Tag Archives: business

The Mobile-Free Classroom – A Dream Come True

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published on LinkedIn and is available here.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against mobile phones (just an allergy, as my students know).

But I recently had a dream-like experience of teaching a class where students did not have mobile phones anywhere near them. Dream-like, because the mobile phone is every student’s partner-in-crime during classes. So much so that sometimes I miss students who engage in good old doodling or hangman.

These students had deposited their phones in a basket (they did not have a choice) and let themselves into the uncharted territory of sitting in class without the “adult pacifier” at hand (see image, research by Shiri Melumad and Michel Tuan Pham). Not even laptops or tablets. The credit for the mobile-free class goes to the HR manager. I spoke with Pradnya for just two minutes, but her willpower was evident, and her good intentions were obvious.

Source: https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article/47/2/237/5716332


And so, I taught my first ever classroom where mobile phones were absolutely absent. Not just invisible or inaudible, but really absent from the minds of the students.

When the mobile phone is present, it has a pull, it is just waiting to be checked, and can’t be denied. So even if a student decides not to use the phone, but the phone is on the desk or even in the bag, the silent call of the phone continues to distract (see image, research by Adrian Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy and Maarten Bos). In the mobile-free class, there is no such distraction.


Source: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/691462


Now, I do not yet have proof, but as someone who has taught graduate students and executives for about 800 hours, low distraction classes (classes where students oblige with my request to put their phones away) operate at a higher plane of engagement and learning compared to high distraction classes. The absence of electronic devices activates the one device which will accompany us through life, even in the age of AI – the brain!

Students often don’t get an opportunity to notice the benefits of a mobile-free class, and this creates an understandable resistance to putting away the phone. But objective research and my experience concur on this observation. And every year there are a few students who thank me (Aparna D in The CMO’s Playbook was the first!) for requesting that they avoid using the phone. And that’s where the proof of the pudding lies… in switching off the phone and letting the class take you places.

So next time your teacher requests the class to put away your phones, do so with a smile. It’s one small step for a student, one giant leap for education!

Here’s all of us after six hours of refreshing freedom!

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How to leverage India’s MarTech boom [Forbes India]

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(c) Namrata Suryavanshi, Priya Narayanan, and Aditya Bhamidipaty

This article was first published online on May 23, 2025 in The Forbes India (online) IIM Kozhikode Thought Leadership section and is available here on the publisher’s website. The article below provides an updated version of the infographic from Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology landscape.

Namrata is Director – Consulting & Customer Experience at FirstHive, a Customer Data Platform. Priya is Assistant Professor of Marketing at IIM Kozhikode. Aditya is Founder & CEO at FirstHive.

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Imagine this: you’ve just landed in Barcelona after a gruelling 24-hour flight. You’re exhausted, and all you want is to check into your hotel and rest for a while in those soft new fancy pyjamas you bought for this trip. But then, reality hits—you realise your baggage hasn’t arrived. Panicked, you rush to the airline authorities, and they assure you that your luggage will be delivered to your hotel… in two days. Frustrated, you turn to social media, venting your anger and tagging the airline. Within seconds, you receive a response. But instead of empathy, you’re greeted with the last two words you want to see right now. Any guesses? “Thank you for sharing your feedback.”

Now, your frustration multiplies. The airline seems robotic and indifferent—completely out of touch with your situation. You might even vow never to fly with them again. So, what went wrong here? The airline relied on automated technology to send an instant response, but the message lacked context, empathy, and personalisation.

Could the airline have used smarter technologies to gauge your frustration and tailor a response using generative AI? Absolutely. And that’s exactly what we’ll explore in this article—how marketers, particularly in India, are adapting to MarTech. We delve into the unique challenges Indian marketers face, especially when bridging gaps arising from multiple cultures, languages, and geographies, and how technology can be a game-changer in delivering personalised, contextually relevant experiences.

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Marketing Meets Technology – Bringing Marketing Practice to Academics

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article describes my new elective course that focuses on how Technology has impacted Marketing practice, across four major dimensions: consumers, omnichannel marketing, martech, and marketing strategy. Besides discussing the use of caselets shared by two companies, the article lists a set of useful resources in this domain. Comments from participants of the course speak to its practical relevance and academic usefulness.

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In May 2021, I decided to teach a PGP elective course The Digital Customer at IIMK. The idea was motivated by my sense – vague as it was – that the customer in the 2020s was no longer the customer of the 2010s when I did my MBA and PhD. We covered quite some ground, the students and I, but I was sure there was a lot more to my “sense” that things were changing rapidly.

I then offered a different elective Marketing to the Digital Customer in 2022, which, in hindsight, was even less satisfying in its ability to capture the goings-on in the market and in the field of marketing. Students probably guessed this, because the course found no takers.

In 2023, after much rework, the course reappeared to PGPs as Marketing Strategy for the Digital World. This course resonated with Executive PGP students, and with PGP students in 2024, as some of the course alumni who might be reading this post might agree. If you do, pls share in the comments!

But marketing strategy for the digital world was, after all, what every company was doing: adding a digital flavor to everything marketing. So what remained besides regular Marketing? What was it that was worth learning about from a student’s or manager’s point of view?

To me the answer was closer to a “reinvention” of marketing. That too, very likely a bottom-up reinvention, because technology had begun to touch each element of marketing and transform many of those. Marketing as traditionally understood and taught through the standard b-school perspective needed a relook. It was a bold and semi-substantiated view to take, but bottom-up changes necessitate top-down evolution in strategy. This, for sure, was worth studying!

And so, the course Marketing Meets Technology came into being. This is what Marketing had been doing for the last decade! I first wrote about the course on my blog in June last year as the course started taking shape. The very first innings of the course with over 80 participants from the executive MBA program was wrapped up late last month. The course consists of four modules:

What we covered in the first innings of Marketing Meets Technology
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Take Two: The Future of the Two-Year Full-Time MBA in India

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published online on December 13, 2024 as a special feature in the IIM Ahmedabad alumni magazine WIMWIAN and is available here on IIMA’s website for the magazine. Note: I hold an MBA (the two-year full-time kind!) and a PhD, both from IIM Ahmedabad. The programs that I teach at IIM Kozhikode are listed at the end of the article.

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Recent months have witnessed an emerging debate on the relevance of the two-year full-time MBA programmes across B-schools in India. With the rise in online and hybrid programmes boosted by the pandemic, and prospective students reconsidering spending two full years on academics, the flagship postgraduate programme at IIMs and other B-schools is under scrutiny.

To understand the issue, it is important to note that IIMs, especially the older IIMs, had historically been endowed with the mandate of training managers for the country. These institutes did so through rigorous academic programmes spanning a vast curriculum traversed over two years, and churned out general managers who could hold their own in any field.

The evolving MBA

Over the years, many things have changed but many things have held steady. Demand for the two-year full-time MBA (referred to as PGP, using legacy terminology) continues unabated: the most recent 2023 edition of the Common Admission Test (CAT) that originally provided admission to the IIMs but is now adopted by several other B-schools was written by 2.88 lakh candidates, an increase of 30% over the previous year. Clearly, the numbers attest to the popularity of the PGP.

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Tata Starbucks: Of (Italian) Glass Size and (Indian) Class Size

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How does the size of the serving glass (minimum 240 ml) and the size of India’s urban middle class (88% of the population) matter to Starbucks India? Let’s find out, in this second of two articles on Starbucks.

© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

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As part one of my two-part analysis of Starbucks (posted about a week ago) suggests, Starbucks globally seems to be in the kind of trouble that takes time to pass. However, closer home, things seem less stark. Tata Starbucks has two big factors going for it: advantage Tata that continues to give, and a growing market that is any MNC’s dream. But is that enough?

Before answering this, let’s address a niggling but real issue with Starbucks in India.

A Starbucks store in India. Source: internet.
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Why a Few Bad Quarters Might be Good for Starbucks

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Starbucks was in the blazing limelight a month or so ago. This time the news was not a new product launch or a new store opening, but the ways that the new CEO Brian Niccols (replacing the incumbent Laxman Narasimhan before his term ended) intended to “make Starbucks, Starbucks again”. In his “open letter for all partners, customers and stakeholders”, Niccols acknowledged that Starbucks seemed to “have drifted from [its] core.”

Starbucks share price (see below) seems to reflect this view – a downward trend starting in early 2023 went on for well over a year is now beginning to pick up, with Niccols at the helm. Here is my (potentially contrarian, likely underinformed) view on the issues at Starbucks and how these could be solved. Don’t miss the bonus piece on Starbucks in India – coming up soon.

(Subscribe to my blog on the home page and you will never miss a post. No advertising, no spam.)

Share price trend of Starbucks, 2020-2024. Source: Google search.

© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

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All around Brian Niccols are people waiting and watching. And the last thing the newly anointed CEO of Starbucks probably wants is another bad set of quarterly financial results. But a few bad quarters might actually turn out to be good for Starbucks. Here’s why.

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Zomato’s healthier options: Now what? [Businessline Brandline]

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published online on June 9, 2024 in The Hindu BusinessLine BrandLine and is available here on the publisher’s website. The article was published in the print newspaper on June 10, 2024.

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Food delivery app Zomato recently introduced a new feature that suggests “healthier options” when customers select food items. Considering that Zomato has long been providing options for healthy eating, be it salads, desserts, or vegan food, the new step is not surprising. At the same time, this news raises the question: How far should a platform go in helping customers choose healthy?

The question of healthy and unhealthy food choices is not an easy one, for a customer or for the platform. Consider the following:

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“India’s social network” is tea. The question is, which tea?!

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First published July 2, 2023. Updated Oct 31, 2023 with a) an edited version of the ad shared by Red Label (following my article?!), and b) link to relevant research article.

© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

A recent advertisement projects the humble tea as “India’s social network”. The ad is probably trending by this time, and worth at least one watch. The customer insight is spot-on. The video portrays various ways in which tea takes the form of friend requests, likes, shares, trends, stories, and so on in India, becoming a social network in itself. Engrossed as we are in the narrative, we forget that this is a brand’s commercial. Finally, though, the very last shot tells us that the ad is from Brooke Bond Red Label.

Screen shot from the “India’s social network” ad (watch the full ad here)

Well, as I watched the ad play, my thoughts centred on the cup of Kanan Devan (Tata Tea) tea that I usually drink in the morning and evening… steaming tea in a steel tumbler… the quantity never enough but I never make more… I am happiest when that tea is fully foamy at the top… and when I blow on it a teeny bit, the foam makes space for the beautiful brown color beneath… if the color is the right shade, the tea will be the right taste… oh yes, the tea packet at home is nearly finished and I need to buy another of the green packets soon…

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Next Diwali, Let’s Avoid the Condescension of Doing Good? [Financial Express]

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published on May 27, 2022 in the Financial Express and is available here on the publisher’s website. In this article, I present my take on the “condescension of doing good” that is visible in recent Diwali advertising, and urge marketers to put human values first.

The version below includes links to the relevant advertisements that I discuss.

It was Cadbury that hit upon the idea of brands doing good during Diwali in a seriously big way – the 2020 ad from Cadbury Celebrations showed how small local stores that were hit by the pandemic could be brought into the customer’s consideration set through geography-based hyper-personalization. “This is not just a Cadbury ad,” they said, and so we believed: the ad nudged us towards local stores. Thus it was that in the midst of the pandemic, Cadbury found a way to do good and be good, and yet gain marketing momentum.

But the next year, as the prestige factor was upped, Shah Rukh Khan’s charisma was deemed essential to do the same job for a similar ad by Cadbury. In this ad, Shah Rukh Khan names local stores in his voiceover and this, again, was powered by technology. It wasn’t too bad, except the realization that our purchases of Celebrations were funding the expense incurred in engaging the celebrity actor.

But this year? With its #ShopsForShopless ad of 2022, Cadbury has, despite its best intentions, fallen prey to “purpose”, the new catchword in marketing. Somebody (or worse, everybody) at Cadbury seems to have decided that for Celebrations to stand out, it had to be tagged with purpose. So, now that good old eating and gifting are not enough for Diwali, the Cadbury ad tells us to scan a QR code on the sweet box, help roadside hawkers set up virtual shops, and buy from such shops. For the kind of “help” that they received, the gratitude in the eyes of Damodar (not Damodarji?!) and his helper is nauseating in its excessiveness.

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