MBA number crunching

The biggest advantage of doing MBA is to fool the high level corporates about the kind of number crunching that is involved. This is ok from a operational point of view....but corporate level, the kind of number crunching maximum should be related to ROI & profits.

These people go down till the revenue they are most likely to learn from the customer in God forsaken part of the country and even calculate the amount of revenue he will give through out his life time. Lets say if the person Daler form a village in Punjab may be contributing Rs.5 on a purchase of a day. The marketing officer is likely to tell you how much will he contribute till he dies or till the product stays in the market.

Now, this is only important for the marketing manager to get funds sanctioned from the CFO. But here one needs to understand at the corporate level that numbers can be taken care by the tactical level but at the strategy level one needs to find the CHANGE. The change that is happening in the external environment, preference that the customer has, gaps in service level & things that delight the customer.

The point i want to make is that, market research is very important form. Instead of outsourcing your research to some market research agencies, the decision maker needs to come down to the field and see the difficulties that are being faced by the customers. It is like giving your eyes and ears to the research agency, who see something and report what they perceive the management wants. No wonder why niche markets pop in, when small attributes are not taken into account by the big guns!!

Life in a PG class room

What i am thinking now is how to pass time......compared to what happened yesterday. A holiday with family , friends...and now this stupid class. The thing is that i do everything which is not essential to my life in other words everything that is irrelevant. I had other plans basically when i had joined MBA, like studying full time, submitting assignments that would have recommendations which would change management science, talking to on-field company executives while analyzing the marketing strategy of the company...but only to my dismay that i realised the powerful tool i.e. the internet, where other peoples hard work is just copied and pasted in our project reports.

Coming back to my topic, a class is a tool in education which gives information but thanks to my amazing concentration i am unable to even gather a single piece of information. Statistics class has been a nightmare since the time i have joined MBA. The best thing that happened to me during MBA was, the first class that i had to attend was that of statistics. It not only ruined my perception of MBA but subsequently told me how a subject which is of importance today can be taught in a manner that a person can never understand.

Statistics is one of the most important subjects in marketing.

1. It tells you how to forecast sales?


2. It tells you how your product will perform in relation to competition?


3. When is the best possible time to launch a product?


4. Quality issues...(Statistics in identifying quality...something to think about!!!)
   
   

All the above question are very important from a business decision perspective. They help a marketer to make product & brand related with specific regards to promotion, distribution of goods in case of seasonality of products, the kind of investment that is needed, the right time to enter the market, where to locate you warehouse in the country so as to minimise the costs.......etc

Anyone who has studied statistics, in other words any person who has the capacity to find averages, will also agree that all these decisions are made on past knowledge and information. Now the only thing is that, past was yesterday and it is gone....what about today and tomorrow?? it cannot be predicted on the basis of the past. The variables that were important yesterday cannot be important in the future...as the environment in which the business operates and the preferences of the customers changes over time.

Moreover, statistics I believe is a predictive science based in the variables of the past. Well, i think MBA is all about these numbers, just fudge them and you get what you want to prove. No wonder there were a series of amazing financial crises that happened on a model that was fradulent from the very beginning, as it was only numbers.

But than the question is how do you make forecasts, there has to be certain trends that happened in the past which aids you to make future forecasts. So in other words, forecast is important.

What people fail to understand is to look beyond the number game, i am not disowning the fact that numbers are not important. What i am saying is that "Focus on the big picture" there are trends in the external environment that needs to be monitored, so the business can understand the changing trends and align its business decisions accordingly.

I miss my graduation days, where the quant i was doing atleast was easy and made sense. Life is simple but just to show sophistication of knowledge you make a simple thing look complicated!!!