Seminar at Welingkar

B-SCHOOL BEAT

Last fortnight the Mumbai-based Welingkar Institute of Management organised a seminar on "Re-inventing customers in FMCG sector" as part of its "Disha" series of industry interface seminars for students.

The half-day seminar included participants such as Harish Bijoor, CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults, and Avinash Pant, general manager, Coca-Cola.

While Bijoor questioned the very existence of "brand loyalty" and suggested the acceptance of "brand promiscuity" instead, Pant spoke about the challenges and risks involved in the strategy for creating preference, price value and pervasiveness for brand Coca-Cola in India. He also shared how difficult it was to convince the international bosses about the success of the intrinsically Indian theme of the "Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola" campaign.

Amitabh Babbar, product manager, Hindalco Limited gave some fresh insights into the branding and marketing strategies for a seemingly uninteresting category like aluminium foil. ITC Foods' Prassana Rai took the students through an interesting case study on the company's Ashirwad Atta brand.

Entrepreneurship meet

S P Jain Institute of Management & Research and National Entrepreneurship Network recently launched "Lock, stock and trade", an event aimed at raising awareness on entrepreneurship among students.

The event featured an IPO stock trading game where the participants were asked to identify a company's value proposition and then accordingly sell and buy its shares.

Students from different institutes, entrepreneurs, professionals and professors participated in the game, which provided an opportunity for students to interact with industry and a get first-hand experience on entrepreneurial thinking.

The other highlight of the event was a panel discussion on the "Idea of IPO" in which the panelists "" Cafe Coffee Day Director Naresh Malhotra, Arvind Brands President Darshan Mehta and entertainment entrepreneur Samir Karnik "" debated topics like investment priorities for companies and their growth.

Murthy at MDI

In an initiative to increase industry-student interactions, Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon recently invited Infosys Chairman and Chief Mentor Narayan Murthy to its campus.

While interacting with the students, Murthy talked about the complacency that can set in companies that appear to have reached the apex. He said that as a company grows, the competition only gets tougher. He stressed that complacency can result in a customer dismissing one's services, which is detrimental to an organisation's growth.

Further, he pointed out that it is aspirations that drive growth and it is important for an organisation to constantly raise its benchmarks. Murthy also spoke about the importance of transparency in an organisation, accountability of the top management and emphasised on focusing on domestic market.