I always believe that ‘Management’ can never be found in one or the other aspect of the environment where we live. Management is not just about the concepts but also about the different perspective we can bring in all of its application. It is not always about doing some things which are out of the box but more than often about doing the same thing differently. Marketing or management can little be learnt from the books and more from the real life which we experience every day.
Today, I visited a ‘Ganesh’ temple. The atmosphere was awesome. One could feel spiritual waves all around in the air. We can always sense such spirituality when we visit temple. The whole set-up always seems colorful to me. When you visit any place of devotion, you can actually both see and feel various colors. The only thing is you must have those eyes and sense to see all the colors. One can see colors of flowers stalls, no. of toys put up for sales, CDs of bhajans, lockets having photograph of the god, sacred threads, small stalls of snacks, etc. But all these are non-living static things. But there are some more dynamic colors as well which attracted me the most. These colors are people, their behavior, their faith and their strong trust which gives them the power to tackle their problems and worries, beliefs of visitors, so on and so forth.
Marketing too is a dynamic concept. Thus, when there is anything dynamic, you can correlate marketing there. I could learn marketing in these dynamic colors of people visiting Ganeshji temple. The only funda is ‘Keep your eyes open.’
The question remains that what did I learn from the visit? What marketing fundamentals I visualized from this? Here are the answers. I can learn quite a few things from this visit and these colors. Being a marketing student, I also would like to give the terminology (so called marketing jargon) to this experience, as ‘Ganeshji Experience’.
What is this Ganeshji experience? It is as simple as creating and giving an experience ‘Ganeshji temple visit’ to our customers. Let’s create some concept around it (as I am a marketing student).
The people visiting our company or organization are like devotees visiting Ganeshji temple. Once devotee enters the temple area, his mind gets transformed to a different spiritual stage. The aura around the temple takes hold of his mind. In a similar way, it’s the responsibility of the company to take hold of its customers’ minds so that whenever they will think of a solution which we are offering, we must deliver that experience full of the aura which captivates their minds..
Second step is when devotee travels to the main temple; he finds various offerings like photographs, small statues of god, sacred threads, etc. which tell his mind that you are at the right place where you are going to get the ultimate peace. So, as an organization can we do something like this? Obviously we can. It is our responsibility to communicate our values, our value to our customers. It is very important to create similar trust in their minds that we are capable of meeting rather exceeding their expectations and capable of providing them with the best solution possible.
Once devotee reaches the Ganeshji temple; he sees a rat there which is the chariot of Ganeshji. As per Hindu mythology, it is believed that when you express your wishes to this chariot, he will forward them to Ganeshji. So, one can find people talking to chariot of Ganeshji to express their wish. Again there are marketing learning here. In the organization, everyone who interacts with customers should be like this rat. Customer must feel like sharing his needs, problems, and worries as wishes. The faith should be created in the minds of customers that once my problem is communicated to him, it will be solved for sure. For that, our representatives must believe in the values of organization (rat sits in front of Ganeshji in the position with both the hands folded showing respect and obedience). Representatives should also be like him; pure trust on organizations values and complete respect towards customers.
Finally devotee meets his beloved Ganeshji and lastly takes away ‘Prasad’ with him. Is here any management learning? Yes there is. When devotee sees his god, his eyes are closed and he sees his god through the eyes of his mind. It symbolizes the trust and the faith in the god. Similarly, it is the responsibility of the organization that when our customer visits us and seeks for the solution, he must be treated with such an expertise and must be provided with such an experience that he must come with his closed eyes next time having complete faith and trust about our organization. At the last stage, devotee takes away Prasad with him. In the organization, we can call it as a cherry on the top of icing of the cake. We must exceed our customer expectations. When we will be able to achieve that, our customer will carry this Prasad of their delights. Such delighted customers will definitely come back to us because that ultimate thread of devotion has been established.. It is very much crucial as it is said that retention of customers is more important than acquisition.
As mentioned earlier, management learnings lie in the journey of life than just in any book written about it. So let’s try to create ‘Ganeshji Experience’ for our customers with customer as devotee and our products and solutions as God for them to worship about.
