now separately assigned the exact same scores to more than half of the listed celebrities. For the sceptics of tailored marketing, this was an eye-opening “Aha!” moment. Certainly insightful, reinforced with a pinch of fun in communicating, the findings left a lasting impression on attendees’ minds, not excluding
myself. But with me, it left something of greater interest as well.
Except that of Sunny Leone, all scores She had assigned for the given names were the same as mine. It stood out so vividly on the whiteboard that the speaker, during his analysis, couldn’t keep himself from making an interjection hinting at Our ‘match’. I have to admit though, that it might have been my head in a tizzy, falling to Anchoring Bias. As of that moment, my mind had a beautiful muddle to focus on: ‘Birds of a feather’ or ‘Opposites attract’?
Time will tell.
Which ABG company would you want to work for and why?
The ABG company I would want to work for is Aditya Birla Retail Limited. A name that has stood for supreme quality as has been endorsed via becoming India’s first ever food & grocery retailer to receive the FSMS certification, ABRL inspires me to strive towards maintaining and extending its rich legacy further ahead, in the foreseeable future following the IIM Trichy chapter. As I continue to aim for more, ABG family will benefit from my proactive contribution in the specified areas of requirement as well.
The article was written by Tanuj Kar - Class of 2019