A Summer Project is NOT Agent Recruitment Project

I'm shocked at the way number of B-Schools in India are forcing their Marketing Management students to appear for campus interviews - for Final Placements as well as for Summer Training.

For Summer Training, private Insurance sector companies are awarding projects which involve appointment of agents for selling insurance products. The students are being paid a commission for the number of agents they manage to recruit. They are being threatened that if they do not appoint a bare minimum number of agents, they may not get their "certificate of satisfactory completion" from the company at all. Once these students pass out the following year, companies marketing branded products may not touch them with a barge pole. What these students do in the name of Summer Project for a period of 6 to 8 weeks is not a project at all.

Final year MBA Marketing students (with a background in Engineering) have been offered final placements (during campus interviews in February) in insurance companies with the job profile remaining the same as that of Summer Training. The insurance companies issue "Letters of Offer" to practically every individual who appear for the interview. What is worse is that, thereafter, the students were not even allowed to appear for other campus interviews by the college authorities between February and June. The final year students were not even informed about their job content, i.e. on what they were expected to do on joining the company. Final year students have also realized in June that the remuneration promised to them has a very very very high component of variable pay (in the form of incentives). No wonders there's a large number of demotivated fresh and young MBAs in the marketplace. Will someone counsel these youngsters properly, please? I'm keen to hear from youngsters incidents which are very similar to these.

Digital Dabbawalas in Mumbai - from delivering dabbas to offering click-based services

It’s been more than a decade that the world woke up to the reality that Mumbai’s lunch-dabba system is an act of urban genius.

Some called it as the most ingenious food delivery system in the world. The Forbes magazine gave the dabbawalas (lunchbox deliverymen) a Six Sigma performance rating or a 99.99999 percent of precision, which means they make one error in 16 million deliveries! In the last 125 years, there has not been a single instance of a lunchbox that has not been delivered to its destination. Come rain or shine, heavy crowded local trains or Mumbai traffic, the lunch box is picked up from home and delivered. This is the precision of their service – and all this without using any technology.

In recent times, with the world and India taking digital leaps, the dabbawala’s too have found the need to embrace technology and offer click-based services.

"Most of our staff is semi-literate. We earn around Rs. 10,000 to 12,000 per month and were looking for opportunities to have an additional source of income. Our Prime Minister is working towards Digital India mission, and when we got an opportunity from Anulom Technologies for rental registrations, we too decided to offer digital services," says Ulhas Muke, President, Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association.

Dabba delivery to digital services

Around 5,000 dabbawalas travel over 60 to 70 km daily to deliver over 2 lakh lunchboxes across Mumbai, and have earned a reputation for their meticulous operations, integrity and honesty.

In October 2016, with the launch of digitaldabbawala.com, they are now expanding their delivery from just lunch boxes to last-mile delivery of digital services. This is a combined initiative with Anulom Technologies, a government approved rental-agreement registration website.

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"Today, everyone wants to work with a trusted facilitator for digital services. The first of such services by us has been around online rental agreement registration. Anulom directs our dabbawala to a customer’s doorstep with a laptop and a biometric device where the rental agreement format is shown, thumb impressions are taken with the help of biometric machine and documents collected if needed," says Jaising Pingle, Treasurer, Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association, and who is the first trained digital dabbawala.

Before launching this service, Anulom handpicked a 15 member team for process and laptop training. Each of these 15 individuals were chosen from different regions in Mumbai and Thane.

"We were amazed to witness that within two days this group had completely explored most of the laptop features and knew basics like turning it on, logging in and connecting to the net. Post this we held a two day boot camp in the evening for four hours to train them properly, both on the usage of laptops and biometric device working and also around the process of rental registration. We installed an app on their mobile devices. So there is no need to type a single letter. All they need to do is point and click and it is easily understandable. They are exceptionally fast learners," says Prabodh Navare, CEO, Anulom Technologies.

These people initially trained by Anulom have now become the building blocks of the digital movement and are training their fellow dabbawalas. Going ahead, digitaldabbawala.com is planning to launch services like making of Aadhaar cards, changing names on documents, marriage registrations or making other government documents.

(Source: Ashwani Mishra, ETCIO.com dated 2016-12-02)

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How the Brain Processes Different Types of Content [Infographic]

Sometimes, the movie adaptation of a book is better than the book itself. Maybe it's the acting, maybe it's the special effects or the soundtrack, or maybe the story is simply better told on the big screen than in our imaginations.

The reason? Different stories are better told in different formats depending on the message they're trying to convey.

The folks at Main Path Marketing created an infographic to break down common types of content marketing formats and how they communicate information to your audience. And some of their insights may surprise you. For example, did you know that the human brain processes videos 60,000X faster than text? That's part of what makes how-to videos so popular in online search habits.



Source:Written by Sophia Bernazzani in Hubspot