Parallel Lines - When do you "Waste" A Degree ?

When I was quiet and a shy student out of high school, I was asked all too often why I wanted to become lawyer. The practice of law essentially meant ending up in courts as litigating lawyers and courts are not the best place for someone as quiet and shy as me. I lived through that, and became a lawyer nonetheless.

Honestly, it wasn’t out of a crazy desire to go to courts, fight fiery cases and change the constitution. I couldn’t ever remember having such fancies even as a child, given that I did once fancy winning the Wimbledon (note, I play no sports till today). And no, “To Kill a Mockingbird” played no role in it, as well.

With everyone around me already decided and certain about what they wanted to be when they grew up, I only knew that I loved consumer psychology, having spent hours watching advertisements and street shopping for my fodder, and I was disheartened to know that I could not study psychology without mathematics, which I couldn’t do to save my life. Worse still, I didn’t even know what profession really allowed me to research on consumer psychology. So when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, even till the end of school, I had no answer.

As disheartened I was, I still loved humanities, and not knowing ‘exactly’ which under-graduate course was going to help me with a closer to understanding human behavior, I decided I would do a lottery and choose whatever chit I picked up. Fortunately, such extreme measures were not needed, because I came to know that I could study four humanities subjects + law through an integrated five year course and it was going to get me a job at the end of five years. So there, that’s how I became a lawyer – as the best practical way-out to my crisis then.

Then, a decade after that, I realized I still loved consumer psychology, and now the love had turned into crazy love that I could no longer ignore. Now, I knew of professions that would let me delve into it, but I was already five years into law profession and I lost count of how many professionals asked me why I wanted to change “streams”, and if I wanted to, I needed a professional degree like an MBA. I didn’t want to study more, and yet more, and yet more, and wanted to get to working on field directly. I had been O.D-ing on behavioral psychology literature for years, and I couldn’t bear the idea of doing it for some more.

The only option I was left with was now the only option I didn’t have the courage to pursue – quit job, don’t give a fuck, and jump into business. How I survived the ordeal for six months of self-loathing and extreme self-doubt to finally jump into deep water is another story, but in essence, I did. And nearly two decades after I fell in love with advertising in newspapers, I approved (still, didn’t write!) the copy for full-page insert I did for a business I ran in Ahmedabad. And, which didn’t get a single response – but that’s another story again.

Irrespective of whatever was happening around me, I was, at this point, very happy with my life. I was un-successful and struggling, but I went to bed with peace at finally being able to make up my mind to do what I wanted to do for so long.

Not everyone was as elated as I was. I thought it was a phase, and it would pass once I sink into the job. But it didn’t.

The same group of people that questioned my becoming a lawyer + some new group of people (which equals 99% of my world) began asking me even more disdainfully why I chose to “quit law”, having put a decade’s effort in completing my degree and then being a practicing lawyer (very few though understood how corporate law was different from litigation). Some went further, and accused me of “wasting a seat” or worse still, “wasting my degree, education and knowledge”. At the age of thirty-one, I often cannot decide exactly what should make me angrier between being asked why I am not getting married, or being asked to justify my choice to “quit law”.

In India, one expects a young adult to have crystal-clear clarity on what she wants to be at 14 years of age, and such pursuit must be pursued doggedly through competitive exams and such till 18. Very few that I know wanted to be beyond engineer, doctors or lawyers. For one, most like me, did not even know of professions like market researcher or advertising illustrator even existed during high school – so the question of choosing them didn’t even arise! But what is more disturbing is that it is socially acceptable that one’s under-graduation degree must define one’s future course of education + profession for the rest of her life, and any deviation is looked as having lack of determination and clarity. I couldn’t choose to study history as under-grad and then choose to write codes for the rest of my life. Or vice versa. Or whatever versa versa combinations that are available.

Why do we feel so constrained and limited in putting our intellectual existence into such air-tight containers? I would still understand if such constraint came from people with less exposure and education, but that’s barely been true for my experience. When I put in my resignation, a partner at my law firm, with more experience than my years on earth, told me with utmost anger (bordering on ‘rage’) that choosing to “quit law’ for starting up a business at this stage showed how less focused I was about life, and that I should done a degree in commerce and not law if that was my intention (which I should have known at 18, of course).  He could reconcile with a young associate quitting law for marriage or a better offer at another law firm, but not for ‘changing stream’, which was absolutely impious.

So what exactly is “Changing Stream”? And why are we, Indians, so paranoid about it, and equate it to doing drugs and flunking exams? Is it like three parallel lines of Humanities, Sciences and Commerce that separate at higher secondary level and cannot ever, ever, meet mathematically till eternity?

To think of knowledge as drains running parallel to each other as disconnected entities is very disturbing. Of course, knowledge isn’t disconnected and understanding of humanities and sciences are most beautifully entwined to understand greater philosophies of life. Paul Graham’s brilliant book ‘Hackers and Painters’ talks about how his experience at learning painting, made him a better hacker.

Indian education system choses otherwise. It is impossible for anyone to study physics and music together. And those brought up in the system and ingrained with the same value, irrespective of how professionally successful they are, continue to believe likewise. The only ones to lose out in this is us, for knowledge so limited cannot produce brilliant minds.

In recent years, there has been a significant amount of writing in the pop-business section on how technologists should learn humanities, for it teaches “empathy”, which is essential for better product design and such, instead of focusing just on just mathematics. Literature on finance has been also moving on the same line – asking more and more investors to seek wisdom through understanding of humanities.

All these are true. I agree with all of them. But these writings only focus on the limited application of humanities on one’s professional purpose. None really ever emphasize that there is a difference between the practice of a subject and the subject itself (for eg. the difference between being a lawyer and a student of law).  In this, Professor Noah Fieldman makes an excellent argument:

“Apprenticeship training can’t prepare you to see the world that way. Learning from a master is the most conservative form of education possible: Practitioners of an art or a craft teach their students exactly the skills they themselves have learned through generations of practice. If you want the best shirts, go to the Neapolitan women who learned to sew them from the previous generation. If you want the best shoes, there’s a London shoemaker who apprenticed at his master’s last. You can apprentice to be a good tax lawyer, but that won't prepare you to face the big questions.”

To be an engineer better at making products, or an investor making better share portfolio investments, or a lawyer focusing on tax practice isn’t enough to ever seek wisdom to look at the “big questions” – on the core values of our lives, the underlying philosophy that guides us and to understand greater policy decisions on how our lives are determined and controlled, vis-a-vis others. For that, we must allow for the highest degree of integration of humanities as possible, without limiting it to small compartments. And stop living in the paranoia that any knowledge is wasted like left over food if one choose to diversify and expand to other fields.

Now, back to reality and to the more immediate question – How do I stop people from asking me the same questions over and over again?

Especially now that I have a third question being thrown around at me – How will you become a pharma business-woman if you didn’t do B.Pharma ?

My brief answer is by learning business intuition +  general overview on the technical aspect of pharmacology like anyone doing a B.Pharma degree learned by reading books.

If you are asking the same questions to people, just get the facts right – no knowledge is ever wasted, and no one “quits” any knowledge or discipline. Like, such a thing doesn’t even exist ! Are we clear ? 

Brand Watch: Dabur's Yoodley

Ever since I decided to stop drafting agreements, and abandon my corporate law career, for being a 'shop-keeper' (as most Indians call small to medium scale retailers), my worried mother has asked me what it is about sitting at the cash counter in sweltering Calcutta heat in a 200 square feet shop that I like so much that I continue to put myself through what she clearly perceives to be an 'ordeal'. Every now and then, she asks me tactfully, if I have finally been bored, sitting at the cash counter, with a faint hope that I would concede and go back to being a lawyer. 

But then, the truth is that I have never been bored, and far from it, after years and years of consumer gazing at shopping malls and sabzi mandis, most of which began with my shopping trips with my mother to local markets, getting the first-point perspective of observing Indian customers is probably the most fun thing for a struggling business-woman, while making little or no money on most days.

And, why wouldn't it be ? Indian consumer grass-root shopping experience is so vibrant and nuanced and so little captured in academic business writings (which captures predominantly the western  world market) that there is literally no way to get a hang of it, unless one sits in one of those of God damn cash counters for a while. 

First look at the incredibly diverse and unrelated items all retailers stock up -  in fact, small Indian retailers, popularly known as Kiranas (the colloquial equivalent of 'Mom and Pop shops') are so versatile and diverse in their stock inventory that it is not surprising to find a shop selling radio sets as well as potatoes. And in that, they are not any less diversely stocked than bigger shopping malls, albeit at a much smaller scale. 

I don't run a Kirana shop. I run a chemist shop. Not surprisingly, Chemist Shops in India often double up as part-grocery stores, stocking up soft drinks, shampoos sachets, nail polish removers, and all and sundry. My small shop is no exception to that. And why not ? Every now and then there is a request for products ranging from Loreal Burgundy Hair Colour to Nestle Qadbury Chocolates, and every foot-fall, as any retailer would tell you, matters. 

So, about a couple of months, the door-to-door sales manager from Dabur, after taking order for its regular ayurvedic medicated products, set out on the front desk counter a few packets of richly coloured drinks in paper packets, and said "Madam, this is exactly like 'Paper Boat'. Dabur has just launched this under the 'Hajmola Brand' and we have good offers. Keep a few and it will fly out of your counter in no time." 

Wait, but what is 'Paper Boat'? The sales-men at the counter had never heard of 'Paper Boat'. Of course, I had and totally been in love with  their Jal Jeera flavour, a regular on most flights, where it is regularly served since its launch in 2013. Clearly, Paper Boat is a niche market product and it didn't have any mass market visibilty like the Coke-s and Pepsi-s  or even the popular Indian, non-carobonated, mango based drinks like Mazza and Slice. That's why the salesmen, who had barely anything more than high school education but an innate skill to remember stock of nearly 7000 odd medicines, had no clue about it. 

And to make things worse, they couldn't even guess what it was. Do you drink it directly ? Do you add it to water ? Do you need to refrigerate it ? Do you need to drink in one go ? After all,  it wasn't a bottled cola drink or any other drinks that came in a bottle, a format they had been familiar with. It came in a  paper packet with a lid on it, a format very unknown to the mass-market, and had only been used by Paper Boat so far. 

The most experienced salesman at my shop looked at the rates offered, and concluded it was a very good introductory offer with very good margins for us. After all, it was priced only at 30 rupees and we could keep one sample of each to see how it fares, right at the front counter, with maximum visibility to all the customers. Dabur has been a very trusted Indian FMGC brand for decades, and Hajmola has been an iconic digestive pill, widely popular, and a common household favorite across generations. In his decade long experience as a pharmaceutical retail salesman, he has been very wary of new companies and products, which do not fly off the counter and then companies which go bust before withdrawing unsold expired goods from retailers, but he trusted Dabur and believed the brand name would sell it easily off the counter. 

Like that, Yoodley ended up on the counter, and instead of flying off the counter in a jiffy, it took a good two months to sell all the six samples !

From my cash-counter view, I saw all the customers, ranging from middle class house-wives to retired government servants, picking it up with great inquisition and asking the same questions which the sales guys had asked in the first place - Do you drink it directly ? Do you add it to water ? Do you need to refrigerate it ? Do you need to drink in one go ?! Each of them would turn the packet left and right, front and back, with some trying to squeeze or smell,  and then keep it back on the counter dispassionately. First, I would tell me them that it was like 'Paper Boat' and it fell blank with them. So then I began to tell them it was like Maaza, a popular mango drink made by Coca Cola and they needed to do the same thing - drink straight out of the packet and refrigerate, prior to drinking, if they wanted it chilled.

Thus, here's my first question  - 

A ) How important is the physical design of a product, esp. for a product that is being introduced into the market, to be in a format familiar to the consumer ?

Clearly, Dabur has missed the mark by completely copying entirely an unfamiliar format of its product based on presentation of an earlier launched product, i.e. Paper Boat. Other than the fact that it was confusing to consumers, even for those who knew about Paper Boat, it made it look exactly like it was copying Paper Boat - which can't be a good branding strategy to begin with, given that both the products are priced similarly. 

Unless Dabur begins spending bag fulls of money on advertisement to educate the customers on what the product is  (which it subsequently began), why not stick to a familiar physical format, esp when the core products in terms of the flavours  (Awaara Aam Panna, Nimboora Shikanji, Go Goa Guava, Jhakaas Jaljeera, Golmaal Golgappa and Kabhi Kala Kabhi Khatta) are all new.

To add to that, Indian consumers like to touch, feel and see a product before buying, and a hidden drink inside a paper packet wasn't going to get them to trust the product instantly. 

Note to future business-magnet self : Never, never, ever (as Arnab Goswami puts it) confuse the consumer. Do not give them things they have no clue about. And if one new identity is confusing, don't double confuse the consumer with two new things - a new product and a new physical format. And of course, if you are small company with limited marketing budget relying entirely on word of mouth, this could be your death knell. Like seriously !!

Now for the second question :

B) How to make a product aesthetically and psychologically more enticing and informative with the product design of logos and images ?

Yoodley comes in very rich, and un-enticing colours, which are not even associated with imageries of food from any angle. Would you, for example, think of eating anything that is coloured purple ? A food product should be coloured such that it automatically triggers enticement to the brain as an edible product and Yoodley's colour scheme totally failed on this count. The crazy doodles on it are more appropriate for selling children's stationary products and not a food product. This explains why even children and young adults, the more susceptible target group for products such as this, failed to show much excitement in trying out this product. 

And then, there was the fundamental flaw that nearly nothing on the design indicated it was a food product. There were no images of the core fruit flavours on the design - no guava for the Go Goa Guava, no Aam fro Aware Aam Panna. and such. 

Paper Boat on the other hand is a clear winner - the design is clean, on a white background, and provides for cheerful imageries of the core fruit ingredient. Even if a consumer would know nothing about Paper Boat, can still guess it was a mango drink or a jamun drink. 

Note to future marketing stud self:  Pay designers for clear informative designs of product. And don't have doodlers do the professional task. Finally, food products should look like food products, and not stationary sets. As Ogilvy said it long back, providing information through advertising is best way to sell a product.