Giri Devanur – Indian Institute Of Management (neuroscience In Marketing)

By Author: Giri Devanur
Total Articles: 6
Comment this article

4 years back I attended an executive education program at IIM Ahmedabad India. IIM-A is probably the most prestigious educational institution in India. I had the opportunity of working with some of its brightest alumni around the world. I was always curious to go and learn from the gurus at IIM A.

I picked an unusual program to learn as I always thought marketing was one area to improve dramatically. Plain speak – I don’t get marketing!

So, I thought why not some outlier program like neuroscience (which I hardly knew) and marketing!

I enrolled in the program. It was a 3 full-day event. A very good mixture of highly experienced professionals were students. Most of them were from a marketing background. I was the only tech CEO, I guess.

IIM faculty were world-class, to say the least. Especially Dr. Arvind Sahay was fantastic in terms of teaching, connecting the dots, and answering international aspects. There were many case studies and real-life business situations of other cohort members which were discussed.

The stated objectives of the program were::

The program was designed to ...
... develop the participant’s basic knowledge of how the human brain operates – what are some basic brain operating principles?

>>This was the most fascinating learning for me.

Secondly: To understand using the brain operating principles how we make decisions based around the themes of “thinking and feeling,” prediction, confidence, risk, fear, surprise, regret, and happiness; how the brain receives stimuli, processes them, and the responses that it generates.

>>This was very inspirational and helped me understand a lot of aspects of learning.

Finally, To apply these insights in the areas of pricing, marketing communications, packaging, product design, etc. with the objective of producing behavior change in the target audience.

>>I vividly remember the case study of how Apple versus Samsung pricing fights, I learned after this program.

Overall, the IIM faculty was great, the cohort is still connected and it was an extraordinary training program.