IIT Kanpur MBA Blog

”Do not lower your goals to the level of your abilities. Instead, raise your abilities to the height of your goals.” With these words from Swami Vivekananda, we present the March-April 2016 edition of our MBA magazine Avant-Garde. Happy summers  Team Avant Garde K Prakash Raju Manpreet Singh Utkarsh Maurya Catch up with the happenings in the campus by clicking on the link: https://issuu.com/avantgarde.mbaiitk/docs/avant_garde_march-april/1?e=0

The marketing domain has topped the  MBA   summer placements at the premier Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-Kanpur). Almost 50 per cent of the 2015-17 batch students participating in the summer placement process were offered internships in marketing by brands, including Lava, Godrej, Nielson, ACC and Idea Cellular. The domains of consulting & strategy and operations followed next with 14 per cent each of the offers made to students. Analytics and finance accounted for 11 per cent and 9 per cent respectively of the total offers made during the summer placements to the MBA students. IIT-K witnessed participation from 30 companies. Around 20 percent of the students bagged multiple offers during the process. The first time recruiters at the MBA summer placements included marquee names, such as Godrej, ACC, Indiamart, Nielsen, Arvind Mills and Idea. Other key recruiters were Boeing, Bharat Petroleum, Tata Motors,Policy Bazaar and Deloitte....

Everything eventually ends- this is the only universal truth. Like the last days of spring, the final page of a great novel or the climax of a beautiful movie, it's a moment that gives us great joy as well as sorrow. Today was one of those days. Today you bid farewell to all that was familiar and venture forth into an unexplored world with limitless possibilities. The time you spent here has given you all many bittersweet memories that you will cherish for years to come. Let this day not mark the end, but the beginning to the wonderful future that awaits you all. Adieu!!

Mr Praveen Tripathi began the seminar by giving a brief introduction about the classification of households in India. Sir mentioned about the New Consumer Classification System (NCCS) in which there are 12 grades of classification varying from A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, C1, C2, D1, D2, D3, E1, E2, and E3. He contrasted it with the old classification system in which there were 8 grades only. The basic theme behind all this classification is the life score which is assigned to all the households. Life score is calculated based on the education of chief owner and consumer durable. And the discrimination is measured by the Larenz Curve and Gini coefficient. The major drawback of this system as mentioned by sir was that the consumer durable penetration changes faster than education or occupation level. “Inside every transaction there is a knowledge, you need to decode it.” With this quote sir gave a brief about television audience metrics in India which started with Doordarshan Au...

Mr Harshvardhan started the seminar giving an overview of the different waves of e commerce that have come from time to time. It started with Microsoft in 1995 and soon reached India with Shaadi.com. The next wave came around 2005-07 when Alibaba started a Market place model in China. And the last wave came after 2007 which we witness now. Sir explained a fundamental concept of Selection Arbitrage which means when a particular product is not available in geography, it creates a demand. And this is what was leveraged by Amazon initially and further by Alibaba in China. China being a significantly diversified country, Alibaba addressed the selection arbitrage problem by providing a channel of communication between the small scale retailers. It was further comprehended by an example of Amazon and Wal-Mart, mentioning that Wal-Mart has been operating on a warehouse based model and Amazon saw this as an opportunity to reduce the inventory and warehousing cost by introducing th...

"The IITK MBA program is for those who have a desire to augment their technical knowledge with the underpinnings of a formal business education. Looking back at those two wonderful years, IITK taught me the value of team work, out of the box thinking and allowed me to meet some extraordinary people. Choosing IITK is the best thing I have done for myself from a professional standpoint and I must say that it has opened many doors to new opportunities and has been a key element in my career. " • Year of pass out from IIT K : 2006  • Current company name : KPMG USA LLP • Designation: Manager, Enterprise Solutions • Current Location: Indianapolis, Indiana, USA    

On 29 th January, 2016, MBA, IME Department, IIT Kanpur hosted an interactive seminar on “Advances in Consumer Research, Passive measurement, Big Data Micro segmentation and Social media listening” by Mr. Prithvi Raj, Lead-Mobile Insights, Nielsen India. The speaker began the seminar by asking questions on consumer research which the students answered enthusiastically. He updated us with some of the steps Nielsen follows during consumer research which starts from understanding the audience, finding the need gap, proving your product effectiveness to the people and finally ends with sales effectiveness measurement. He also made us aware about the need of innovations, SWOT analysis and competitor analysis before launching a new product. Market research can be done without explicitly conducting surveys-by observing consumers and monitoring their online behavior. For example, Amazon shows recommendations to users by observing their online behavior. The speaker also gave us insight...