just like that

Yes, that’s the question almost every marketing company asks a candidate in the interview process. I feel that it’s a question that everyone wanting to enter S&M should answer very honestly – not just to the company but to your own self and long before the interviews. After all, at first it seems everything is loaded against the marketing guys – their jobs are the ones which involve a lot of travel in rickety buses and trains (more often than not in sweltering heat and humidity of rural India) and on an average, it pays the lowest compared to other fields. You could comfortably sit all day in an AC and make presentations for a software company instead of suffering in the heat. Or fly executive class from one metro to another and tell one-minute solutions to year-long problems of clients. Why would anyone want to take up Sales and Marketing? At first, the argument seems perfectly logical. But dig a little deeper and you get a different point of view. As one of my friends said, “I can’t sit all day in front of a stupid comp and do the same thing over and over again. I shall get bored. I want to travel, meet people and live my life”. Another one says, “I have a natural flair for talking and interacting with people. I am not a desk-jobber. I can’t do stupid numbers and stupid graphs” So is it just about a personality-profile fit? What else could be a decisive factor? In this post, I try to explore that with my own experience.

If someone had told me couple of years back that I would be entering ‘S&M’ after MBA, I would have probably shrugged it off or just said ‘Yeah! Maybe! U can never tell!’ When I first came to IIM Indore, I had a lot of pre-conceived notions. I had almost made up my mind to go into Finance even before I knew what it held. To be honest, I was just driven by whatever were appearing in the papers at that time – time and again, there were reports of how much money I-bankers made and what glorious, luxurious lives they were leading. So when after the initial few weeks of accounts reality struck, it struck hard. At first, I thought I wasn’t working hard enough. After all, I had topped all my life in almost all subjects. But with more and more single digit scores in quizzes, I not only realized that I had no clue about assets, liabilities and income statements but also despite my best efforts, finance wasn’t coming to me. It was almost as if Finance was laughing at me – “You lowly mortal! What did u think of me?”

I don’t know when but it was sometime during my second term that I decided I was not going to Finance. It was a coming together of a lot of factors – all the banks deciding not to shortlist me during summers, my poor scores in Finance and accounts quizzes and the sheer terror that came over me every time I saw a balance sheet. In hindsight, it was probably too early to call it quits (considering the fact we had learned little ‘real’ finance till then) but at that time it was the right decision.

So at this point, when I was really unsure about what I was going to do came our IRIS event ‘Marksman’. It was basically a marketing strategy game we were organizing as part of our annual inter-college festival. I later realized the game being very similar to a popular branding game marketed to international B-schools for their curricula. The important difference was that this one had been Indianized very well. It was basically about four soap manufacturing companies fighting it across the different regions under various simulated conditions as they attempt to capture market share and increase their brand value. As part of the preparations for the game, I learnt a lot about market research, consumer behavior under different situations – things I would have never learnt in class, at least not in the first year. The game was one of the important reasons that I turned towards marketing.

By the time I was in my third term, I had more or less settled with marketing. And this was what worried me the most – I wasn’t very sure whether I wanted to do marketing but it was looking like the right choice. The bigger dilemma came when we had to select our electives for the fourth term before we went for our internships. Knowing my dilemma, one of my good friends suggested I take marketing courses but keep a couple of Fin courses in the ‘float’ option just in case I changed my mind after my internship. Although my summer internship didn’t give me any first hand experience in sales or distribution, I got to know a little about the way sales actually worked by observing some of the managers there. I just felt that I could do the sale they were trying to make – it sort of reassured my own abilities to handle sales. I was actually able to understand where exactly the manager was making a mistake. And I became more confident.

In second year, with the help of some good courses and better Profs, I begun to deliberate more about marketing as a career. Although there was a small dilemma till the beginning of placements,there was just a gut feel which asked me to go ahead with it and so here Iam - a fresh MBA about to jump into S&M. So where exactly in the middle of all this did I make that choice to enter marketing? Which is that one point which tipped it over? The truth is I don’t think there was one. I can’t point to a single day and say that was when it happened. It was just a slow-build up until finally one day I realized I will probably enjoy doing this and I will be good at it. This might not be the case with everyone – I have seen people who knew that they have always wanted to do marketing. Some others have always thought it as a natural fit for their personality. I guess, in the end, what really matters is that u should be convinced yourself and clearly know why you are taking it up. Salaries or Big names don’t matter; it’s better to take up something that you know you will like doing – Conventional wisdom, yes, but worth recollecting and remembering!