Two months ago, forty-seven eager young minds started on a quest for “the CMO’s playbook” – a journey to understand strategic decision making in marketing. An equally eager but not so young mind (yours truly) joined them, mainly to prove that fun and learning can go together. It was a tall ask from all of us, but we managed to pull it off!

Finally, it was the student teams that prepared their original playbooks for CMOs, and I might have merely orchestrated the journey – a journey through a mix of simulation, business cases, discussions of real life marketing, and minimal reliance on pre-cooked frameworks.

Along the way, we talked about CMOs like Harish Bhat who put India on the world map of CMOs. We engaged in wholesome criticism of well-known brands like Tata Neu, L’Oreal, Maggi, and Coca-Cola, as well as several not so well-known brands. We discovered ideas related to marketing at startups and VC-funded companies. In sum, a journey covering the gamut from marketing strategy to consumer psychology to martech.

In the process, we were critical, puzzled, appreciative, and understandably enough, we were bored at times. Most of all, though, we had our beliefs and hypotheses questioned, which (as smart educators know) provides the best and most sticky of learnings. And because we forced ourselves to take a stance each time, we realized how difficult it is to take good decisions, particularly when there are no objectively right decisions anyway.

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‘The CMO’s Playbook’ is an elective course available to MBA students in the second year at IIMK, designed based on my experiences in marketing. It is a fresh and practical take on marketing strategy, inspired by academic research and featuring a mix of pedagogy.

In case you are a marketer or from the industry and this makes you curious, pls reach out to me as I am eager to exchange ideas on how learnings in the classroom can be transferred to corporate life and vice versa.

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Acknowledgements

Huge shoutout to my forty-seven co-travellers – you have given much and got much. Thank you for tolerating my inexplicable and seemingly incurable allergy to smartphones!

To my students of the first innings of The CMO’s Playbook last year – my learning curve for this course has been steep and you taught me a lot.

Thank you to my colleagues of the Marketing area at IIM Kozhikode for wise comments.

Special thanks to Arindam Banerjee (IIM Ahmedabad) and Keyoor Purani (IIM Kozhikode) for guidance, and to Sourav Borah (IIM Ahmedabad) for incredible patience in handholding me through the simulation!

Many thanks to Adrian Terron and Kavita Mahto for your input early on.

My gratitude to two other people who are probably not aware of their contribution. To Rajan Varadarajan (Texas A&M University) for several research papers including the 2010 JAMS paper differentiating marketing strategy and strategic marketing. To Saral Mukherjee (IIM Ahmedabad), master teacher, for giving this teacher a chance to attend your Elephants and Cheetahs course, for your book on the course, for the vociferous indignation against “cut the labor” proposed as a solution to cost reduction in a factory (the IIMA PGP class of 2011 Section C might remember). I felt some of that indignation when a bunch of students decided the other day that in order to sell they would “grab the customer”.