If you want a fat paycheque, let me assure you that almost all domains of MBA can offer you a fat paycheque if you are skilled enough.
If you want a cushy work in a large AC cabin of yours, then I am sorry to say, you are in the wrong place. At least for the initial years of your work life in marketing, the sooner you forget about such illusory distractions, the better it is for you.
Having said that, I now present to you my own “eye-opening” yet “enlightening” experience of marketing during my internship with “LG Corporation”, formerly “Lucky-GoldStar”, also known as LG.
The name LG needs no introduction. It is a household name worldwide. LG Corporation is a South Korean conglomerate or chaebol, headquartered in Seoul, Korea. Although the conglomerate has several lines of businesses and products ranging from chemicals to power plants, my internship was with the ubiquitous and near omnipresent LG Electronics. My Internship was in their electronics division (LG Electronics India) and was focused on marketing in the city of joy, Kolkata – the city of Howrah Bridge, Roshogolla, Biriyani, Authentic Bangla food, etc, added with the comfort of being at home. Marketing seems to be a cushy job after all you see, isn’t it?
No, it’s not. And there lies the fun part.
My work was focused on a 5 pronged goal set:
- Understanding the customer buying preferences with respect to distribution channels (LG Brand Shoppes, Multi Brand electronics retail shops, Hyper Markets or e-commerce)
- A comparative study of customer’s perceptions regarding LG products and its major and immediate competitors by means of data gathered from surveys, in-depth interviews, observational marketing and applying different quantitative techniques and statistical methods.
- To analyze the overall satisfaction level of customers using LG products and studying the challenges faced by the company in India and some differentiation strategies used by it.
- Finding out the product display share of LG and all the leading market players in a region and get more insights regarding the marketing and branding activities undertaken by the company.
- Thorough catchment area analysis and recommending places in the city where LG can launch new exclusive brand stores.
Basically, it is a Market Research project. And research is based on data, which is a gospel fact.
“Data, data, data. I can’t build bricks without clay” – Sherlock Holmes.
Finding such a data requires you to move mountains (not literally). But in the case of market research, this metaphor means moving out of your office and into the field to get your hands dirty. A lot.
Most of my internship involved traveling – a lot of it. To get customer insights as well as insights on channel performance, I traveled to every nook and corner of not only Kolkata, but also the adjoining districts of Greater Kolkata, like Howrah, Hooghly, North and South 24 Parganas. Interacting with a variety of demographic and psychographic profiles of customers from the nostalgia invoking Belur Math, to the British styled areas like Esplanade and the vibrant IT City of Salt Lake was an experience in itself. That gave valuable data and numbers to crunch on, and basically helped me answer the following questions:
- Time duration based buying patterns of customers
- Decision-making units of a family (pleased to find out that it is the wife who is the decision maker)
- Pain Points of a customer in general when it comes to a particular channel or a particular product line
- How to effectively make use of shelf display share
- Competitive Strengths, Weaknesses and analyzing the action of competitors
However, this is not as easy as it sounds.
The juxtaposition of the presumed comfort of home and the toil involved in data collection was manifested during the entire internship. Couple this with the humid summer of a tropical coastal place like Kolkata. And I didn’t yet factor in the effort required to place myself in the customer’s shoes and generating relevant questionnaire in the first place. Not to forget the “non-response bias”, where more time and energy is wasted. The post data collection through in-depth interviews, surveys and observational marketing calculations involving advanced statistics of T-test, Chi-square, Regression, ANOVA, etc cannot be ignored.
No marketing experience can be complete without promotions and branding. Although I couldn’t get the opportunity to conduct a full-fledged promotional campaign, however, bits and snippets of promotions - Mothers’ Day, IPL Campaign promotions and such related events were taken care of whenever the situation demanded or presented itself during my internship and also to which extent they were effective was analyzed by me. I coordinated with the regional Area Sales Managers, Team Leads and Senior Sales Executives at the brand stores at regular time intervals to carry out the research. The promotions to be very specific tried to capture the celebration theme by offering the relevant value propositions in the form of certain offers like extended warranty, cash backs, and discounts and goodies to the actual target segment.
Overall, I received an eye opener that marketing is not at all as cushy as it seems. In fact, it is far from it. However, the lack of such comfort is what makes one a great marketer. After all, marketing exists to remove pains and add gains to a customer, for which he or she pays you money.
It takes a hell lot of efforts to make marketing a success and thereby build a brand so massive as LG. After all, “A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is -- it is what consumers tell each other it is”, as rightly said by Scott Cook, Board Member of P&G.
I would now conclude my experience by summing up a few points which will be helpful to you for taking up marketing jobs, whether for summers or for finals:
- Marketing is all about understanding customer, their needs and offering them a great value. To achieve this, comfort zones are a big no go.
- Go with an open mind. Every customer or channel is a source of knowledge and data, which is useful for enhancing the customer experience in the end
- Books and classroom concepts are your friends. Pay attention in class and know where to apply those concepts during your internship
- Don’t take any harsh words from your mentor personally. Those words are only meant to improve your skills. Moreover, your mentor is the only person who is the bridge between your academic world and the practical world. Learn from his or her experience and ask questions
- Treat the Summer Internship as a great opportunity to learn about the practical aspects of an organization before you actually join an organization. It will help you once you join post the completion of your studies. This is especially useful for the freshers.
- Work hard, party harder. I did that being in Kolkata, and needless to tell you about the delicacies of authentic Bengali food. Make sure you discover the authentic food at least of any place where you would be working. The whole of India has lots and lots of such experiences to offer in this regard.
Wish all the juniors all the very Best!
Went in as a novice, came out not as a Marketing Wizard, but definitely came out with a new set of tools and the right approach to achieve that dream. Hope you live your dream too.
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