Marketing 'Marketing'

Well, the first word represents the verb and the second word represents the subject. What else do you expect? If marketing is not able to sell marketing then it will defy its name. You will recollect what you might have already heard many times that Marketing is an Art. Now do you think there is any way to teach something which is an art, perhaps Not. Still, marketing is a subject well written and taught in B-schools.

Just to give you some background, I had one of the courses in the first term on basics of marketing. It was nothing but a collection of approaches that marketers take in different situation. There are no laws, theories no rules. This is because marketing deals with human mind, human behaviours and catering to human desires. If it were to me marketing is best taught by field work and the approaches one should take to market product will automatically evolve over a period of time.

For e.g. when one realizes that there are competing products in the market he will automatically highlight the attributes that differentiate his product from the other competing products, marketers call this POD (point of differentiation). Many times he will select a few individual who he thinks are more likely to purchase his product, they have glorified it by giving it a term ‘targeting’. If the customers seem a little reluctant to purchase the product at a given price, he may offer them some free gifts/discounts/rebate coupons, they call it ‘promotion’. He decides upon whether to sell the product by a retail outlet or directly sell the product or sell over the internet, they call it ‘Marketing Channels’.

These points as I have discussed above still is not loaded so as to compete with other disciplines in MBA. So, they have packaged these terms into different terms and called them Mix. So there we see all the Mix of Mix. Marketing Mix, Promotion Mix, Brand Mix etc. and 4Ps, 4Cs etc. There is a book written about these CONCEPTS and it is termed as the Bible of marketing. But at the end of the course I realized that all that 400 pages (or 500, I do not know the exact number of pages) can be summarized into 40-50 pages and the book will lose identity. The book itself is a well packaged product. It includes graphics, visuals and real life examples from the industry. The colour combination and paper quality is good. Finally, marketing as a management discipline and the book, both are selling successfully in the market.Now this is what we call marketing isn’t.

Scratch Pad - Science and Society

At the beginning of earth formation, we know all the continents were joined together, they separated. Then the continents got divided into nations, nations into states and states are fighting with each other and within themselves we have more states, practically.

Almost all the nations are troubled with internal conflicts within the state, some states demanding separations from the nations. Within those states there are communities/tribes demanding separate states. Take an example in India, Pakistan, Russia, Afghanistan etc.
The human generation got divided into races, races into religions, religions into caste and caste into sub-caste.

Let us go back to our solar system. The distances between every two heavenly bodies are increasing, i.e. the universe is expanding. Why is it expanding rather than shrinking owing to the gravitational forces of the other heavenly bodies? Is it because of diffusion, i.e. the heavenly bodies are very much concentrated in the Milky Way and they are diffusing outside where the density (if I can use the term here) of heavenly bodies is less.

How do we see all these things put together?
I recall a Law that I studied in my engineering course, Law of entropy, which states that every mass of body/molecule behave in such a manner to increase the entropy of the system. Entropy means the degree of randomness in the system.Does it apply here? Can we say that the law of entropy holds here?

Let us say that it may hold in the solar system but what about human civilization, the continents, countries, states, culture, religion, does it apply here as well. Can I take it further and say that if it follows these laws, the it may follow equilibrium lar as well. How we can fit the equilibrium into this? What will be the equilibrium state of division of human civilization into religion, cast and sub-caste.

Say, the religion continue division into caste, caste into sub-caste etc. At one point, people will realize that they are very few left, so they will again dilute the last criteria of division. So there is a threshold size of a group (political or social) that seems to be sufficient for self sustainence. Any less than that people are afraid of sidelined by the other groups, so either they will merge their group with other group or they will break other bigger group and import some group member into their group. This is what happens in the society, small religious groups regroup with others and bigger groups split into smaller one. Some groups are dissolved completely and at the same time new groups are evolved.

Can someone fit a equation on this phenomenon and find the equilibrium state, with groups as molecules and individuals as atoms, so at equilibrium atoms are changing their association with molecules but at a larger level the composition remains same. It will be a nice world then!

All for a brand IIT, Contd....

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/Careers/Second_list_IITs_break_tradition/articleshow/3342429.cms
This is what I was afraid of, and have written in the previous post.
This is just the begining, now after 3-4 years there will be demand to reduce the academic rigour and that will be the last nail in the coffin.

Advantages of Democracy...........

All this for a Brand IIT

All for a Brand IIT

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/IIT_physics_cut-off_down_to_zero_as_seats_increase/articleshow/3316557.cms

I had no plan to write blog today, but the article made me write.

It hurts! You increase the seats, You pull the OBC up, You pull the poorer people up, You do anything that you want to do but not at the cost of the quality.

The brand IIT is only because of the quality and quality is what people value. It has taken at least 40 years to build the brand IIT, if not more. One wrong decision can undo all this. I feel very sad if all this happens for votes and politics.

I am not against increasing the seat, giving ‘allowances’ to some, but do the politicians care about people not making it in the IITs. They can push people in, but believe me it’s not easy to get out. I have seen people spoiling their 4-7 years and not making it out. Those who are getting the all sympathy for increasing the seat will be responsible for spoiling the lives of the same people who they think they care. Media only covers when politician (decision makers !) announce ‘increase in seats’ for the benefit for ‘Aam Aadmi’, media fails to cover how these students are performing in IIT, I think they should start presenting that picture to the public. It’s only us, the insider who know the truth.

This will only increase the pressure on the ‘not so elite’ students once they are in the IITs and competing among the other ‘competitive’ ones.

Just by pushing them in does not mean the job is done. This will increase the drop out rates in IITs, another intelligent politician will then order IITs to relax on the academic rigour to help people get out of IIT!

They will sight reasons for increased pressure amongst students, increase in number of suicides (believe me I won’t be surprised), and I am sure they will succeed in lighten the academic rigour.
There are very few things that world values for India, preserve it, I want to preserve it and am sure every alumni do as well.

Scratch Pad - Genius, Then and Now

We have read many theories that are universally accepted, many theorists who proposed such theories are admired in their respective fields. Sometimes they are referred to have being contributed in other fields as well. While I was going through the many theories of motivation suggested by many ‘Researchers’, every theory different from the previous one in some aspect still there is a consistent need for new theory because group behaviour is such a complex process that you can not really put it in the framework of theories.

No, do not get afraid, I am not proposing a new theory for motivation. What I am thinking is that whenever I come across any big researcher, inventors, scientists etc. all those theories existed for a long time. Take an example, Newton Laws of motion, Ohm Law, Fick's law of diffusion, Bernoulli's principle etc. Pardon me for my engineering background, is that the reason! There are no new theory coming up, I am not saying that the research is not happening these days, the research is definitely happening and even at a faster rates but there are not breakthrough theories coming up, that are widely accepted and universally recognized. Well, you may disagree with me here because my knowledge may be very limited.

Still I am puzzled, is it that all the research that could have been done is already been done in all the fields at macro level and whatever research is currently being done is all at micro level for e.g. particle dynamics, nanotechnologies etc. So there are no theories of say solid mechanics or fluid mechanics or thermodynamics, conduction, convection, mass transfer etc. (Again pardon me for sounding a bit technical).

There is a huge scope of research if we go deeper and I believe that we are yet to find any universal principle at this micro/nano level that can be accepted as universal law. Every hypothesis gets refined every five year or so to improve on its applicability and accuracy. Is it what it should be or our research is actually not able to converge to one direction? Is it that while researching on these micro/nano aspects we ourselves are doing Brownian research (getting some inspiration from Brownian motion), and therefore it being happening in every direction and actually difficult to converge.

Or is it that the earlier scientist/theorists were well capable to take their research in one discrete direction and finally result in a universally acceptable law. Or is it that there were lack of scientist community to actually counter a theory proposed by someone. Or is it that there are no more theory left at the macro level that hasn’t been proposed yet and therefore we have successfully explained all macro level phenomenon.

I am sure that there are a lot more number of researchers/scientist today, with a lot more knowledge at their disposal, working on a lot more complex and efficient equipment and driven by a lot more funds and motivation. I am also sure there are a lot more technical papers published in international journals and this trend is going to be the same in the years to come.

Still, isn’t there is one macro level phenomenon that is not yet been discovered or observed and hence there is a scope of at least one new law that will be quickly accepted universally. I am definitely not the person who can comment on this question.

Next Scarce Resource

I was contemplating to write on this for long. Recently when the UPA govt. increased the petrol/diesel prices, our PM addressed the whole nation trying to educate people that the government had no option left but to increase the prices. Trying to educate the people that there is little that govt. can do as these are global factors affecting all the countries and India in one of them. He also shared with the citizens what were the possible alternatives that the govt. could have tried and their limitation and finally they increased the prices. Some people may disagree with this saying that government has levied so many duties and taxes on petrol/diesel at the first place and they should first give concessions on that front. Well I am not writing this to detail out the proportion of taxes, their objective, their requirement and etc. So pardon me for this.

What I want to discuss is the vision that Mr. PM has, one should listen to that message he delivered to the citizens on that day. He is truly an economist because economics is all about efficient and effective use of scarce resources. He is also a true leader because he made a point to make people aware about another daily resource which is not scarce at this point of time, but the early indication are visible on the horizon. Please forgive me if you feel/perceive that I am praising Mr. PM too much. Believe me, I do not have any vested interest in politics and I am not planning to join the concerned political party (because in that case I should be praising someone else!).

What I want to highlight is that he is planning for the future, crude is the present, he is taking necessary steps, but at the same time he is warning people to be aware that such situation might arise again in future and we should start planning for that right from today. I am not that skilled yet to sense if this ‘future problem’ provide any opportunity for business idea, but I am sure key people in the industry must be having some plans to address the situation in the future for the benefit of the people, of course if they take in the philanthropist context. You can relate few M&A in this space by one of the big Indian houses, though the scale of operation as of now is very small. It may take may be 10-15 years before people do realize and accept this as a major challenge but it is always good to start planning now, especially in India where the execution take so long, may be this is the reason Mr. PM mentioned this right away without waiting.

I do not think I mentioned earlier in this post that he said ‘Water’. Thanks Mr. PM for hoping against all odds.

India Growth Story?

The recent IIP numbers are in the downward trend. Analyst are citing these are temporary set backs, comparison to high base numbers (IIP data) from last year, and global slow down.

Crude has touched $135 and Indian basket is around $122. With OIL marketing companies making a loss of Rs16/- and Rs27/- per liter of petrol and diesel and Rs320/- (approx) per LPG cylinder, I wonder if there is any more stem left! BPCL and HPCL are talking of quota set of each individual oil distributor based on the sales last year.

There was a BRIC report sometime back, now people are talking about report by a Goldman Sachs analyst who predicted that crude will touch $200.

Government is doing well by artificially controlling the prices but this is not a permanent measure, they should be doing (I hope) more than this. They should explore various methods of transferring the crude burden partly to consumers who can afford it and at the same time not impacting the inflation. They have to selectively subsidize the core functions of economy from the crude burden but leave the affluent class (and the emerging middle class) to pay for their petrol bill. By core functions I mean transportation of industrial goods, power generations etc.

Rupee surged to all time high of around 39.5 w.r.t $ and it is back to 43.5, thanks to high crude import bill.

Indian agriculture growth statistics are not exciting, this coupled with shrinking land under irrigation, dismal condition of Indian farmers and unpredictable nature of monsoon only indicate that situation is going to get worse.

Though it is projected that the wheat production is set to increase but I am not really sure it would be able to satisfy the ever increasing need of growing economy. And what about wheat production for coming years! Do we have plan for that in the pipeline or we are just relying on the monsoons of those respective years.

Not only agriculture, other building blocks of economy, capital goods, power sector, inland transport and ports & harbor infrastructure, all of these need significant investments, I wonder how government will fund these requirements.

Recently there was a news that Thailand was planning a cartel of ‘Rice Exporting Nations’ and there was a huge cry among the international community. I feel the way OPEC is able to monopolize the Crude market; the day is not far where the other commodity producing nation will form the other sorts of cartel and the world will again move back to the barter system.