Markathon April 2012 Edition

Dedicated to Team Markathon 2010-12: Our Mentors, Friends and Seniors without whom this wouldn’t be possible.

Dear Readers,

As we sit down to pen this editorial, we are at a loss of words to describe what we feel. The feeling of being at the helm of one of the country’s most reverberating marketing magazine is yet to sink in to each of us here at Team Markathon. This being the first edition by team 2011-2013, it is very close to our hearts. Working under the 2010-2012 team we have helped the magazine scale new heights. We have associated with some of the most eminent personalities in the field of marketing and have seen a phenomenal increase in our readership base.

Taking the culture of Markathon forward, our cover story for this month “A global design for Indian fashion” analyses the Indian fashion industry. The cover story examines the present scenario of the Indian Designer segment Industry through various examples. It identifies the various challenges faced and highlights the amount of untapped potential this industry has to provide for the future. The cover story also gives strategies that could be employed to catapult this nascent industry to a global stature.

Our Vartalaap for this month features an eminent personality from the Media and Entertainment world, Mr. Farokh Balsara, Partner at Ernst & Young, one of the big four Consulting firms. He has been E&Y's media and entertainment practices leader in the country for over a decade and currently drives the segment throughout Europe, Middle East, India and Africa. He talks to us about the growing media and Entertainment business and some of its intricacies in the Indian context.

From the academic world, we have John Hauser, Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has expertise in marketing and product development areas, including the design and marketing of new products, customer satisfaction incentives and new product forecasting models. The proposer of the world famous Voice of the Customer methods, talks about the intricacies of marketing on wide range of topics from marketing science to virtual customer methods.

We also have a special section where we would like to bid farewell to 2010-2012 Team Markathon, who have guided us at each step and have been very critical to make Markathon what it is today.

This edition is not only special to us members, but marks a significant change in leadership for Markathon. We have certain changes lined up for you over the next few editions. We will constantly strive to make Markathon “Bigger, better and Stronger” (And you thought only Kanye West could do that)

We would like to thank our readers who’ve constantly sent in their feedback and suggestions to improve the magazine. As always, we will try to improvise and ascertain that together we will learn and together we will grow.

Do send in your feedback/suggestions to markathon.iims@gmail.com.

Sit back and wear your seat belts, because this is going to be a ride you will remember.

Happy Reading
Team Markathon