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MANDI: Learning Marketing Ideas the NITIE way During the exercise, each of the student teams experienced the complete personal selling process a number of times. This gave them a feel of different customer types, their expectations, possible product objections and so on. Says Saumya Sarpal, a student, "I was trying to sell one of the 'Tangrams' (a toy) in Worli-Sea-Face to this rather uninterested guy, when a kid tapped my elbow and asked, 'what is this?', pointing to the frame of a house built using 'Jodo', that I was carrying. Initially, I thought of brushing him off, but something in me hinted that this is the end-user of the toys standing in front of me and I should try to sell it to him. I sat down patiently, and gave him a demo. The kid taught me a lesson not to ignore anybody." After the exercise, the students had a feedback session where the central idea was to bring reflective observation and abstract conceptualization together. Explains Yugit Bhansal, a participant, "What I learned from Mandi is that there is a market for almost everything. You only need to know how and whom to approach. When we were selling at the railway stations in Mumbai, initially there were no customers but once we were able to gather few of them then the group effect propagated and after that there was so much curiosity that it was getting very difficult to handle the number of queries." The fact that the proceeds were going for a social cause inspired the students to work harder at their sales process. However, it was not a cakewalk for these students all the time. For example a person mistook a group of students to be desperate job hunters and offered them a job where they would have to actually work full-time as salesmen for a salary of Rs. 4,000 per month including a clause that said that the job was only for a period of three months. As students hailed from various parts of the country, the language barrier in some instances also hampered some of them. Contributed by - |
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