The past two years of uncertainty has affected consumer behaviour, said Suresh Ramanathan, a leading academic expert on consumer behaviour and an alumnus of IIM Calcutta and Stern School of Business, New York University. In an interview with THE WEEK, Ramanathan also talked about how the companies had dealt with the pandemic-induced troubles. "Technology adoption has become a necessity during the pandemic." Ramanathan said that every business is becoming data-driven, and no business school aspirant can survive without knowing how to navigate data.
Excerpts:
Q/ What are the main changes you observed in consumer behaviour during the pandemic?
In the initial phase of the pandemic, people became more risk-averse. As jobs were lost and income came down, people started cutting down on savings. The irony is that the one item that was being cut more commonly than anything else was insurance policy premium. People stopped paying their premiums. It was happening precisely at a time when lives were at stake. And so, it was striking in terms of how people approached risk. I had always thought that India is a country where people are prudent. And here we were finding exactly the opposite results.
Interestingly, in the same research, we found that the people did not stop spending on gold during the pandemic. Gold never went down. In the initial part of the pandemic, people tended to be apprehensive—they did not know what the future was going to be. So, people were a lot more focused on just the necessities. Over time, people learnt to deal with it. And, because of that, they became a lot more open to taking chances.
Q/ How did the corporates and professional education institutions respond to the pandemic-induced uncertainty?
Work-from-home [regime] produced lasting changes. Many companies have talked about allowing employees permanently to work from home. They have shut down their offices. But, on the other hand, we are also seeing a backlash against the WFH regime. Many industry leaders have come forward saying that what you get from people being together—in an environment, working with each other—is different from what you get when you are working from home. In terms of quality or productivity, you may get the same [output], but the idea of team, collaboration, cohesiveness... I think that disappears [because of WFH].
I run an educational institution. Educational institutions are based on close contact with students.
The pandemic, in one way, disrupted the way we do things, but it also forced people to reinvent themselves.
Q/ What were the initiatives taken by your business school during the pandemic phase to ensure continuous engagement with students?
We wanted to keep the levels of engagement with the students high. So, we decided to leverage technology and our access to a wide network of academics and CXOs. We brought leading academics to interact—of course, online—with our students. Experts like Srikant Datar from Harvard Business School, Madhav Rajan from Chicago Booth, Ashwath Damodaran from NYU, Hayagreeva Rao from Stanford, Sunil Chopra from Kellogg, Shyam Sunder from Yale spoke to our students.
Similarly, we brought CXOs—people like R. Sheshasayee and Kiran Majumdar Shaw—to interact with students. We also had masterclasses, workshops and a variety of team-building exercises. So, our unique initiative—and we call it Term Zero—ensured complete engagement, and we ran it for two months.
Another thing we did was that we embraced digitisation on the campus. Every aspect of our operations is now digitised, including exams. During the pandemic phase, exams had to be conducted online, and we needed advanced systems for that. We purchased those systems. Even after students came back to campus, we continued with the online system.
The impact of the pandemic has certainly been felt in the form of acceleration and adoption of technology. It has been a compulsion for many companies and educational institutions. The adoption of technology has become a necessity.
Q/ Great Lakes is an institution that offers courses in business analytics and data science. What is the importance of data analytics in running businesses?
The future of all businesses is going to be data-driven. Even a so-called soft field like marketing—everybody calls it soft, but it is not—is a data-driven field.
No business school aspirant can survive without knowing how to navigate data. You should know what is possible with the data you have. What kind of insights do you want. In the business world, time is of importance. Every moment you function without information, while your competitor has the edge in terms of having the data and knowing what to do with it, you are losing.
Q/ Could you tell us about the training you offer to your students in the data analytics segment?
We have a full-fledged major. Our students can major in analytics. They learn things related to artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, deep learning, and business analytics. And, so they get to learn all of that. On top of that, they also get to take courses in other functional areas. For example, marketing analytics or financial analytics, and how analytics is applied in these domains.
All these big companies are functioning on big data. And, in real-time, they are generating data. And, if you do not know what to do with those data, you are in trouble.