Life Experiences in The Journey of Making a Fruitful Marketing Career

Industry Interaction – Listing Career Opportunities in Marketing; Account of a series of life experience in the journey of making a fruitful Marketing career, October 25th, 2019

Objective: To guide and enable students choose from a plethora of unaware opportunities in the realm of Marketing.

Target Audience: 1st semester (2019-21 Batch) & 3rd semester (2018-20 Batch)

Ms. Meera Ramakrishnan, a very talented and textured women, a business leader was invited to deliver a session on the subject titled above. The speaker is claimed to have extensive experience of more than 24 years in strategy planning and marketing. Her experience spans across B2C Healthcare, Information Technology, Media, and Safety & Security.

Ms. Meera opened up the session by sharing a brief anecdote of her own life to allure the audience. She narrated very likably of how she was distinctively from a different background and had nothing to do with marketing but yet pursued her MBA without being not so thoughtful of what she was upto. She illustrated how she could manage to get her internship at the TTK Group (based in Chennai an Indian business conglomerate with its presence across diverse industries that included then consumer durables, pharmaceuticals and supplements etc.). to work for the organization’s advertising team in promoting and building a marketing strategy (USP) for men’s lingerie.

Ms. Meera started her career in July 1995 as a Senior Marketing Officer at ‘The Hindu’ where she was responsible for creating and executing marketing strategies to increase space selling and objectively gearing the organization towards attaining desirable profit margins. After working for around 4 years at ‘The Hindu’ she moved to Infosys Technologies Limited and became the company’s Marketing Manager designated with the primary responsibility of heading global marketing for “Automotive Aerospace and Engineering Practice” and led her team there for almost 7 years making the business very lucrative. She seems unstoppable now! She got associated with GE Healthcare after Infosys for few years, assisted the organization as the Head of its South Asia marketing running responsibilities of Branding, Strategy and Marketing Operations. She also held an esteemed position of Marketing and Strategy Director at Honeywell – Life Safety.

After toiling hard for well-regarded organizations in the year 2017 she started her entrepreneurial journey by establishing Zishta, an organization trying to revive and relive the ancient ethnic knowledge/culture by offering sustainable household solutions, besides the concern has its listings on ecommerce platforms.

The speaker kept emphasizing on specific attributes like observation, conviction to convince and clarity of thinking throughout her dialogue session to lay one’s focus on understanding that one has got to be imbibing constantly in today’s age and time to progress in professional career. She also quoted her own professional instances to assert how important these skills are in the business world.

She yet drew several other examples citing references to how companies with whom she had worked with suffered from failures and gained from successes to enlighten and make the student community accept the opportunities presented by the unrestrained volatile market.

Grand Takeaways:

• The session produced educated audience; students are now aware of the real difference between sales and marketing.
• Marketing is understood as a 360° framework (it starts with the inception of a company’s offerings and is valued eternally).
• Discovery of brilliant unfamiliar career opportunities in marketing – Strategic Analyst, Market Researcher, Business Analyst, Channel Management, Consumer marketing, MASCOM etc.
• Significance of being abreast with what’s happening around in order to sustain and subsist in the marketplace.

The session finally got concluded by felicitating the dignitary with a memorable memento as a token of appreciation in exchange for exemplary industry insights.