The First Mover Advantage, With A Twist

March 2009, Mumbai

From: [email protected]

To: MKT BATCH 2009-11

CC: MKT BATCH 2008-10

Subject: Hello Marketing Batch Juniors

Hi Friends,

Good day to all!!!

Almost all of you would be surprised to read this email from a stranger. Let me take this opportunity to introduce myself to you, I am Sameer Merchant, Class Coordinator of Marketing Batch 2008-10 (your senior batch). Due to the structure and time frame of the course that we are pursuing at the institute, unfortunately, we as your senior batch were not physically present to welcome you when you arrived at the campus. You must have been informed that this year the institute has started the courses earlier by a couple of weeks, hence we are unable to welcome you since most of us are doing our interns from our hometowns. Accordingly, I am doing it from Mumbai – which is my hometown.

The reason behind writing this email is just to say hello to all of you. Hope I get a few replies to this email. Looking forward to interacting more with all of you!

Regards,

Sam

+91 9849861357

PS: I prefer to be called as Sam which is my nick name. Once you see me even you would prefer to call me by that name, still no compulsions.

I got quite a few responses to this email. A few responses had just a reluctant ‘hello’ and a few others had a curiosity to know more about me. If I was to assume that all the 60 seats for the junior batch were occupied, then my calculation was saying that I received almost 75% response. During my internship of two months in Mumbai, I was constantly in touch with Sujatha Ma’am, our Course Coordinator, since she was my faculty guide for the internship report. She was overwhelmed with this move since she had asked me to reflect a lot of maturity, not only from my side, but on behalf of the whole batch. She even mentioned that Girish Suresh sir, the HOD of the Marketing and famous amongst the students as ‘The Prick’, too, got to know about such communication going to the new batch from their senior batch and was glad that things were progressive.

Going by the name which the students of previous batches had bestowed upon the HOD, he never failed to live up to actually being a prick. He was immensely knowledgeable, about any damn topic under the sky, and had the tendency to show that knowledge to others, in an obviously unacceptable manner. He had yet to teach our class in the first year, but I had already got a taste of his demeaning treatment since I was the Class Coordinator and had to approach him for approvals on guest lectures and other initiatives from the students. He was found to be less supportive than expected and always used to have that disgusting facial expression while commenting. So, getting a few words of appreciation from him meant a lot, although it didn’t come directly to me.

I had planned this move right from the time when I decided to take up an internship in Mumbai. Saril was my aide in the campus since he was doing his internship with one of the reality sector companies in Hyderabad. As he was physically present in the campus, he could give me the overall mood of the batch, their demographics, and various locations from where they belonged to and most importantly, he could pass on their email ids. It took me more than an hour to compose the email and took Toshi another hour to review it; I preferred to keep all such emails going out on behalf of the whole class reviewed by him.

The best thing about Saril was that he always went beyond the expected task and in this case, he smartly got me the email IDs of the HR junior batch as well. There was a synergy between the Marketing and HR courses of our batch since we were dealing with the same problem together when we were juniors – the rift between the senior and the junior batches then. So we were united on most of the issues. Another big reason for the unity and synergy was the demographics. Traditionally, all the marketing batches had more boys in the class compared to girls, and vice versa for the HR batch. So, to stay together was in the interest of everybody, to maintain gender symmetry.

The catch here was between the minorities in both batches, girls of the marketing batch and boys of the HR batch. Boys from the HR batch were generally overshadowed by us for a few issues pertaining to just boys and the girls of the marketing had a ‘cold war’ of some kind with the girls of the HR class.

Keeping the delicate relationship that the two batches had, I had to be very discreet in using the information that Saril had sent over. His whole point was to use the email IDs in such a way that it would highlight the superiority of our batch as seniors over the HR batch in front of their juniors. I completely agreed with his purpose of fetching me that information. We had learned about the ‘first mover advantage’ or ‘FMA’ during our core marketing subject classes and the theory was applicable here. Reaching out to them before their seniors do would definitely increase our visibility and would set a superior impression regarding our batch. But, it had to be subtle, and not offend our HR batch mates.

This issue was of a high magnitude, which had important matters like the visibility of the batch on one hand; and was equally sensitive since it included a strong and diplomatic relationship with the HR batch on the other hand. Such issues call for a discussion with the COMMITTEE. The discussion had to be made virtually since all of us were at different places. So I sent an email with a detailed explanation of the issue to Toshi and Zaffar, who were doing their internships in Kolkata; to Suraj, who was in Delhi and to Gopal and Saril, who were in Hyderabad. Though we were constantly updating the string of emails with ideas on how the task could be accomplished, but nothing concrete was coming out of it. At the very moment when we were running out of ideas, the solution came to us, rather than reaching for it.

Rahul Reddy, the same friend of ours who had created a fiasco during his sister’s wedding and my counterpart in the HR senior batch, had got the news of the email that I had sent to the marketing juniors and wanted to replicate the same for his class. He had given me a call asking if I could help him compose such an email. By now, I had already made a reputation for myself of being a ‘go-to’ person with written communication tasks. I suggested to Rahul, that rather than ‘reinventing the wheel, he can simply realign it’. He can use the same email by making a few modifications to it. He agreed and I forwarded a copy of the same email to him which was sent across to the Marketing juniors.

The next day I got a call from an unknown number:

“Hello, is this Rahul Sir?”, it was a female at the other end.

It was in the afternoon and I was at the office of the company where I was doing my internship, hence I took a couple of seconds to respond. Before I could respond to the call with wrong number, the female at the other end started to talk.

“Sorry to have disturbed you Sir. Let me start with my introduction, I am Priti Bhatacharya, from your junior batch. Sir, the reason why I am disturbing you is because I didn’t have any other option. First, I wanted to thank you for sending that warm welcome email and also sharing your phone number with it. I felt it was totally fattafatti! If it wasn’t for that email, I wouldn’t have got your number. Sir, I know that you would be busy with your internship right now, but we need some immediate help. There are a few Marketing Seniors who are bothering us. They are chasing us from the hostel to the mess and under this helpless condition, I considered calling you first, rather than complaining about them directly to the hostel wardens. I thought you could be helpful, all because of the email that you had sent. When you can be proactive and send such a comforting email, I am sure you could intervene and resolve this problem.”

It took me a few seconds again to register what was happening. Before I could think about clarifying that she had contacted the wrong person, it struck me that someone from my class was making things uncomfortable for girls of another class on the campus. That wasn’t acceptable so my natural reaction was to know more about the guys who were bothering the girls. So I asked,

“Priti, I am so sorry to hear this. However, since I am not in campus, I would need a few more details about these guys. I know all the boys from that class, so a short description of even one guy would be enough”

The only thing running in mind was to get the description, figure out who these guys are and then have a word with them.

She was quick in her response, “Sir, I have got their names too. One of them is Jiten and the other is Mahesh”

“Priti, sorry again for the inconvenience caused to you. Give me a day or two, I will set things straight regarding this. And thank you for not complaining to the management, which is very mature of you”

With this, I kept the phone and spoke to Saril and Gopal. It took them just one discussion with Mahesh and Jiten and they were not to be found anywhere near the girl's hostel. The next day, I got a message from the same number at 10 pm,

‘Thanks for all your help, Sir. We haven’t seen those boys for the whole day. That was quick of you, Sir’

I should have immediately told her that this wasn’t Rahul, but I thought that would freak her out. She would start getting scared by the fact that she informed the class coordinator of the same class about some boys bothering them. So I played along and replied,

‘The pleasure was all mine. By the way, I am a little uncomfortable in being addressed as sir. You can call me by my name, that would make things a lot comfortable’

Meanwhile, I again went through the email that Rahul had sent to his juniors and was wondering how someone can ignore changing the signature for forwards, and that too such a personalized communication going from your email id. And my phone beeped again.

‘Or can I call you Sam? You had mentioned that it is your nickname and you prefer others calling you by that name

I again went through the email and noticed it again that the ‘PostScript’ was also retained while sending the email. I replied to her with a yes and kept on thinking about what just happened. My phone beeped again and it was someone calling this time. It was Sadia,

“Jaanu, sweetheart, what are you doing? You busy?”

I was wondering why she was asking me if I was busy with something at this time of the night. Post dinner, when I am not on campus, the only task that I have is to chat with her through SMS.

“Sadia, darling, I was thinking about you and only you. I was thinking of the movie that we watched last week. Wasn’t it romantic that one more movie went down in our list of movies that has to be re-watched, individually, so that we actually end up watching the movie? God bless the empty theatres during the morning shows on weekdays”

I could feel she was blushing,

“Sameer, stop it, I am feeling shy. Mr. Merchant, ‘would be Mrs. Merchant’ was thinking about Mr. Merchant and that is why she had texted him. But poor ‘would be Mrs. Merchant’, Mr. Merchant is so busy that she didn’t get any responses”

I realized that in the process of responding to Priti and posing as an HR senior, I had ignored a couple of messages from Sadia. She continued,

“has she already got a co-wife?”

I guessed she has started watching the daily soaps again.

“Sadia, jaan, I am so sorry to have made you wait. As I said, I was so immensely thinking about you that I didn’t realize that you had actually texted. And please stop watching those daily soaps. They are just spoiling my sweetheart’s otherwise pure and innocent mind”

She liked watching them, and the debate went on, as usual.

A few text messages were exchanged with Priti too, for the next few days, till I completed my internship and left Mumbai for the second year of the course.

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