Listening to the 'Mandi'

HUMAN FACTOR

A B-school takes students to where it matters "" the markets

The CEO of a leading FMCG company thinks the majority of management students from the premier schools in India are bubbling with bright ideas and have a solid academic base, but are divorced from market realities. He calls them "ivory tower theoreticians""" bright young men and women who can seldom practice what they preach. Tough words, but something that many in corporate India say, is partly true.

It's well known that some Indian companies have found a way out of this by posting young managers in rural India where they can listen to the market. Now at least one management school is trying to plug this gap by encouraging students to sweat it out and get a real feel of the heat and dust of the Indian marketplace.

So when you find a bunch of students on the roads of Mumbai selling innovative gadgets and toys, don't mistake them for a group of company salesmen. They are the students of the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (Nitie), carrying out a project work named Mandi (market), which is part of the curriculum.

T R Prasad, assistant professor of Nitie and the brain behind Mandi, feels management teaching cannot be a one-way transaction and the objective of Mandi is to tell future managers how a field sales campaign, or field experience, can be integrated into the teaching of personal selling skills as part of a management course.

Prasad, who has written a research paper on Mandi, says projects like this help break mental blocks and in getting over inhibitions. "Selling skills cannot be taught in a class room," he says. His research paper, which has been accepted by the Association for Business Stimulation and Experiential Learning in the US, also talks about the role of the teacher, which changes dramatically in this kind of field activity "" from providing students with the answers, the teacher has to guide them through a process. This requires a different mindset, as well as an entirely different set of skills and knowledge.

Here's how a Mandi project worked. About 100 MBA students were divided into groups of 10. To help the students plan and prepare for their experiential learning, some audio-visuals related to personal selling were shown, and students were directed to related reading materials on the topic.

Each student invested a minimum of six to seven hours in preparation and the products chosen for personal selling were educational aids used for teaching mathematics and science.

On the assumption that the brand effect could distort the sales volumes, branded merchandise was deliberately avoided. The merchandise selected was supplied by a non-profit organisation called Navnirmiti.

On an average, each student team made 60 sales pitches in the field and around 30 per cent of these were converted into final sales. The sales volumes generated across groups varied greatly and ranged between Rs 1,500 and Rs 9,000.

All the students put together made total sales of Rs 82,000 in a single day. However, the most important outcome of the project lay in the qualitative takeaways. The day after the field visit, a feedback session was held.

Initially, students in small groups were encouraged to share their experiences. The student teams that had made the maximum sales clearly demonstrated the ways and means through which they were able to make customers feel the products were special.

The product "Jodo", which had multiple uses as an educational tool in mathematics, organic chemistry, designing architecture models, and craft, demonstrated in concrete terms how multiple markets can be created for a single product.

Performance on the Mandi project was given a 10 per cent weightage in the evaluation of the marketing management course. Some of the criteria taken into account for evaluating the students' performance were the actual sales volumes generated by the student groups, the quality of experiences brought to the feedback sessions and the quality of the written assignment on the project.

In the debriefing discussions, the students' eagerness to experiment once again in the market place was evident. They also realised first hand the importance of a complete knowledge of the product on the part of the sales person.

One student narrated his experience of how a prospect reversed his decision to buy the product when he could not solve the puzzle.

One important feedback was that students did not spout the jargon that they had memorised from their textbooks, as in traditional learning endeavours, but spoke out of experience and understanding.

Most importantly, as Prasad says, the Mandi project helped students to get an answer to the one question that every marketer is interested in: why do buyers buy?