Marketing Yoga

Marketing Yoga Lifestyle

Today we had interesting discussion at Kimaya hotel in Kothrud with Sandeepji Naik, Harshadji Shah and Preetima Mulik. We talked about marketing projects to promote SSY lifestyle. Here is what we discussed in brief:

Based ancient Hindu wisdom, SSY now has some extremely valuable knowledge for sharing with the world. Guruji dedicated his life to pass on this knowledge and skills to large community of disciples but now the knowledge is not spreading fast enough. One of the areas where we have opportunity to improve is building the marketing expertise and adopting the 21st century internet based marketing technologies to achieve rapid growth. There is one possibility worth exploring to build this expertise.

At College of Engineering, Pune (COEP), a course is being introduced for the final engineering students, to teach these marketing technologies called "Growth Engineering" (AKA Growth Hacking, Marketing Automation, Direct Marketing, Internet marketing etc. etc.) Prof Ashok Ranade and Prof Ashok Saraf lead the teaching efforts. Prof Saraf has been SSY champion for last 2 decades.

For the Growth Engineering course, students are required to complete one marketing project and the proposal is to offer the task of marketing SSY services as marketing projects to the students. Students will benefit by getting a experience of real life practical project and SSY in return will benefit of experimenting the new marketing technologies. 

For execution of the projects, teams consisting of about 4 to 6 students, will be formed. One or two representatives from SSY will join the team. While students will do most of the technical work like web programming, SSY reps need to provide complete information about the service product to the and participate in all team exchanges. All students meet once a week for about 1 to 2 hours in a classroom for a presentation from the faculty. Each project team will then meet separately to execute their project steps at their own convenience.

The course is being offered by COEP and all the related costs are being taken care of by the COEP like; Faculty remuneration, Hall, Computer lab and Software subscriptions, books, printing etc. etc. SSY will not be charged any fees for participating in this course. However, there are some direct costs associated with execution of SSY marketing projects which will have to be born by SSY. These costs that SSY need to budget for are Website hosting and programming, Search Engine charges, travel and incidentals for the team members etc. 

What SSY marketing projects  can be considered? We need specific well defined service products, like; various different courses (ISP, BSP, TTC, etc) or Ashram retreats etc. Based on suggestion from Radhama, Jagdeeshji and others following 2 projects are discussed y the group.

(1) ISP or Children's SSY: 

(2) Peace Homes (Accommodations in Ashram as well as homes and nature)

Because of the limited time of the course the projects have to be of specific clearly defined service product and it can not be of general nature like overall marketing strategy of SSY/RSVK organization. However, after executing these 2 compact projects, the participants will gain good understanding for developing a strategy for the entire RSVK organization.

The course starts in first week of January 2016. Exact schedule will be known before end of this month. Tentatively the weekly classroom sessions will be on a workday (Monday through Thursday, preferably sometime between 3 and 6 pm.