About MBA - A day in the Life of a Marketing Manager

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Interviews

Marketing Manager

Operations Manager

Chief Technology Officer (CTO)




	Maneesh Varma
	Head (Post-Paid Acquisitions), Corporate Marketing Bharti Cellular Limited New Delhi

Interview of Marketing Manager


	Business Lifeline -Calendar and E-mail The first thing I do after reaching work is check my mails. I can expect to see 40 to 50 new messages in the inbox on any given day. The first part of the day is spent sorting through the updates from the circles and other teams that I interact with. I reply to the more urgent mails and then check my calendar for the day. Looking at the calendar I get to know what are the tasks scheduled for today, what are the upcoming deadlines and if there are any meetings and presentations coming up that I have to prepare for.

	Plans and Programs Most of my day is spent in carrying out the marketing programs. Programs such as the launch of new products, alliance programs, change in design, packaging or communication of existing products or roll out of new tariff plans. The skeletons of these programs are developed three to four months in advance and approximate timelines decided. As the deadline for the launch of a program approaches, the micro level tasks are rolled out. For example, if we are introducing a new packaging for our post-paid products, the micro-level tasks would be giving a brief to the creative agency for the new packaging, getting a new design from them and then a whole round of meetings and presentations till a design is finalized. Besides the launch of new products & programs, my other key responsibility is regular monitoring of the performance of programs that have already been launched. This normally involves interaction with IT to get performance reports, getting user feedback and analyzing it, and if the feedback is not positive, implementing the changes required to make the programs more effective.

	Traveling As a function, marketing involves a fair bit of traveling. I try to make at least one trip to one of our circles in any given month. In critical cases, it may even be two to three trips in a month. The idea behind these trips to is to get first hand information about how our programs are being implemented and how customers are responding to these programs. I interact with the product owners in the circles, circle sales teams, channel partners and customers. This allows me to understand and measure performance and success of the program.

	Customer Feedback The success of any marketing activity depends on how well it connects with the customers; hence getting feedback from the end users is very critical element. To ensure this, I make it a point to visit one of our retail outlets at least once a week. There, by overlooking the interaction of our representatives with walk-ins and other existing customers, I can get customer feedback first hand. I also collect customer feedback through market research tracks which are done on a monthly basis, data from the Customer Care teams, and reports from the circles.

	Fire-fighting Most of our marketing initiatives are planned well in advance. It involves backend activities such as co-ordination with the creative team, putting the back-end IT support in place and ensuring that all processes are followed and deadlines fixed. However, since the telecom sector is very dynamic in nature it is not unusual that competitors unexpectedly introduce new plans overnight. On such days we go into fire-fighting mode, as the entire team races against time to get the competition counter approvals and put the product and processes in place.

	Schedule My day begins at 9:30am; there is usually a coffee break around 11:30. Lunch can be anytime between 2 to 3 but that's typically a working lunch. On good days, I get back home around 8:30, but whenever there is fire-fighting to be done, the team has been known to spend the entire night at the office. But, that is what makes marketing such and exciting function to be in.

	First to the market - this is mantra that guides us. Every task done through out the day is paced to ensure that we are the first to the market and that we never miss deadlines.

	As told to Pegasus in December 2005.

Choosing the Right Specialization

A Day in the Life of an Operations Manager