GUEST LECTURE by Ms. Debasree Dasgupta
Guest Lecture Title: Reimagining the future from a marketing perspective
Date of Conduct: 4th October 2020
Duration: 1 hour
Speaker’s Name & Designation: Ms. Debasree Dasgupta, Marketing Director
Organization: PepsiCo
HOD/Concerned Faculty Head: Student Relations / Ms. Anuja Zanzad
Batch: IB Students Batch 2019-21 and 2020-22
No of students present: 250
Synopsis:
On the 4th of October, the students of MBA-IB 2019-21 and 2020-22 attended a webinar by Ms. Debasree Dasgupta, Marketing Director – Pepsi, West Europe at PepsiCo. The lecture was centred on “Reimagining the future from a marketing perspective”.
Ms. Dasgupta started the session by sharing an anecdote from The Big Bang Theory.
She emphasized on the role of experimentation and ideation across sectors due to the pandemic and the different strategies they used to cope with the current market. She presented examples from the Educational and Health industries wherein she spoke about how classroom lectures and seminar have shifted to online lectures and webinars on platforms such as Microsoft teams, Google meet and Zoom. She also focussed on how online teaching has become very curiosity driven. The healthcare sector has seen a rise in telehealth care, chatbots, entries of new online applications, insurance companies with new plans. Ms. Dasgupta stressed upon how the E-commerce sector boomed over the past 10 years and how the pandemic resulted in a larger market for hygienic products with a 37% growth in its demand. Ms. Dasgupta further elaborated on how Pepsi partnered with different associations like Tomorrowland, Global Citizen, and Champions League to carry out various events and also their collaborations with various celebrities from Taylor Swift to Shahrukh Khan. Ms. Dasgupta focused on points like simplicity being key to drive customers, growth of augmented and virtual reality in business, the rise of self-drive cars for contactless travel, economic recovery and rise in usage of drones and robots.
The session ended with an interactive question and answer process.
Feedback:
- “Ms. Dasgupta gave us a global perspective through marketing strategies of how different sectors are adapting to this pandemic. One of the most interesting things she spoke about was how AI and technology brought a famous music festival - Tomorrowland, online and delivered a very similar experience as the real event!” – Rhea Dhote, MBA, International Business (Marketing), Batch 2020-2022.
- “The session was very informative and Ms Debasree shared the marketing strategies in the current scenario by giving relevant and relatable examples from the various sectors. It was also amazing to hear the perspective of a person in the leadership role in such a behemoth of a company PepsiCo. Apart from being informative, she welcomed a lot of questions and answered them in a simple yet clear manner for everyone to understand the tactical decisions a major organization faces and how they go about it.” – Shobhit Yadav, MBA, International Business (Supply Chain Management), Batch 2019-2021.
Overall Feedback: The webinar helped students understand how different sector work out their business plans and strategies with changing duration and encouraged students to try and experiment with new ideas.
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Overall Feedback: The session helped students understand how to stay motivated during tough times, how to take on challenges, and become successful business leaders.
