Mnemonics in Marketing

1. What was the most unexpected idea expressed in today’s class materials?

Today’s most exciting topic for me was the secondary research. Secondary research is all the background data that needs to be analyzed, which is available in publicly published platforms. It can be anything from annual report, sales report to journals and news articles, and is named as secondary as the information was already been published beforehand. It can be a very useful source of information, as for us being the students we generally work with secondary data sets for our academic work. This topic is not something which is uncommon or new for me, however there is a specific personal experience regarding secondary research, which gave me hard time in my career.

1. What are your reasons for your answer in Part 1?

Before coming to Canada, I worked as Product Development manager at Alliance Capital Asset Management Ltd, in Bangladesh. As like any other countries, we have a government regulatory wing, BSEC (Bangladesh Securities Exchange Commission) which acted as the sole governing body for the capital market related financial platforms. As being a developing and a highly bureaucratic country, Bangladesh had very few investment instruments, and the general people had hard time to put their faith into capital market. As the country was rapidly marching towards a mid-income nation, BSEC was coming up with various new products, and me being the product development manager, it was my responsibility to align my companies’ offerings with BSEC guidelines. Back in 2018, BSEC introduced SIP (Systematic Investment Plan) with mutual funds for the first time ever, and they have conducted an in-depth research of the whole market, releasing a “SIP Projection Report 18-19”. This report consisted with all the statistical analysis, date sets and projections in the upcoming SIP industry, which I used as my secondary research. As this was a new product in the market, all the financial companies were focusing on this secondary research to design their own products, including me.

However, by the end of 2018, when we have developed our blueprints for ACAML SIP, our biggest product MTB Mutual Fund took a deep dive. The reason was that individual customers started to withdraw their money from our most successful product MTB Fund, as the “BSEC SIP Projection Report 18-19” created a bubble effect, promising some near to impossible dividend rate, which was factually impossible for anyone to attain. And my mistake was that I have already introduced our upcoming SIP products in trade fairs, which made my consumers very hyped and influenced them to switch, as they just got their last year’s dividend. During the entire mess I have realized, never to trust on a single source secondary research, even if it’s from the highest level of authentic source. Primary research must take place side by side with a secondary research, before giving out any hints about the final products in any sort of campaign.

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