Mandi 2008@ IIM Calcutta

Have you ever jumped into a pool without asking about the depth? Have you ever driven a car without knowing the complete controls? Have you ever taken part in a competition without knowing all the rules? If the answer is no, then read on. If yes, you would empathise with me and still read on!!!

Here, in IIM Calcutta, we have a club called “Census” which organised an event called Mandi (Marketplace). Herein, the only instruction we imbibed was that we may to sell something in a team of 4. So, we just a made of team (which was dramatic too) and registered for the event.

The prelim was an online quiz of 45 minutes in which “Googling” was allowed. One team member was not there to help us and no Wi-Fi was effectively just 2 laptops in use. Yeah, I told my wingies to help me for the quiz which they did. After the stipulated time and sending the entries, we realised that we had missed a sitter and forgot to answer one question, which was also not that tough. Cursing our luck, we forgot about it.

The prelim result came out and we were pleasantly surprised to see our team making it to next round. Around 60 teams had participated and being one of the 8 teams to qualify, really felt good! Then there was a meeting called for all the finalists to explain about the next round and this is where we got the biggest shock of our lives.

It was an elaborate process which all the marketing concepts and game theory and business ‘strategy’ had to be used. We had to sell a product, price it appropriately and promote it like anything inside the campus. For everything, we had a capital of Rs. 2,000 only. The final evaluation was on basis on promotion, feedback of students, and our product as such and finally the profits of course.

The first task at hand was to select the product we wanted to sell. We had a brainstorming session and finally came up with the idea of keeping card games, luck 7 of dice and the most popular breaking the glass pyramid with the tennis ball. To incentivise, we offered double money if the person was successful in any of the events.

Second task was to bid for the promotion place. For this, every team had 1000 points to bid for all the spots. Some bids were secret, some were open and some were online. Net net, we got a decent deal as we got the best place for our banner, a decent place for a poster and fundoo place where our stall was to be put up. Designing poster and banner was the next task at hand and we worked for like 12 hours non stop to achieve the same. Forgot to mention, the bidding process and previous brainstorming sessions had already made up sleep-deprived. On top of that, classes and assignments and submissions and pre-class readings were already in place. To make matters worse, we had our CV submission deadline for the upcoming summer placement. But all of us were just so geared up that everything was happening with just 1-2 hours of sleep.

We also had option of getting 3 pamphlets printed and had to submit at least one promotion video for the same. All this also had deadlines too. We thought about insane ideas for the pamphlets and made 3 videos. Also, the institute has a IP messenger in which one of our team member was really active, which helped us a lot. He created a rage by promoting day in and day out.

After promoting to the best possible according to our capabilities, we prepared ourselves for the big day – the Mandi day where people will actually come and play in our stalls and see the “competition” too. The event was to last 3 hours only and this was the time to rake in profits.

We started a little slow as it people went to eating stalls but there is a limit to which one can eat! Some people start coming in and started winning too ;) Cash excites everyone – this word of mouth started spreading like fire in the forest and people just rushed in to our stall. The crowd was beginning to get unmanageable and people were ready to wait even 15-20 minutes to try their luck. Since, we had a cap of Rs. 2,000, that was the maximum we could give out as prize money. People continuously thronged our stall and since some were winning too, we ran out of cash to give prize money at around 11 pm, still one hour to go for the event to close. We were in profit without an iota of doubt but had a liquidity crunch. But, we had to earn more profit as it was an important criterion for the final standing.

Then, we invited people just to people the game of breaking the pyramid and we were surprised to see that people were playing it without getting anything in return.

In the end, it was an effort which ended on a good note. We were really happy after this event and gave a sense of achievement.

Result for us – could not finish in top 3 but got to pocket Rs. 800 which were our profit and Rs. 1,000 were given to our team as a 'special appreciation for the incredible spirit we showed.' This was due to the fact that we were the only team which met ALL the deadlines for the event.