It is a widely accepted fact that marketers obsessively use broad and blunt instruments like mass marketing, national advertising, assembly line production, and inferential marketing research often missing personal marketing orientation. Also, customers want products that serve their exact needs of both—the mind and the heart. To understand how today’s marketers are trying to win over the customers, Corporate Resource Management Centre, (CRMC) of Jagan Institute of Management Studies organized its Annual Marketing Summit aptly titled ‘Hearts & Minds: Winning both ways’ on March 5th, 2005 at India International Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi.

The whole day industry-academia partnership exercise was well attended by Indian and multinational corporates like Mr. Kishore Chakraborty, Director Consumer Insight, McCann Erickson; Mr. Ajay Sood, General Manager, Wunderman; Mr. Raju Sarin, President, Media Transasia and Dr. Harshvardhan Verma, Faculty member, FMS, University of Delhi among others. Dr. M.S. Verma and Prof. Nitin Seth, Directors, JIMS, Prof. Acharya, Management Faculty, CRMC staff members, students and faculty members of JIMS were also present at the occasion. The marketing seminar began with a welcome speech by Dr. Verma. The attempt helped the corporates and the audience to understand how marketers win the customers by connecting through their hearts and minds.

Speaking on ‘Winning the heart & mind through advertising’, Mr. Chakraborty spoke about the role of advertising in moulding prospective consumers’ minds. He said, “Advertising is one medium where you can come with any idea as nobody questions you keeping in mind the strategy one opts.” He substantiated his views with ample examples as to how brands are compared with bundle of emotions and how to influence people born and conditioned in emotions. He also talked about the successful attempts of multinational companies of strongly connecting to Indian culture for selling their products.

Mr. Sood shared his viewpoint of ‘Winning customer forever’ understanding customer profitability and attending to ‘Never satisfied customers’. He spoke about Functional Benefit to the customer through performance, Process Benefit with the customer through Treatment and Relationship Benefit for the customer through Community.

‘Magic, Myth, Mystique and Branding’ was the topic chosen by Dr. Harsh V. Verma. Maintaining that marketing is all about success, survival, profits, sales, market share and growth, he said that the challenge is “about destroying commoditization unleashed by competition. Price sensitivity is what we see in the marketplace.” Clarifying the myths related to success of a brand, he said that a brand sold due to a reason is not a good brand. Moreover, it is the brand that is the source of revenue and not the product. Similarly, other speakers also shared their views on their respective fields focusing the consumer insight.