December 3, 2010
School of Business, Coimbatore
 

“Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”
 

Ramakanta Panda, a business school alumnus from Coimbatore, began his guest article recently published on the website afaqs.com, India’s most popular marketing and advertising portal, with this quote from the management guru, Peter Drucker.
 

Titled Why Marketing is Becoming Synonymous with Advertising, the article discussed the growing complexity and sophistication of the marketing function today.
 

“Marketers need to choose the right set of marketing technology based on a marketing maturity model,” the article emphasized.
 

Currently working with TCS in the field of digital marketing, Ramakanta’s interests extend to Digital Advertising, Social Media Marketing and Web Analytics. And he likes to write!
 

A white paper co-authored by him in partnership with his colleague, Shashikant Anpat from TCS was also recently published on the TCS website.
 

Titled Implementing Enterprise Marketing Management to Manage New Market and Media Dynamics, the paper can be downloaded as a pdf from the site.
 

“Marketing professionals are under constant pressure to deliver qualified leads, while competition across all forms of business is at an all-time high,” noted the co-authors, in their study.
 

“Globalization has made competition more aggressive and customers’ expectations have also increased to a great extent. In such a scenario, it is not enough for marketers to rely purely on traditional approaches and strategies to deliver the desired business results.”
 

What are they to do then?
 

“An enterprise-wide integrated marketing suite can help in seamless coordination between different activities of the marketing organization, like business planning, marketing campaign management, performance analysis and reporting,” they suggested.
 

Their paper studied the effectiveness of deploying such Enterprise Marketing Management suites. Doubtlessly their colleagues in TCS will use the study to sell such suites to organizations.
 

No wonder then, that this Amritian has already received special awards from the CTO, CIO and Group VP at TCS.
 

Ramakanta completed his MBA in Marketing from Amrita after obtaining a BE in Mechanical Engineering. We congratulate him as he continues to explore new frontiers, adding value to his employer and his alma mater.