Marketing Communication – My white rabbit! -Abhay Arun Inamdar

I look at the process of communication with astonishment. It is such a fabulous process of meticulous planning, organizing, execution and control, all the principles of management in coherence with each other. Marketing communication is one of the most significant aspects of
creating a brand for the product or service.

I have had my share of branding a few products, communicating about them over a period
of time and have learnt a lot through the course. While learning the important concepts of branding and marketing in a business school, you cannot look at it objectively

It is only when you start implementing the marketing concepts to build the brand; you face
the tough nature of doing something so delicate on a regular basis. Brand is a subtle matter at hand. You have to capture and occupy the minds of your prospective customers.

This is a continuous process and the brand has to stay on top of the customers’ mind at all
times. It should have the recall value to sustain your company’s selling extravaganza in exuberant markets.

I had been fortunate enough to undertake some of its activities. Well, it wasn’t purely a
branding activity. I used marketing communication to let my company’s products known to our prospective customers.

I was a fresher and naive to the concept of Marketing. Of course there was no lack of ideas
and how to implement them. The budget and the products were constraints for this small software company I had been working for. We decided to give it a try however.

Knowing about my products was absolutely necessary. I loved writing, I still do, and hence I
wanted to write about my products and services. Product training was the most obvious part. A technical training accustomed me to my software products and services. There weren’t much of them.

There was a handpicked basket of products which our developers were capable of
developing and I had to communicate them to my prospective customers and sell them eventually. We developed some content on our website, printed a Company brochure which informed you about the company and its services.

I thought that was enough to sell, but that wasn’t. In spite of my effort to sell the products,
the response was lukewarm. I tried my best to reach more and more, but in vain. We organized an open house event and tried to promote one of the products too. We could not sell much.

The marketing communication was more than enough to tell everything about the products
and services. What was it then? Were the products too local or not serving the customers’ needs? Was the sales effort not enough?

When I recall the time, all the factors might have been true. On my part, I think I did not
reach enough prospective customers with my brochure who were in need of those products so that they could buy them from us. The communication drive was enough, the zeal to sell wasn’t.

I learnt an important lesson out of that experience. Of course I had to go through a few
unfortunate experiences before, to realize that I have had my lesson. I wanted to work into a
creative part of Marketing. I didn’t want to sell directly. That’s what I did, I followed the white
rabbit* of my own!

(*White rabbit refers to a small scene from the movie Matrix where the protagonist follows a woman (with a tattoo of white rabbit on her shoulder) to understand and explore and find out the answer to the most passionate question, what is matrix?)