As part of its silver jubilee celebrations, Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar (XIMB), organised a two-day business conclave last weekend on its campus in association with The Telegraph. Industry stalwarts and corporate honchos attended the event that was packed with talks and interactive sessions with students of the B-school.
Strategy
On the first day, a consulting and strategy conclave titled Stratonomics ’12 was held, the theme “Rethinking Business: Competing through Organisational Agility — Strategic, Portfolio and Operational”. The speakers provided real life examples to substantiate their take on the topic.
Speakers
Ashok Banerjee (vice-president, data platform and supply chain engineering, Flipkart), Satish Das (chief security officer and vice president, enterprise risk management, Cognizant Technology Solutions), Debasis Mohapatra (senior manager, PricewaterhouseCoopers), Srikanth (professor, IIT-Bhubaneswar) and Shailesh Ranjan (director, Vector Consulting Group) were the speakers.
Tactical approach
Banerjee spoke about the importance of chaos and structure in an organisation. His mathematical model for measuring effect of word-of-mouth publicity left a lasting impression on the students.
Das touched upon the changes in global companies such as different generations working under a single roof and the shift of focus from developed to developing countries. Mohapatra put forth case studies and explored whether customer aspect was required to be added to organisational agilities. Sundarajan threw light on three major challenges that a small organisation faces – improving relationships, scaling the work force and adding new customers. He also discussed strategies an organisation needs to adopt to emerge unscathed in the face of recession. Ranjan felt an organisation reaches the ideal state when its focus is only on growth and it is in a position to decide who its customers will be. He stressed on properly exploiting and then elevating internal resources. The event ended with the launch of “The Strategist”, a magazine published by Constrat, the institute’s consulting and strategy consortium.
Focus on consumer
Varied and interesting perspectives on customer-focussed business took centre stage at the second day’s event, titled Mercatique ’12. The topic for debate was “Innovations in India in Marketing” in which speakers not only shared their success stories but also presented smarter, creative approaches to widen one's consumer base. An exciting QnA round further enriched the session.
Panelists
Supriyo Sinha (vice-president, Bengali dailies, Anandabazar Patrika), A.L. Jagannath (director, trade marketing at LinkedIn-India), K. Dasaratharaman (president, speciality retail at RPG Group), Nandakumar E. (head-operations at ITC Limited Tribeni Tissues), Prakash Dadlani (vice-president, marketing excellence at 3M-India), Vidur Vyas (director, marketing at PepsiCo-India) and Rajneesh Bhasin (managing director, Borges-India) were the speakers.
Brand talk
Sinha stressed upon the need for internal marketing before reaching out with the products to consumers and external stakeholders and spoke of innovations involving the same. Through short clips from three films, he put his idea of marketing innovations in perspective. Asked if leveraging the goodwill of an age-old brand was a better strategy than launching a new brand, Sinha said: “This was the kind of conflict that we faced at ABP. We debated if we should change the look and feel of Anandabazar Patrika or launch a new paper to capture the attention of the youth. Finally we decided not to tinker with the core image of the flagship newspaper. That way the youth-centric Ebela was born.” Dasaratharaman sought to supplement the answer to brand strategy by explaining it from the angle of a business decision. “For example, Ponds launched a toothpaste which never clicked because consumer perception of Ponds was that of a skin cream and they thought twice before putting a product from this brand in their mouth,” he said. He also talked about challenges in Indian market in terms of changing market demographics and increasing consumer confidence. Nandakumar offered practical perspectives while talking about ITC’s sustainable innovation practices and its focus on people, planet and profits. Dadlani spoke about the technologies that drive their product’s business and Vyas introduced the innovation and relevance model of Pepsico to the students. Jagannath explained the roles that each member of different social media plays in our lives and how marketers can capitalise on it. The concepts of consumer-to-consumer marketing and business-to-business marketing via social media added an interesting flavour to the discussion. Bhasin summed up his talk by saying that there were two kinds of people in the business world. The first category is good at maintenance and the other, at building things brick-by-brick.
