SCMS Marketing Colloquium's Inaugural Day Was a Confluence of Industry Stalwarts from All Across Sectors
Online, December 11, 2013 (Newswire.com) - The SCMS-Cochin School of Business' prestigious SCMS Marketing Colloquium began on December 6, 2013 in a rousing fashion, drawing students, researchers, and industry experts to the two-day event. The annual colloquium, this year entitled the International Conference on Building Customer Trust, has been highly anticipated all year. If the inaugural day kick-off was any indication, this year's event promises to be especially memorable.
By selecting such a relevant topic as building customer trust, the SCMS Marketing Colloquium has quickly established itself as wanting to tackle issues that are important to both students and those in the world of business. As such, a wide-range of talent was gathered for the 2013 SCMS Marketing Colloquium from all over the world.
Beginning the colloquium's inaugural session was Dr. Padmakumar Nair, Academic Director of the Leadership Center for the University of Texas - Dallas School of Management. He started the session in a grand fashion, immediately creating an open climate for both students and faculty to facilitate discourse on his topic on how to build customer trust. Focusing on sustainable trust, transactions of cost, and the tragedy of theories, Dr. Nair had this to say concerning trust: "Trust is something that happens only through experience."
Dr. Nair went on to explain his definition of trust as being the expectation of any person from the action of another person that, in turn, affects the choice of the former person. He further extrapolated about various cases of trust deficit and mentioned India as being one of the major trust deficit countries due to the increasing number of immigrants. He also pointed out that business schools do not teach about the failure of theories, instead training to make decisions scientifically rather than statistically.
After receiving a warm reception, Dr. Nair was follow by the event's second speaker, Mr. Vijay Vijayasankar, Global Vice President of SAP Big Data Division of Phoenix, Arizona. Taking up where Dr. Nair left off, Mr. Vijayasankar also talked about the importance of failure in the learning process. As Mr. Vijayasankar stated: "Business schools do not teach how to fail, but this is necessary for students, especially teaching the attitude of failing quickly and failing responsibly. To fail responsibly, integrity is required, because decisions should not be made based on whether others or looking or not."
In keeping with the theme of the colloquium, Mr. Vijayasankar established quickly that you need to always do right by the customer and to think of the long-term prospects of turning customers into clients rather than keeping the customers simply as customers. Mr. Vijayasankar also stressed the importance of mentors, technology, and localization to better succeed in business education.
Speaker 3 of the inaugural event was Mr. Thomas De Lizaso, Regional Manager of Decathlon India, Ltd., out of Bangalore. Mr. De Lizaso spoke at length about how his company, Decathlon, placed importance on the role of customer satisfaction and the tools they used to ensure this concept. This includes the role of customer feedback and other tools to measure customer satisfaction. He also placed emphasis on how to read customers and how to build long-term customer loyalty.
As the first day came to a close, Mr. Vijayasankar was particularly impressed by what he had found at SCMS: "SCMS was excellent. I especially liked the way I was received and presented. I was overwhelmed by the staff and student participation. I would like to thank everyone here."
Given the reception to the first day of the SCMS Marketing Colloquium, it is a sentiment shared by all. Students gained immensely from the exposure and the inaugural session was a clear indicator to the success of the following business sessions of the Colloquium, spread across two full days.
