Sometimes it can suck to be a guinea pig for a new curriculum. But, there are classes that make up for it. One of them is Advanced Applications (Marketing). As it’s the first course of this sort to be taught to first year MBAs, it had a rocky start. However, it’s slowly become an incredibly exciting course to be part of.

On Tuesday, Visa’s Chief/Global Marketing Officer came to class to discuss the company’s marketing structure before its IPO, and the challenges this structure posed for the company going forward. Our goal, as a class, is to work with our professor to come up with recommendations for how the GMO should restructure the company to create an accountable and effective marketing-oriented organization.

It’s pretty cool (to say the least) that we’re working to solve a problem that is real and happening now. I’m pretty sure few of us have had the opportunity to think about how to change an organization that captures 15% of a $20 trillion dollar market opportunity (personal consumption). While I doubt we’ll come up with anything as clever as the GMO already has in the works, it’s amazing just to have the opportunity to learn about what he is facing and to have the chance to think about these things.

Now I can see why our 2nd year is going to rock!

Recently, I went to South India to learn about scaling health care services across large, low-income populations. While the businesses are "offline," there is at least one significant similarity to many web-based businesses: leveraging social networks in order to acquire trust, gain customers and generate revenue. Here are just some of the ventures we visited:

• Scojo: low-cost reading glasses. The company has an innovative microfranchise model for training entrepreneurs (low-income individuals, generally women) how to identify problems with vision in order identify prospective buyers and sell the eye glasses. Interesting learnings were: How do find your entrepreneurs and educate them? How do you get low-income entrepreneurs to be willing to pay the upfront costs of the glasses and training? How will buyers overcome the negative stigma associated with glasses? One really interesting take away was the importance of style despite the consumer they were targeting.
  

• Medicine Shoppe: traditionally served the high-income population, but is expanding its pharmacies/clinics to low income communities in India. This has required completely rethinking how they approach medical services. For example, after finding no business was coming in they removed all the windows and doors from the pharmacies/clinics in the low income areas - with them there, it looked too strange to the local residents and they would not enter.
  

• 1298: Dial 1298 Ambulance is a private ambulance company. Their business model is especially interesting. It's services are provided at a premium to affluent populations and at no cost to the poor. Scaling up operations in India is challenging - the wealthy and poor live in different areas, separated by traffic and bad roads.
  

One core focus for many of the organizations was on leveraging already established channels of distribution in order to tap remote / distributed populations. Unlike most developed areas, technology is not always an option for acquiring attention. When things are not easy, you need to find a way to redraw your understanding of the world. I think that's when innovation starts to get really exciting.

If you're interested in more details, here is a write-up on our trip Southern India.