“All we expect out of you in the end of these 2 months is an OUT OF THE BOX THINKING !!!”. For the next few hours I found my head echoing
My work started as soon as I was allocated the topic and the next few weeks went in unveiling and dissecting the HRC market, studying the competitors and the users. I came across so many unusual, surprisingly funny facts. One of them is as follows : The very prestigious competitors spend millions of rupees on advertising with a set of prestigious firms who carefully & cleverly “copy paste” the branding ideas from the international brands, and these very ideas ROCK in our country
I took my project ahead and decided to walk down the hot, burning Delhi roads with the sales personnel who would make me have a face to face interaction with the real stakeholders - the retailers, who were selling the product directly to our prestigious customers. Those few days on the roads covering one market area after another could not be forgotten. Honks from all the possible sides of the roads, people rushing in and out of the metro at the same time, the whole city seeming to be running after some unknown glory, girls adoring themselves in the metro – at times looking at their nailpaints / dresses / trying to have a view of theirs from the smallest possible metallic frames and then having that satisfied air of dressing “TIP-TOP”.
An internship is so much of a myth breaker. It took me away from the unrealistic picture of sales stint. And now I completely agree to the fact that a successful marketing person should go through the enriching experience of sales. I came back after the whole research compiled with a new set of ideas to work on the packing for our product, which should definitely be able to convey the maximum possible concern our company had in making difficult product like HRC to go natural. Finally, I chose the colors that the cartons should have to make customers believe in the first sight itself that they are looking at something which is safe for their body. And then weeks passed in making the whole set of packing to make the product look safe and natural.
After psychoanalysis of the communication and packing which we were to adopt, I went on to explore the distribution front of the HRC. The world is so systematic, nothing here happens without a firm reasoning and an in-depth thinking. Why does a product launch only in particular cities, why do the trade promotions vary from city to city. I like a fool used to believe that the products are mostly launched in the cosmopolitan and metro cities. Cities that consume a maximum of a particular kind of product, the pattern of growing sales from city to city is actually what make those products reach those cities first. After brainstorming with loads of excel sheets from the sales department I came up with a concrete plan for the distribution and launch ! Trust me, excel sheets so much look like a burden, full of numbers difficult to comprehend. But once you make friends with those numbers, they become such interesting company that you could actually spend hours with them, exploring them and surprising your ownself with the kind of information they hide within themselves.
After exhaling out the experiences from the deliverables of my project, how could I fail to mention the wonderful experience of meeting our advert team, the production heads and, the procurement teams? The kind of hierarchical flow a product has with the way it is connected to all the departments, and realization of the need of synchronisation within these departments for a successful launch was stupefying. That the world of corporate which is only blamed to work for 10 hours a day in a row, could actually be so interesting and overwhelming was unknown to me. I loved each and every day that I spent on my project and with every passing day the feel of being a
Also it was so encouraging to see how the management was ready to lend its ears to the summer interns whenever they needed it. My mentor, herself a Symbiosis alum, was enthusiastic, supportive and welcoming. Her concern, guidance and appreciation led me do things to my maximum potential. The major concern when one goes for an internship in an entirely new territory is about the “Mentor” under whom one would intern. My case was fortunate in a lot of ways.
And also the kind of healthy competitive environment that prevailed in Dabur for those 2 months definitely added a lot to learning as it had one of the best brains from the best of institutes in India. A lot of brains working together are always better than one brain working alone. We, the interns from different arenas, found time to gossip, eat together, crib together, spend weekends together and,[/s] know about each other’s colleges and schedules. It was a holistic view on things in itself. Apart from being in the office in this 2 month trail I also got some time to hit the gym and hence accomplish my second dream of losing some wicked pounds of flab, though the hectic routine during summers did help me in doing so as well.
