Applied Marketing Finance: Corporate series by Professor Anjana Grewal
Pete Drucker rightly said- “If it can’t be measured, it cannot be managed”
During the AMF class, Prof Grewal had invited Mr. Ganish Bahl, Director-Digital Marketing at Vivo who has strong Digital Marketing experience to share his experiences with the candidates of International Masters in Business (IMB) at SDA Bocconi Asia Center on the topic – Social Media KPIs
Mr. Ganish is a seasoned marketer with over 14 years of experience in the telecom industry. He is an engineer and MBA from IIM L and is an ambassador of digital growth and transformation in the Industry. Due to his consistent efforts, he has been awarded as the Top 30 Digital marketers by Economic Times Brand Equity in 2019 and he has also featured among the top 50 digital marketers by CMO Council for 3 consecutive years. He has been a great team man and leader who has been responsible for transforming the digital journey of top global brands like Samsung, Vivo, Micromax, etc. He is an avid traveler and loves adventure sports to keep up the liveliness. His motto in life is “Never say Never”.
The session started with throwing some light on understanding the current digital landscape (Globally & Indian context), benefits when a digital medium is used, and went on to explore how objectives and strategy dictate KPI, a step-by-step approach on how to choose them strategically, and a framework to create “Thumb Stopping” content so as to keep potential customers engaged throughout their journey.
The key learning in the session was how qualitative metrics customized as per objectives, which can be benchmarked and upgraded to help analyze social trends and deliver on promised value.
Prof Dr. Grewal also added some memorable insights from Mr. Ganish Bahl’s session
1. Digital is a very cost-efficient medium
2. The usage of Facebook Vernacular has grown dramatically in India
3. Pre-COVID- Consumer behavior could be summed in ROPO- Research Online and Purchase offline which would have now shifted due to the Covid-19 Lockdown
4. The objective is what defines the KPI.
5. There is an app for almost everything.
Further discussions & examples on how cross-functional teams from marketing and finance make decisions together to achieve common goals especially for the digital mediums helped the students put practical structure to knowledge acquired from the classroom session.
Dr. Anjana Grewal also invited Mr. Rahul Dash, Co-founder of Purplle.com for the AMF corporate series session. Rahul Dash is the Co-founder of Purplle.com, One of India’s leading Health and Beauty Destination. Purplle.com attracts 5 million visitors on a monthly basis with 70% repeat customers. In addition to an eCommerce Marketplace, Purplle also owns a bouquet of digital-first Beauty and skincare brands created for the Indian audience. Rahul graduated from IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad and joined TAS (Tata Administrative Services) before starting Purplle.com
Mr. Rahul Dash not only gave an overview of the company, which is a leading Indian Beauty Technology Company but also gave interesting insights into the e-commerce industry and its profitability drivers.
From a pure marketplace to an inventory-led model, Mr. Dash explained the different models that exist in e-commerce. Through the session, students also got a chance to understand the numerical element of profitability with a live case example covering all Profit and Loss elements specific to an e-commerce business. He touched upon the importance of Scale, Customer Acquisition Cost, and also repeat of Cohort in the analysis.
The students of SDA Bocconi Asia Center thank both the guests for such enlightening sessions. The article is contributed by Vani Tarika & Ashish Panigrahi, IMB Class 2021.
