Having started out as a reticent introverted kid who would rarely speak in class or in the midst of an audience, I had made a conscious effort in the final year of my engineering to garner the confidence and panache required to address people without being conscious about myself. The journey of my evolution from an extremely shy non-speaker to someone who didn’t find it too troublesome to address an audience of 60+ was topsy-turvy, but it helped me shed my inhibitions and develop a skill which I feel is paramount for a person seeking excellence in the marketing domain post-MBA.
The presentation that I am going to talk about is special because of the topic my team had chosen. It was the 7th ‘Product and Brand Management’ session of this term, and we had to present a brand story within 10-15 minutes in front of the professor and other students, emphasizing the evolution of a brand we had chosen as our topic for the project. After the initial brainstorming and debate among the group members regarding the brand we wanted to go ahead with, I decided to pitch the idea of doing the project on ‘Brand Salman Khan’. The idea struck a chord with everyone else in the group, and all of us unanimously decided to go ahead with it as the topic of the presentation. The whole idea was to make it appealing, fun, hilarious and link our research with the learnings derived from the PBM course.
The next 24 hours involved a lot of research, gathering data from various sources, editing videos, looking up on the internet for memes and a lot more. However, the excitement and desire for doing something unique were what kept the entire team going. Once all the homework was done, it was time for the showdown.
The entire audience was appalled on reading the opening slide of our audio-visual PPT, which had the topic of our project. Over the course of the next 12-13 minutes, we decided to take the audience through the journey that Salman Khan has lived over the course of last 2-2.5 decades. We started off with what makes Salman Khan a brand, how he fits into the various definitions of a brand, his evolution over the years, the development of his brand ‘Being Human’, the negative connotations attached with his image and lastly some of his controversies. With a lot of memes and videos thrown in, it made for an amusing show for the people present in the classroom. We finished it all off with some of the quintessential Salman dialogues and a little jig. At the end of the presentation, we had been lauded for attempting a topic such as this and pulling off the impossible, which is keeping everyone in the room glued to us. The journey at IIM Trichy has been enriching and fun thus far, and this was one incident that I would like to believe would remain etched in my heart forever.
Which ABG company would I like to work for and why?
ABG has a plethora of exciting companies under its umbrella, ranging from telecom to fashion & retail to carbon black, and what not. The goodwill associated with the group is unmatched in India and working with them would be an honor that very few would not want to not look forward to.
On a personal front, I am a marketing enthusiast with a penchant for fashion and trends. The thought of shopping for clothes and accessories excites me to an unfathomable level. Having worked with an FMCG firm, I have done a lot of primary research with customers and consumers of products to figure out their psychology behind what engenders a purchase decision and am aware of the intricacies of sales and distribution.
I would like to work for the ‘Fashion and Retail’ division of ABG, if given a chance, to optimize my skillset and merge it with the underlying passion that I possess towards fashion. Customer relationship management, market research, advertising and the occasional hard-selling are the pillars of marketing that excite the enthusiast in me. If given an opportunity, I would like to grab the opportunity to work for one of their fashion labels such as LP or Allen Solly and help them expand and grow in both the online and offline space, while also contributing to my personal growth and learning.
This article is written by Nikhil Mayank Pandey - Class of 2019
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