Up For Sale: Are you Game?

Chennai has become a shopper’s paradise as most of the high end apparel companies have their booties up for grab. The results are clearly visible, in normal days you will find little crowd inside magnificently decorated show-rooms and the yellow display board with SALE written over it has remarkable effect. It’s surely a crowd puller as the regular brand shopper take it as a chance to pre-pone their future purchase and the low end shopper welcomes it as an entry to the brand conscious club.

The question is what’s the logic behind the sale? Are the prices really low? In some cases it’s yes and in some cases they simply markup the price and then offer a discount which actually means only 10-15% for the customer instead of
the promised 40-50%.

The UpTo deal: - I often get frustrated when I see the UpTo SALE like upto 40%. The simple idea is that they offer high discount on slow moving items so that to recover the loss in revenue from the quantity and utilities are frustratingly priced at a premium. So for the company it’s always a win-win situation. Like I went into this Adidas showroom to find out that their 50% sale condition is that you have to pay full on the product you price and then you can redeem the discount on some other article. So if you have to buy a shoe worth Rs. 5000/- you will get discount worth Rs 2500/- on the next purchase which has to be made on the same day. I doubt that consumers are not dumb enough to fall into the trap and most of the shoppers are the brand loyals only. So their purpose might only be to drive traffic into their lavishly maintained showrooms.

The purpose: - The purpose behind SALE offers are ideally one of these clearing the stock and making way for new arrivals as taste and preferences changes every six months, targeting those people who have the desire and offering them some incentive to take purchase action or simply driving traffic to store by putting a SALE banner. Consumers are not that ignorant now, they have their own mental accounting and they can quickly guess that what should be the ideal price of the product and the sale tag really add some value to them or not. Simply putting a sale banner and charging exorbitant prices are not going to do any justice to your sales and the volume turnover won’t differ much. It could be the opposite way also where you run your promotions for so long that the discounted price is actually perceived as the real price. Koutons is an excellent example where the company runs promotion for like all round the year with discounts as high as 60%. Now, there are few takers for Koutons at the markup prices. But, the company is still happy because they have penetrated into the market segment where loyalty is little and people are willing to switch a brand if they get value for money. So, a short term tactical decision for Koutons may become long term strategy for the pricing of their products. The big question is that where will these promotions stand after the entry of big brothers in retail like Wall Mart and Sears? May be apparel industry should start looking inward and focus on implementing a target costing approach.

We are all slave to our habits..

“The future of a person depends on the kind of habits they have. And we all are creator of our habits”. Among those million two liners from Navjot Singh Sidhu, this has somehow managed to grab my mindshare for long. We all agree about the thing about individual habits but then how many of us have tried changing our habits in let’s say past one year? Anyways talking about myself, I really have tried changing some of my old time habits (I don’t smoke or drink so considerably it should have been easier for me) but I can honestly acknowledge this fact that I have failed miserably.

It’s a cruel reality that over a period of time subconsciously we all become slave of our habits. Even a simple habit like lying down while studying is hard to change, forget about the other strong things like smoking, drinking or even getting up late in the morning. Many people end up making resolutions like going for a walk early in the morning or eating breakfast daily but then my experience suggests that it’s really hard to change even simple things in our lives.

Well the important thing I want to highlight is that though we may find ourselves incapable to change these things and instead learn to live with them I think that we miss out on the hard fact that in a way we loose control over our lives. The stronger a habit becomes, the lesser control we have on our lives. This lack of control sometime plays with our conscious mind too and it reflects in poor utilization of our time and sometime poor decision making. Well, it happens in those cases also when we are exposed to a particular life style and we try to develop certain habits like being friendlier, going out more frequently, being impulsive or may be smoking and drinking also. Now, it starts casually but then it takes over your personality after some time and people may feel guilty, stressed or tensed over their incapability to launch a restore operation.

But then, after all we ourselves are creator of our habits and the only thing is that we have to learn not to give up. We should know that if we are capable of developing a certain habits then let it be the solution to the same problem. We do not actually need to change our habits as it is a demanding process rather with a little bit of expert counseling and help we can always inculcate another habit which offset the negative effect of the other one. This is one area where I think that knowledge of group dynamics, motivation, attitude, perception and human psychology can help. And even if the theoretical understanding proved to be of no help, then what are friends for? Well, so my idea is that work on just one good habit of choosing the right people in your life and you will never regret.

Humour**
Somebody please help me with my habit of blabbering continuously. I really have become slave of it or may be it is too much of listening to Sidhuism. As the master so the disciple.

Life is really beautiful.

It was one fine day in March when my surgeon announced that you are out of any danger my son! But you have to continue with the chemicals for one more month as to make sure that your system remains immune. I was diagnosed with Lymphoma in June 2005 and had excision biopsy to confirm that. If I say that I was not terrified at any moment then probably I would be lying because I was really terrified. Not for me but for my family members who knew that I was just one diagnosis away from death. Months of chemotherapy followed and I crawled my way out of the claws of cancer. Well, most of my friends were unaware of this and probably if I say today that I was with them laughing, shouting and cracking jokes during my final days in college probably no body will believe this but it was one truth that I chose to hide from everyone and my family chose to hide it from my Mom. I was completely unsure about my future and every swig of those chemicals use to remind me of that terrible thing that I was carrying inside my neck. My emotional trauma was so overwhelming that I use to cry alone in dark and those were the times when my thoughts really shaped up. Those were the moment when I decided about moving ahead with my MBA. I indulged myself in reading. All sort of reading. I indulged myself in other activities but this thing was always playing at the back of my mind that I was living a borrowed life.

Today I am here, six months deep into my MBA waiting for my summer placements where I would be perhaps closest to any organizational setup and which will decide the direction of my career but then if I have to pick one period in which I have learnt the most is not these six months of MBA or tiring years of Engineering but rather those 12 months when I was hanging between life and death. Well, it’s no mean achievement considering the fact that some spend their entire lives and never realize the purpose of their lives.

Humour:
My friends always ask me that how come I manage to sleep so much as it’s considered a crime to sleep for more than 3 hours a day in a B school but then probably because I know what I have to do with my life. Nice excuse, isn’t it?

2007: One Step Close

Year 2006 was of significant importance to me. I graduated in Engineering (even I am wondering till date that how) I traveled all the way to south India to start with my masters against the advice of my father and family members. But well, today I am sitting here on my desk trying to do an inquest on my last one year.

I am trying to trace the reasons behind my decision about my career. All I remember is that there was this vague picture inside my mind about the white collar job with six figure salaries offered to MBA graduates but then one girl tried to change all this. She questioned my attitude and then to find some answers to her questions I learnt a lot about changing the world. She did not ask me to join some NGO or to do something really stupid but rather she convinced me that how my MBA can fit into the schemes of things that I wanted to do. Well, I don’t know in which part of the world she is now but then all those thoughts are still fresh and honest inside me. Those thoughts were seriously sticky. The idea of providing mass healthcare on affordable cost, educating masses without compromising with the quality of education, empowering people with low cost skills improvement programs, at this point of time they may seems to be farfetched but I know that even ordinary individuals have done extra-ordinary in the past. It was sad that I was unable to meet her during her stay in India and god knows when I will be close again to her but then to inspire you need not to be very close. All I want to say to you is thanks Piali. I am one step closer to my dreams.

New Year.. Anniversary Post.

Whoa.. My blog turned one year older... I am happy because I successfully held on to at-least this one resolution of mine. If there is something to remember I guess I started my year with a fitness routine and I pressed myself on jogging, walking and lawn tennis but I lost my way out due to travel and then to this MBA. Life has never been so demanding for me. Though I still don't study much but then, I have learnt to appreciate this new and stressed way of life. I know life will be like this only so better be prepared. Well, if I have to take one thing out of this year and carry it forward then probably I would take the memories from my convocation. For two days I felt like I was doing time travelling. There I was standing at the crossroads of the two different lives one "of a freak" and the other "of a somewhat serious freak". Anything it will be sheer injustice to summarize that experience in one or two lines. The new resolution is to pen down all that the year 2006 has taught me. Hope I will hang on to it. Three cheers to the new year... Hip Hip hurrah..