Sumit Sharma, Amit Kumar and Mahtab Masood with their notebook.

The grand purpose of ‘SAM Initiatives’, a marketing project by three class of 2012 students of Shailesh J Mehta School of Management (SJMSoM), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay was to provide a niche marketing platform for companies, whose target customers were college students. But what became a more noteworthy purpose of the marketing effort, was that exercise notebooks which initially cost Rs 70-90 were made available to students for a disruptive Rs 15 at the IIT campus.

How? By asking local advertisers to advertise their products in the books.

The brains behind this simple plan were SJMSoM second-year students Mahtab Masood, Amit Kumar and Sumit Sharma. For the trio, the effort was two-fold. To make a foolproof attractive marketing proposition for the advertisers and to create a smart takeaway for the beneficiaries, in this case the students.

The students first venture last year sold 1,100 notebooks by the fifth day of sales. When asked why such a small number was printed for a student population in IIT Bombay of about 7,000, Sumit explained that the economics had not allowed them to scale further. We had in mind about 5,000 books but considering the printing costs, we could only manufacture so many. After having sold all, we can go back to the advertisers with a new proposition detailing the success of the first venture. The next time we will aim for a larger print amount.

In all, seven advertisers located nearby IIT-B advertised in the notebooks. Jebby Jacob, who runs a music class in Powai was one of the advertisers and is a very pleased man. He told PaGaLGuY that he had got a tremendous response from the advertisement in the IIT-B notebooks. I was happy with the number of people who got back to me after the ad was published. The ad reached my exact target audience and so it worked. Mr Jacob is all set to provide another advertisement if the students come to him again.

Mahtab says that the competitive advantage lay in the total experience a user got while buying the product. The notebooks are A4-sized, spiral bound with high quality 75 gsm writing sheets and at just Rs 15.

Sumit added that notebook was in fact not the primary aim of their marketing initiative, though an important one. We wanted to create a database of users for advertisers and also promote the advertisers products online with this database.

The notebooks besides ads, also had promotional offers, discount coupons and other valuable information such as weekend gateways, Mumbai local train map, etc. Amit explained that everytime a book was bought, the student was asked to register himself. There was an online interface with every registration and the student was asked whether he wanted to be contacted about any promotional activities by the advertisers. If yes, he was sent the promotional information. In this way we also collected a database which could be used for any kind of marketing venture or poll purposes.

The number of registrations on the website were by 66 unique users and the number of ‘Likes’ on the initiative’s Facebook page was 280+, while the number of webpage views on the website were 2500+.

Amit said that after a month of selling all the notebooks, they ran a market research survey among both types of students — those who had bought the notebooks and those who had not. The objective of this survey was to assess the effectiveness of brand recall of the advertisers who had advertised in our notebooks. “We came to the conclusion that almost all the advertisers had had an increase in brand retention by more than 100%,” added Amit.

The team shared a chart from the study with PaGaLGuY.

The trio is however not willing to discuss how much it actually took to print one notebook and whether they made any profits at all. But working on the initiative gave them varied learning experiences.

Having graduated from SJMSoM in 2012, the three students are now working at three different companies — Sumit in manufacturing, Amit in marketing and Mahtab in IT. But they hope to come together to carry this venture ahead sometime. The three told PaGaLGuY that entrepreneurship was where they were all headed and their pet project at IIT-B had been like a pilot.

Below is a little project report type analysis of the venture as made by the trio and shared with PaGaLGuY.

Core challenges

To provide an advertising platform to companies which target college students, making the advertisements more cost-effective and efficient along with the capability of tracking the sales of their product and having the lowest cost-per-view of the advertisement.

To provide an online interface which captures the data of the niche target segment and using the business intelligence to make specific promotional offer to the directed users.

To provide high quality notebooks to students at an affordable price along with providing necessary comprehensive generic information relevant to student need. This coupled with the capability of following their brand and getting real time update of discounts/offers.

Product/ Service Description & Value Proposition

The venture has both online and offline offerings for its customers:

Offline product: Notebook

Multi-subject A4 size spiral bound notebook

High quality 160 writing sheets of 75gsm

Aesthetically designed covers

Advertisement on separators of the notebook which acts as utility rather than obstruction

Online product: Website and social media

Personalised student account for the registered students

Exclusive offers and discounts to be delivered by email and SMS

Using business intelligence on the data captured on web for dynamic sales targeting.

Value proposition for the Students:

Affordable cost of the high quality notebook @Rs 15

Ease of availability of the notebook.

Relevant information in the notebook along with offers/discounts

Value proposition for Advertisers

Niche and targeted audience

High reach and high brand retention and recall

Sales tracking of the advertisements

Comprehensive online and offline platform with lowest cost per view of the advertisement.

Target Audience & Market Size

The plan is to sell our notebooks to college students across different campuses in Mumbai & later in other cities. The target segment is students in colleges, which are located geographically in proximity to the point of sale/service of our advertiser so as to provide a nice & targeted advertising platform. On Advertising front, we are targeting both National/Local advertisers for ales/promotions/brand building/coupons etc.

The Research

As per IDFC SSKI India Research Report 2009, there are 18000+ higher educational institutes and there were 3.1 million graduate students in the year 2010, thus the market size of the target customers (College students) is huge and is growing at an astounding rate. Also the total ad spend in India in the year 2010 was $ 6.7 billion growing at an astounding rate of 28% which is highest in Asia Pacific region, so the market potential is immense.