3 E'S of Professional Education at JICM

You have to dream …before your dream can come true Our endeavor at JICM is to train students to the best of their ability, providing them pragmatic training to make them employable in the field of Marketing Communication Management

REMINISCING JICM

Down memory lane, reminiscing JICM, I just cannot resist the gush of my emotions. It was raining incessantly when we inaugurated JICM, Bhopal on 23rd July, 2009. The infrastructure was almost complete, but tit-bits yet to go.

Students, faculty, staff members, my colleagues Rajiv, Abhishek, Sanjeev and I were standing still before the front office-gate, when two of our founder students Mr. Vishwendra Singh Parmar and Ms. Swati Soni cut the ribbon to set the ball rolling at JICM. 24 committed students with great trust on JICM, looked upon me with great expectations to make their lives worthwhile and their dreams fulfilled.

These students had great trust on me. I salute their trust bestowed in JICM. JICM will ensure that these students are well groomed, well educated and well trained by the best of professional faculty which India offers and are finally well placed in their desired destinations. While raising JICM, I always imagined to bring the best of Communication and Management School together, where communication plays the anchoring role. To make this happen, I visited many C-Schools and B-Schools in India and abroad to assimilate the best of both the worlds. I finally decided that JICM should have in-house practice facilities with the best of industry faculty teaching so that students can simultaneously practice what they learn from these maestros.

This is how the 1st Practice School for Communication Management came into existence in India. In JICM, students will master the Science of Marketing Communication Management which our industry needs today. They will be trained to develop the ability to see beyond the obvious. To provide practice to our students, JICM is the only school in India to have an in-house advertising agency and monthly newspaper “COMMA” that trains students by working on live projects.


IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNICATION

Communication is the foundation of all relationships and interpersonal working. It involves the mutual exchange of information, and is therefore, central for team functioning. The most direct form of communication is active listening, speaking, communicating through written message and non-verbal communication. In short, communication is a process by which we assign and convey meaning in an attempt to create shared understanding.

All over the world, Communication is considered as the means of developing and expressing our inherent abilities, because in each one of us there is a hope and dream which when fulfilled can be translated into a benefit for everyone. I believe honourable nations emerge when citizens build their ability to excel and communicate it to develop shared understanding for the larger benefit of the society.

3 E'S of PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION

JICM philosophy encompasses 3 E'S of Professional Education i.e.
Education
Employment
Employability

Enacting the philosophy we always take in account the clear distinction between Quantity v/s Quality and Excellence v/s Inclusion. Understanding it fully well that “Good is not the enemy of Great” we groom both category of students with the same spirit and zeal. At JICM we recognize that students are not born adult, one has to develop and grow adult, and only care, inculcation of knowledge and practice can make them perfect in their chosen field.

Our endeavor at JICM is to develop employability of our students so they become readily employable. To accomplish this very objective, we conduct personality grooming sessions at regular intervals and post all our students for summer training in renowned companies like Ogilvy, Times of India, Pedilite, Dainik Jagran, Reliance, Docomo, Radio Mirchi etc. In its very first year JICM had constituted a placement cell and this month we will be opening a Placement Liaison Office at Mumbai as well. JICM will ensure that all students get placements in their chosen fields.

BE ORIGINAL AND REMAIN FRESH

We realize at JICM that young minds are more impressionable than mature minds. These young people are beautiful people with beautiful minds. They are pristine and that is precisely what we care for while guiding them towards the right-fruitful direction with our experience because I understand “A child miseducated is a child lost”. We at JICM teach these beautiful minds to be ORIGINAL. As original is always fresh and fresh only has a shelf life. The main essence of mastering Communication is to “think fresh and create fresh”, because in the Communication world only the freshest survives.

At JICM, we tell our students never-ever let any of your tiny ideas die young. Try to explore it at its full length, try to apply it to current situations and see if something refreshing can be brewed out of it because “You have to dream….. before your dream can come true”.

JSWS MISSION

Jagran Social Welfare Society (JSWS), the promoting body of JICM, has its mission, making world class quality education more accessible and affordable so that more students can pursue their dreams. It is a mission we believe that will help make the world a better place. Demand for professional education continues to grow, often outpacing supply around the world. The centre of our vision is value-defined by our students and those who employ them. Career oriented degrees delivered with international perspective will help JICM students achieve a return on their education investment in a global market place.

JICM success is measured by the fact that when our students succeed, the country will prosper and the society will benefit.

My heartfelt congratulations on the successful completion of one year of JICM operations.

Hari Mohan Gupta
CHAIRMAN
JAGRAN SOCIAL WELFARE SOCIETY
Bhopal

GOA AD FEST 2010: NAKED IDEAS

The trip to the Goa Ad fest was like dream come true. After the meltdown, which took all the industries across the world into downsizing their human resources, and their advertising budgets to cut down cost. From the consumers end, they started to concentrate more on savings and spending only on necessities rather then luxury products and services to sustain in the time of recession. This year’s theme at the GOA ADFEST 2010 was “Survival of the Freshest” where some of the top advertising agencies showcased some of the freshest ideas, which they had created, on behalf of their clients to catch the imagination of the target market and made the brand stand apart from the cluttered competition.

During recession when the consumers are choosy to pick among various options available in the market, it usually takes a “fresh idea” or an out of the box idea to break the clutter and competition. One such seminar which I attended during the Goa Ad Fest 2010 was of Will Collin, Founder Partner, Naked Communication, where he talked about the importance of thinking fresh and tailoring the communication to the needs of the target audience rather than being over creative.

In his presentation, Collin began by incorporating the popular adage into his idea, saying that freshness is not about trying different things, but doing things differently. "The problem is that we forget that only through process, we arrive at fresh ideas. Freshness in communication means asking what you are actually planning for," he said. Collin resented the fact that fresh communication is often thought of as doing "cool stuff".

"Challenge everything! If you want to make a difference, go to the core of the problem," he suggested.

He added that fresh communication is not about chasing "shiny, new things" or about finding different routes to reach the same place. "Start conversation in a different place. Recognize there is a need to change. Start a conversation to find the core problem, than jumping straight to the solution," he elaborated.

To explain his point further he cited an example from a 1940s Clark Gable movie, The Huckster, where in a particular scene, a marketing official insists on forcefully pushing the brand to the consumer. "How much has really changed from those days? How much have we moved from the marketing paradigm we choose to work in?" he asked.

Collin, thereafter, proceeded to share some 'lessons' for fresh communication.

The first lesson, which he gave, was Avoiding Irritation: When we design a communication one should keep in mind the communication should not irritate the consumer. He believes that we are still following this as a legacy which needs to be broken if we need to achieve freshness in communication.

The second lesson to attain freshness in communication is to attain an Integrated Communication where he believes that the communication strategy should be designed around the consumer and not to confront brand in front of the consumer. The consumer experiences a brand not only through the bought media but also through personal experiences of consumers, chat rooms, website, visuals ect. The totality of all mediums creates the perception about a brand. The brand communication is something similar to the human communication where only 7% is about the copy, message, creative which the agency creates and 93% is the way the brand is behaving, the context it is encountered, the style with which it is communicated. This is the main problem, which he thinks is with the advertising agencies where they are too focused on the 7% forgetting about the 93% of the communication. To illustrate this he gave an example of Lloyd TSB Bank campaign “YOU FIRST” where they claimed to put the consumer first. To test this claim, a telephone call was made to the bank; and the caller, posing as a potential customer, asked the bank representative how the bank put the customer first. The results revealed a rather callous approach, with one of the eventual responses being, "That is just something they say in the ads". Collin reiterated that this was definitely not a case of integrated marketing, which is critical for freshness in communication.

The third lesson is avoiding living in a silo and being isolated, which exist on both agency as well as client side in the industry. This is where people work in their individual capacity and in their own ways. In agencies and organizations one department does not interact with the other department. According to Collin, this is a structural fault which most of the agencies and organizations have, which is hampering the freshness in communication.

The fourth lesson, which Collin thinks is important to gain freshness in communication, is to never be compromised. "Media neutrality needs to come from objectivity - free from bias. Think objectively what combination of services would work best," he said. He also suggested that organizations should have an independent communication strategy agency, which should not be part of the core organization. This helps the strategy agency to have a full picture, a bird eye view to suggest what’s best for its client.

For the fifth lesson he reiterated his earlier point of not chasing shiny, new things as the fifth lesson. Most new initiatives are recommended more for the novelty factor, rather than being the right solution to the problem, he observed. "Freshness does not essentially mean you have to be sexy," was the sixth lesson. "Unsexy can be the new sexy," he added. He believes when core strategies are to be designed its best to be unsexy, as being unsexy is to follow the process for designing a complete integrated marketing communication plan. Following a unsexy process always help clients to give a profitable approach rather then a new shiny, sexy solution. He also gave example of one their clients Boots – the chemist in the UK. By this example he said how going by a process helped them to understand the core of the problem, which eventually reduced their cost and increased the profits.
Collin urged that the audience needs to be understood better for getting freshness in communication. Explaining the dangers of taking the audience for granted, he quoted another dialogue from The Huckster, "Someday, 50 million people are going to just reach out and turn off their radios." Collin remarked that consumers should not be seen as the "target audience", but as partners. He attacked the jargon used in marketing lingo, which he termed as "military language". "It is not about carpet bombing or guerilla warfare, but respecting the audience," he said.

He also suggested that we should start thinking from the consumer side and start living a life, which he/she faces as a consumer, instead of just thinking of an idea and then looking at ways of hitting the consumer with that message. This will help agencies to make the correct decision as to where the brand needs to communicate and will be more effective.

The next lesson, he said was to overcome "muscle memory" and following a monotonous routine at work. "There is a better way if you unlearn your muscle memory. Everything your brand does is communication," he said. He also focused on different ways how clients look at their budgets, which are namely, Silos where each department has its own budget and they plan differently which leads to disintegration. The second is the coordination model where different department still work separately but they try to coordinate with each other’s plan. He believes that the third model of integration is most effective where there is a single pool of cash and every department sits together and thinks the most effective way of spending the budget. This is the best way to achieve freshness in communication.

He proceeded to cite case studies of work done by Naked as examples before closing the session. "If we want to be successful, we need to acknowledge our weaknesses," Collin said, as part of his closing remarks.

Welcome Note

Hello everyone

This is my first go at blogging and I am pretty excited about it. In my blogs i will be sharing my experiences from both work and personal life. Since I am working in the education sector will also put some of my views of policy and new trends in education sector.

Also I will be posting some of the articles i keep writing in the areas of brand development, marketing communication and other marketing field. I hope you will find these interesting and keep encouraging me to go and write more.

Some of the article in pipeline are a review on my visit to the Goa Adfest, trends in educational institute marketing, brand development in education sector and a meeting with Will Collins.

I hope you all will find them interesting.