Reflecting on MKDM

MKDM - Marketing and Decision Making was an extension of Marketing I in Term 2. We were introduced to various concepts in Marketing like - Competitive Strategies, Dealiing with competition, conjoint analysis for strategic decisions, sales force allocation, resource allocation, managing products, launching new products and also attending to a declining market.

Apart from this, we were also asked to play this game called MARKSTRAT. The whole batch was divided into teams of 4. 5 teams were part of an industry. In an industry, every team (we were called as A,E,I,O and U) was given a starting budget and products to market. Our job was to apply all the marketing fundas and - launch products, do R&D, allocate sales force, allocate advertising and a host of other things. Typically, anything and everything that would be a part of creating a new product for the market.

Markstrat tips for the next batch - do get in touch with me before your first decision. We'll make you rich!!!

So, when the exam came, everything turned out to be a total disaster. Questions were like describe this, define that, write three attributes, two reasons and stuff like that. It was a mugpot's delight. On top of this, we had few quantitative questions for which we had to memorise the formulae. And you can be sure that you will not get marks if you dont write the right words that were mentioned in the handouts.

Did I do something like this in 1996-97 when I appeared for the Tamil Nadu State Board Examination? Just mugged up every printed word from the textbook and fished for those keywords in the question paper so that I could just blindly write.

Well, that's marketing for all of you.