Never Forget These Marketing Fundamentals: Industry Guest Session with Sambit Mohanty, Business Development Manager, Dow Jones

But as Sambit Mohanty, Business Development Manager at Dow Jones, pointed out in his talk with PGDBM students at the CFM campus recently, the marketing field has changed. “Till a decade ago, marketing was just about building a brand. Today, the company expects a marketing guy to increase sales as well.” To help students, especially those of the marketing batch, gear up to face the corporate world, Mr. Mohanty shared some helpful principles that all marketers should remember.

The 4 Must-Ask Questions

These questions, Mr. Mohanty said, are relevant to anyone in the field, from a marketing newbie to a senior marketing manager. You will be quizzed on this by recruiters, clients, bosses – and you better know the answers well.

Do you know who needs you?
Who is your target audience and what are their basic needs?

Do you know why they need you?
How does your product and its functions help them fulfill your needs?

Do you know why they would choose you?
Know the USP of your brand.

Do you know why they would choose someone else?
Know your competition. Understand their strengths and weaknesses to know your own flaws. This is help you learn what to show and what to hide.

3 Golden Rules of Good Advertising

In a segment of his talk that garnered the most interactivity from the students, Mr. Mohanty laid down the three factors that all effective advertising will touch upon – food, fear & sex. “Fear is the biggest human motivator. Use it as a marketing tool,” he advised students and proceeded to name some TV ads that have successfully employed all three factors.

Mr. Mohanty also told students never to assume that a customer will understand the message you are trying to convey, giving the example of the FedEx logo. The white space between the ‘E’ and the ‘X’ forms a perfect arrow, suggesting a company moving forward and looking ahead. But most people cannot see the arrow! So it is important to always think like a customer.

Mr. Mohanty shared some other useful tips with the students, which are summarized below.

After the session, we caught up with Mr. Mohanty and asked him why he had chosen the topics he did to share with students. He said, “In a short time, the students will join corporates as people new to marketing. And from my experience, there are certain things that marketers don’t take into consideration sometimes or miss out on. Those are the things I wanted to focus on. This happens even with senior marketing people. In the rut of daily affairs, sometimes we tend to drift from the basic fundamentals of marketing.”

Mr. Mohanty also spoke about the importance of social climate when it comes to addressing a target audience. “Social climate is crucial. How people work and how they perceive things in India is very different from how they perceive things in Singapore or Sydney. Like I was telling the students, in India, people start at costs and discounts – those are factors that motivate them. But in Sydney or the United States, what motivates them is value. Of course, cost is a factor but it’s a difference of priority. So as a marketing person, when you design your initiatives or campaigns, you have to know how the customer is thinking. That is the base of all your marketing efforts.”