Meet The Press...

We started out the day with an interesting lecture from Professor K. Balakrishnan on “Indian Perspectives in International Branding”. Some interesting points he mentioned were: -the function of branding is to create risk, -certain brands in India can only be sold in particular states of India (partly because of tax reasons), -brands become useful when the customer loses his reference points, -the objective of marketing is to disorient the customer and the objective of the brand is to reorient the customer. He then showed us some commercial clips from India to show how they differ from American commercials. To be honest, I thought they were very similar to American commercials. One of the commercials we saw for ‘Asian Paint’ had a number of good looking people going in and out of a nice house. The music playing over the commercial was very upbeat. It was eerie how similar it was to an American commercial. Another one had a wedding going on with a number of luxurious items shown in the commercial. One conclusion, I can draw out of this is that both societies (American and Indian) are obsessed with status, power, and wealth. As stated previously in my blogs, Varma discusses Indian’s obsession with these attributes thoroughly in Being Indian. I think both societies recognize this, which is why the majority of commercials we see (whether in America or India) consist of good looking people with above average houses and other extravagant items.

After class we received a copy of the Star of Mysore, a local newspaper here in Mysore. Inside was an article titled “USA students visit SDM-IMD” about us studying international business in India. Another article we saw today about some of the students in our class that were interviewed for India’s national press. To top it all off, we had a press conference with various India media. I think that it is very flattering that so much media attention has been placed on us in these last couple of weeks. I hate to go back to what Varma says in Being Indian, but I really do think it reinforces the idea of Indian’s being obsessed with power and status. I believe the reason there was so much media attention was because we were all Americans and not to sound ethnocentric but Americans are viewed very highly in India (it doesn't have to be even Americans, but any foreigners coming to India with perceived status and power). By printing articles on us, these newspapers could hopefully sell more papers because they assume more people would buy it because of their obsession with high status people.

I also wanted to mention that I participated in Indian outsourcing today. My girlfriend sent me her paper to edit for grammar. I completed it during the day here (while she was sleeping in the states) and now when she wakes up tomorrow, it will be in her inbox ready to go. This made me realize what a valuable asset this is (U.S. companies outsourcing work to India). Having now experienced it first hand, I must say it is a very efficient process. At the press conference today, when Harvey was asked by a reporter “What do American’s think about outsourcing?”, he responded “as of now they do not like it all”. I couldn’t agree more with him, all you hear from the ordinary American is how outsourcing is eliminating all the jobs in America. In the book The World is Flat, Friedman talks about this issue with Rajesh Rao, founder and CEO of an Indian game company in Bangalore. “Instead of complaining about outsourcing, said Rajesh, Americans and Western Europeans would ‘be better off thinking about how you can raise your bar and raise yourselves into doing something better…my message is that what’s happening now is just the tip of the iceberg…what is really necessary is for everybody to wake up to the fact that there is a fundamental shift that is happening in the way people are doing business. And everyone is going to have to improve themselves and be able to compete. It is just going to be one global market (190-191).’” I completely agree with what Rajesh is stating here. Change is always a very hard thing to go through, but when you want to stay a global competitor you have to be able to adapt to it in an efficient and productive manner. One thing that I am going to do to help spread the word on outsourcing as a positive business tool is exactly what Harvey said in the press conference which is “after this study abroad experience, I am going to go back home and tell people the positive experience I have had with it”. Attached are some pictures of the press conference below.

Finally, I finished off the day with a dinner at a rooftop restaurant with my good friends on the trip. We also invited in our auto-rickshaw driver who we have became close with throughout the trip (he invited us to his house for the festival tomorrow). It was a really fun dinner. Attached below is a picture of all of us at dinner.