OnYourMark- The Marketing Club| IIM Kashipur

OnYourMark (OYM), the Marketing Club of IIM Kashipur, was established on 16th January 2014 by the students to promote and nurture the knowledge of marketing in the IIM Kashipur community. The raison d’être for OYM is to create an amenable ethos towards marketing. OYM strives to create enthusiasm among the students for the domain of marketing and guide them to explore their careers in this field. As it has rightly been said in the business world, “Marketing is not anyone’s job… It’s everyone’s job!”. The club seeks to make the student community well-versed with the recent happenings in the field of marketing to aid their industry knowledge and recruitment preparation.

OYM oversees several initiatives to achieve the club’s:

Vision: To improve the marketing acumen of IIM Kashipur & build a culture of Marketing studies.

Mission: Organizing student-centric events to involve maximum participation and benefits for all.

With the growing use of the online medium, the club adapted to new modes of learning and incorporated new initiatives to emanate marketing knowledge through channels like social media and video conferencing. The following are some key activities undertaken by the club to foster accentuated learning:

• Forevision Workshops: OYM facilitated Marketing Workshops from Forevision in Digital Marketing and Advanced FMCG sales techniques training which had successful participation of 100+ students. These help them gain practical exposure to the current trends and tools through real-life case studies, exercises, and live demos which are increasingly used in businesses nowadays and enable them to think out of the box, just like a marketer is supposed to. 
• CutPaste Article series: Carefully curated articles are handpicked by OYM and extracts illustrating the concepts are shared with the batch in an email blast to familiarize and update them with the latest, modern terminologies in a short period. This allows them to quickly grasp these concepts and also gives them an option to read the full article provided to enhance their understanding.
• Open house discussions: Discussions on current events as well as concepts that students learn in classrooms are further deliberated to gain deeper insights into the subject matter. 
• Guidance in case-studies: Conducting in-depth discussions on the cases in the curriculum to better equip the students with the principles used in a light-hearted environment. This gives the students confidence to contribute in class and further their knowledge.
• Encouraging a culture of corporate competitions: Corporate competitions give students a chance to apply curriculum learnings and search for viable solutions to real-world business problems. OYM identifies marketing based opportunities from a plethora of competitions and encourages student participation.
• Marketing Weekly – OYM collaborated with Marketing Weekly to help the students navigate the overwhelming sea of marketing content. A breakdown of marketing concepts as well as the latest news are illustrated in these weekly articles keeps everybody up to date with the current industry trends and expectations. 
• Social Media Campaigns: From concepts, trends, and everything marketing, campaigns are run on OYM social media handles to create an enthusiasm for marketing. These posts provide interesting reads with a visual aid to engage the reader. 

OYM also conducts events year-round to engage students with practical exposure to marketing concepts so that they learn the application of the same.  

• Guerrilla MarFair: A Guerrilla marketing event enabling participants to create displays and advertise any brand. The event boasts average participation of 125+ students every year.
• Markaholic: The flagship case study competition of OYM is an event conducted during Agnitraya. It received the highest registration of 1079+ in the previous year with participants coming from many top B-schools like IIM Lucknow, IIM K, IIFT, etc. 
• Online Week of Social Media Marketing: Participants create a video Advertisement based on the theme selected and strive to go viral on social media. This tests and hones the participant’s social media strategy and technique which is a quickly growing and required marketing skill.
• MarQuiz: An intra-college marketing quiz competition aimed at inculcating a competitive spirit and encouraging teamwork. It focuses on expanding the students’ knowledge in the domain.

The club also conducts entertaining events to further pique the interest of students in the field of marketing by incorporating elements like brand-knowledge, wit, and the ability to pitch your ideas such as:

• Ambush Marketing: The participants use their creativity to implement the tactic of Ambush marketing to ambush their rival teams during the Kashipur Premier League. 
• Pitch Please: A test of persuasion and zeal is presented as a challenge to the participant in this event. They need to pitch a product, an idea, or a sellable item, and winners are crowned based on the votes they receive from the audience.
• DumbCharADs: A fun-filled brand guessing game that tests students on their brand awareness as well as acting acumen.

In this way, the club presents a spectrum of potential possibilities in the field of marketing for a student to pursue. It keeps a buzz around marketing domain and fuels the enthusiasm of the students at its best.

Industry leaders discuss Indian Economic Reforms at IIM Kashipur’s Finance summit MANTHAN’12

1^st Dec 2012, Gautami Heights, Kashipur: Inaugurating the second annual Finance summit of IIM Kashipur, Dr.Gautam Sinha, Director, IIM Kashipur emphasized on the fact that India still faces many barriers in competition and a lot of work is required to be done for financial inclusion. According to Mr. Sinha, MANTHAN’12 aims at providing fresh ideas and insights about the needs of the present, through eye opening talks by domain experts.

MANTHAN is an annual Finance Summit organized by IIM Kashipur to provide a platform for state of the art discussions on the current state and future direction of the Indian economic reforms. The event witnessed a mix of eminent industry personalities from the field of economics, academia and students.

Reflecting on Indian Economic Reforms Dr. M Govinda Rao, Member, Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister and Director, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy said that more relaxations in service sector have made India a service centric country where less importance is given to infrastructure or power sector. He added that poor expenditure management and fiscal deficit in conjunction with election and increased petrol prices had led the deceleration of Indian economy in 2008. But at the same time he said that the repercussions can be more severe than the constructive effects of reforms such as price control by government often leads to a misallocation of resources. He emphasized on the fact that government reforms like creation of National Investment Board will be more helpful. Along with this, private sector should invest more & present a road map to government rather than reacting according to reforms.

Dr. M Govinda Rao Inaugurating Manthan-2012 by lightning the lamp

Mr. Robin Banerjee, Deputy Managing Director of Bilcare Limited stated that debt w.r.t GDP is going down (decreased from 75% in 2006 to 67% in 2012) and the country will continue to grow for at least next 5 decades because it has a median age of 25yrs. which makes it the youngest in the world. But at the same time he said that, in terms of per capita income India stands at 135^th position out of 180 countries, which raises a few concern. According to him the motive of economic reforms should be targeted towards removing distortion i.e. creating policies which equally favor rich & poor people and also manage competition. He added that two basic challenges faced by India are, first, lot of paper work which causes delay in getting permission to start a project and second, contractual agreements. In terms of following contractual agreements India stands at 184^th position out of 185 countries which stops foreign investors from investing in India. Few of the suggestions given by him which will decrease the fiscal deficit as well as Gini coefficient are decreasing interest rate, selling the surplus land and divestment of loss making government companies.

Dr. D.S. Malik, Managing Director, Amex auto group Co., demonstrated the scenario of Indian auto industry post economic reforms. He emphasized the need of better tax policies. He also focused on labor laws that are currently practiced.

Mr. Ranen Banerjee, Executive Director/Partner, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, was of the view that currently India is having weak macro fundamentals. External factors like high crude oil prices and depreciating foreign exchange rate are among the main reason. He proposed REFORM 2.0, new changes that should be the future of economic reforms in India. It included giving more choices to bottom of pyramid rather than middle class, empowering the state government so that growth is triggered by them & not by center, rule of law i.e. strengthening the judiciary & contract laws in India and focusing more on emerging concepts like impact sourcing.

Dr. V. Ranganathan, Mentor Faculty at IIM Kashipur, RBI Chair Professor on Infrastructure and Member of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said that making economic reforms are not enough, reforms in governance and attitude is the need of hour. Increasing the efficiency & response should be given more attention and reforms should not be limited only to papers but rather be implemented properly.

IIM Kashipur commenced operations from July 2011. The institute offers its flagship two years Post Graduate Program in Management (PGPM). The institute is set up with the objective of providing quality management education while sensitizing students towards the needs of the society.