Marketing the basic instincts

"Vishak is roaming on MG Road in Bangalore with his dog Brownie at 10:30 in the night and he wants to have sex...no, not with Brownie...can he?"

This was the question that Dr. Tapan Kumar Panda, the marketing management Professor at IIMK asked his students in today's class...yes, you got that right, in the class. Dr. Panda does have a unique style of functioning and in most of the cases, hits on the nerves of the students with his different style. The girl students of the batch are his special targets and he keeps on asking them questions about their boy friends and how and why do they like a particular brand of soap. But is this all that he really does? Certainly not...all his jokes have some purpose and by his cracking those jokes, the retention value of the concepts do increase. I think that hardly any of the students will forget the joke that he cracked today with respect to Vishak and his nightly sojourn and whenever they do think of this joke, they will also be reminded of the underlying concept.

Did you ask what the concept could have been behind such a sick joke? I will take you through it in the words of Dr. Panda.
"If Brownie wants to have sex, can he? He can, but Vishak can not...because Vishak is bound by some social norms which do not allow his basic need of sex to be filtered out and become a want. Thus, we can define a want to be a socially acceptable need."

Now you will say...man, what a way to explain a concept and I will whole-heartedly agree. Having read this blog for some time, the regular readers might have been forming an opinion regarding the way my career is heading (not that I seriously find any reason for doing that). However, these are still early days and though I admit that I have been struck with the glamour and fun involved in marketing, I do not know if it is there to stay. Micro Economics looks interesting as well, and that might lead to financial as well as market analysis...I do not really know.

Something strange and ridiculous (at least for me) happened today. I got a mail in reply to my cartoon that I had sent to the batch email id yesterday. The mail asked me to refrain from posting meaningless mails to the group to avoid clustering of the network. What is this, some sort of sacro sanctorum??? Well, it just reinforces my belief about the kind of attitude that people have come to this place with.

Why, oh why, do they think that a little fun, a little understanding for the other, will make them less of the professional than they are or want to become? But then, thinking this way, I had to realise that even I was not being really understanding. There may be people who may genuinely not like a cartoon and I may be offending their sensibilities by posting the toons (I don't buy the bit about clustering the mail boxes at all, whatever any one might say...there are so many more meaningless mails floating around with abandon). For all such people who did get offended, I have rendered a public apology and asked the others to send me their names so that I can form a group and keep sending the toons to that group alone.