Sunday, December 18, 2005

Back to the floor : Adi Godrej works the Market

More television channels have created greater content demands which have lead to glamourisation of many institutions and people. Imagine being a celebrity becoz u managed to clear a test. Imagine corporate big wigs like mukesh ambani's, vijay mallaya, km birla getting mobbed for auto graphs. Well still glamourising them is better than glamourising the p3p whose only claim to fame is that well they all want to be famous for their partying.

But one of the better fruits of this quest for glamorising corporate honchos is a television serial called " BACK TO THE FLOOR " on BBC world

Saw it for the first time today, and boy wasn't it fun to see the CMD of Godrej Soaps Mr Adi godrej work the market for the day just like we blokes do. He went around vikhroli in a maruti (quite a fall from his merc's and roll's i must say).
I went on a hero cycle in upcountry orissa and AP.(its another story that the cycle was for 4 days...and it now is a sturdy indica).

But i what i liked was the fact that he was asking the same questions that i would ask retailers.

Which means maybe i am as smart as he is or perhaps he is as dumb as i am. I though would tend to believe it is the former.

Pats on the back apart , this program sure was good .

It just reiterates one of the more important business lessons i learnt from the ITC distributor at Balasore , Orissa ( Shyam Babu) " Business is best understood at the top of the chain or at the bottom of the chain. The rest are just complex message switching devices". While the top makes the decision only the man on the field will determine its impact . The rest of the ppl are just control mechanisms.

I hope that i would make meaningful interpretation of my exposure to the retailers and not end up becoming one such complex message switching device.