Visitors at the fair venue on XLRI campus on Sunday. Picture by Bhola Prasad

Jamshedpur, Jan. 18: When you enter the Ghajini kiosk at Maxi Fair, a policeman gives you clues and a map, and asks you to hunt for the murderer.

If you manage to solve the puzzle, you will have helped XLRI students to answer Spencer’s retail query: where to set up its next outlet in the city?

You make your way to the next kiosk — Big Boss — and help the celebrities shop the daily essentials at affordable prices.

The Marketing association of XLRI (Maxi) organises the fair to help corporate houses to find answer to certain queries. The B-school students has worked for other houses like Tata Steel and Aditya Birla Group who participated to get a true respo-nse from the consumers through Bollywood and entertainment based game shows at the fair.

This has been the unique feature of the fair where it conducts the market research for the corporate houses in the format of games and the students say that it is a true study of consumer behaviour as visitors are not aware what corporate question they are answering.

Till this evening there were more than 3,500 people who took part in the games.

“If we ask any individual that we are conducting a research for a corporate house, they would give out perfect answers but not spontaneous or something from their mind. You cannot study people’s mind through those answers so we have come up with fun games that help us in getting the answer that the people feel. While conducting games we are doing nothing but business,” said Abhishek Sharma, the secretary of the marketing association.

Bhootia Haveli, Bollywood Masala and Jeanie are the kiosks of Tata Steel, NEEV (NGO) and Aditya Birla Group respectively. Even at the rural Maxi Fair at Rakha Mines conducted for Byrraju Foundation and Unicef, the response has been double than what was expected.

The game kiosks were also analysed by professors and they evaluated the games and the procedure.

“I will be analysing the games and rate them. The points depend on their design, information required, solution to the problems,” said Sanjay Patro, a faculty of marketing.

“I heard a lot about the fair and came here with my family. I know they conduct market research this way and wanted to try out the games,” said Nilima Jaiswal, a professional in a corporate house.

But what do the participants get? “Surprise gifts are given to the participants to encourage them to come back next year,” said Sharma.