Friday, March 10, 2006

The Marketing Project - ACT- II

EXPLORATORY BUYING BEHAVIOUR TENDENCIES....

the note read.

actually from as many as 17 topics, we zeroed in on the worst topic on earth! why? tough Q. only we shd have known then itself....we wanted to differentiate ourselves from other grps.... actually the prof praised our grp in particular for having taken this topic from amongst other relatively easier ones. and boy, that was a signal for us that we r unnecessarily trying kite flying without the manjhaa. i tell u again, we have been extremely adventurous and we r paying heavily for it. still we cud have done things with a single easier hypothesis. and we complicated things too much by setting up a hypothesis which was still not done in any research. over enthusiasm. blind passion. heart ruled over mind.too late when we realised that.

given the fact marketing by itself is such a perception based and highly subjective fundaes throwing subject, the topic we chose drove us crazy. for instance, i never knew variety seeking cud be so different from change seeking ( according to researchers) . these research papers r grt. they talk abt same things in so different ways that u will be convinced that u can just abt link any thing with anything. but dont try understanding the rationale. chances r that u will not. actually till date we have not understood in entirety the framework of our project ( altho we had submitted the report and the same has been graded....yeah pls dont ask the grades)

3 days left for our submission after exams. with too many threads running in parallel, we had to optimise watever lil time we had. yeah that meant googling thro the nights. i love googling. but i never liked to read the documents i download. it is such a pain. it sure is. ajay was supposedly having a night duty at the MDP lab. gaurav wd be there till midnight. they were handling accomodations for ppl attending GD PIs. i realised that i had to burn the night out at the lab along with them. try some unsuccessful googling. add more crap to the report. or whatever.

we sat thro the night. lucky for us. one 500 ml pepsi bottle to give us company. what....for 4 hrs. thats a world record for taking the longest time to drink a single 500 ml bottle. that too three guys drinking in tandem.

we were searching for the scales. the instruments that are used in a market research survey. meanwhile we had downloaded too many papers ( and read them too). and worse still, some of them contradicting the findings of the remaining. and what are we supposed to do? do this stuff over and over till we burn ourselves out? and without any result? gaurav left at three am finally. ajay and me continued with the work. 4.30 AM, i had dozed off unknowingly. guess ajay was down 15 mins before me. it was a long time since i slept in a chair. the neck was badly aching. legs cud not straighten. wonder how ajay managed. he cud not have.

i managed to open my eyes at 6 AM sharp. my first gaze fell on ajay. he was still looking hard at me and started talking abt some marketing funda. and hey! i started answering him as though we had left a conversation just a min before and were now continuing it. he had supposedly got up 15 mins before. that equalised our sleeping durations. and instantaneously googling continued. for one more hr. we left the lab at 7.15 AM.

we met again at two. we had to collate and relate all the stuff we had collected. meanwhile the prof had sent a detailed format for writing the report. too detailed. three dense pages. at one point of time we used to wonder whether our whole report wd come for three pages!!!! and that too just one day before.

vijay who was out of action for a while, with a bad throat was back in the reckoning. girish also came to the rescue. divya was happily in hyderabad. married lady that she was, we cud not hold her back in our project when she wanted to spend the exam holidays at home. she had escaped at the right time....the worst was yet to be finished.

we decided on the frame work. not very sure though. Discussed and debated unabated. finally we seemed to agree on what we were going to write. atleast we had to. din have enough time on our hands.

we did some parallel processing while making the report. vijay, girish and me were into colating the literature review while ajay and gaurav set abt making the hypothesis and the intro part. but proof reading wd be done together. or so we thought. we ended up finishing our respective parts by 2 AM. we decided to vent out our frustrations in the night canteen. i was not in a mood. managed a chocolate horlicks. others gobbled some gobi parathas.

2.30 AM. gaurav was dead frustrated. gaurav told me that we had to put this vetti stuff in my blog. proof reading was a slow affair. after all why did want ourselves to read the crap we had made ourselves. we cud aptly describe the thought process going on in our mind at that point of time by this foto


i guess i was the first one to fall asleep. in my trademark style, i do in afternoon lectures. others followed suit. 3.30 AM we were wondering why 5 of us shd bee sleeping in a single room with so much discomfort. we left the place and decided to meet at 9 AM. sharp, some one told me. sure enough, i got up at 8.55 AM. brushed my teeth and headed straight for gaurav's room. it took as nearly 4 hrs from then on to freeze the report

finally burned the report on a cd. even it was troubling us. we cudnt initially. tht cd was a goner. somehow it allowed us later.

we decided that awful night that we will keep this project association a memorable one. dheeraj came and pictured our pathetic postures. yeah he did a nice job. thanks to gaurav's digicam.

some fotos for the record:

<-- --------vijay the group leader. man, after u r the leader!!!! u gotta slog even if we dont. dont crib. we still have marketing part II. field study. get ready!!!! anyway he did slog thro the proof reading part....and looks the most serious among us in that grp foto.

yeah i realised the futility of this material life. smile was all i cud do. after all in life, what matters???? -------------->

<-- ---------Gaurav looked the most pathetic. a smile was too lil to placate him. he needs a huge dose of motivicin - the new tablet designed for motivation designed for those who do such marketing projects.

girish looked comfortable. lucky chap.

Acknowledgements:

to all u guys ( and ofcourse me too) for made having this marketing project a GREAT FAILURE.

hey!!!! we still have time to get the cards right. lets atleast get the field study right. doomed if we dont!!!!

Samje?????????

(spl thanks to vijay for making that bubbles of thoughts in the grp foto)

2 comments:

P H Karthik said...

Excellent article. Beutifully captured the moods of everybody. A Yet another path-breaking blog from the stable of lottu-losukku!

Aravindan said...

@anu,

does it happen in ur project too?