the monk and the marketing

(for those who don't know me yet, i call myself "the monk.... ". i won't discuss the rationale for this now... maybe later)

I had always assumed that I was born for marketing… I thought that marketing was plainly based on creativity and since I considered myself to be damn creative… I could sketch a little during my school days and had won a couple of prizes in competitions too… I had also participated in a couple of elocution contests and debates and won some prizes there too… I had also had a nickname of “scrap engineer” as I used to make a lot of new things from things that were normally considered scrap… some poster contests too where portrayal of ideas mattered were also added to my portfolio… I could write poetry too when I was in my second standard (some of the characteristics are still visible occasionally)…

So I thought I was damn creative and that I could manage stuff like marketing easily… or could I ?

But there was a small twist in the tale… I was brought up in a conventional middle class family that said risk taking was taboo… I joined an engineering college while a couple of my creative friends had the audacity to take up non-conventional subjects in media, communication and design… engineering college went off in a breeze and I could not showcase my creativity… mainly because I did not find time for it from the innumerous hours I spent playing carrom, watching TV and sleeping…

And of course the sheep mentality was followed in joining an IT company where I was put into the drabbest of technology with the barest minimum of colors (I still can’t think of any more than 4 colors that were used and one of them was black…). After 2 years I thought enough is enough else I will become color blind to the other millions of colors in the world…

I decided to try my hand at an MBA… mainly because I thought a b-school would house crazily creative people who are not afraid of experimenting… I thought that rules would be disregarded and creativity and practicality would rule…

I decided to do a specialization in IM because I thought I would leverage on my work-ex – a decision I thought would hamper my creativity, but then I had to somehow get into the b-school (in fact this was a decision that I consider pretty smart now)… I wanted to go into marketing – creativity was calling me… you are killing a creative genius by restricting me into a conventional mould… marketing should give me a breather (or so I thought)… my aim – after the first year take a shift into marketing specialization…

But then, my first year with marketing was not a happy relationship… after hours with the green colored marketing bible written from the sayings of the great god of marketing I could not absorb anything of marketing concepts… the 10 commandments from the bible were stringently followed and any deviations like me were deemed a heretic… and instead of burning me at the stake they branded me one – giving away alphabets that one was not very proud of…

I was beaten and broken – I was speechless during the lectures where I found creativity flowing in the form of thoughts and ideas from my peers… I failed to understand why a bike was a bike was a bike, or why a mundane purchase could only be a toothbrush (nowadays they cost a premium you know), or why the competition was always between coke and pepsi and not between a tata and a volvo…

Every prof would say don’t bombard your customer with jargons that only MBAs know the meaning of… In marketing this was an exception – you knew jargons you survived… I could never remember the number and the corresponding alphabets – for example the 4As, 6Bs, 7Cs, 3Ds, 12Es, 13Fs, 4Ps and so on… there was a number for every letter of the alphabet and it was many to one mapping function between the set of all letters and the set of all natural numbers… if at all I could remember the names then it would be difficult to remember the context – you know actually the 4As and 4Ps are the same but the context is now different because the consumer’s attitude has changed… really ?

After a year long futile crusade to find my lost creativity in marketing class, I fervently thank god at every single opportunity for knocking some common sense into me at the time of filling the form – for allowing me to leverage upon my core competency and the learning curve achieved over the 3 years of my stint at a global MNC…

But the fight is not over yet… looks like I have tortured the marketing faculty beyond the limits for making them read and also evaluate my answer papers… ideally they should feel like hanging themselves, but considering the welfare of the greater number of students, they will have to hold on…

I have been d-graded… I still have to fight one last battle… I am not sure where victory will shower her blessings, but I am fighting for a cause – my honor… back to the green bible…