Today, MICA, formerly known as Mudra Institute of Communication, Ahmedabad, is the only residential institute in the country and perhaps in the Asia-Pacific region, dedicated to creating leadership in Strategic Marketing and Communication. Recently, the institute rebranded itself with a new logo while still retaining its vision to create leadership in Strategic Marketing & Communication, as also its tagline- ‘The school of Ideas’. Established in 1991, at the outskirts of Ahmedabad, MICA offers a wide range of AICTE approved academic programmes in communication with specialisations in Marketing Research, Digital Communication Management, Social Change Leadership, Brand Management, Media Management and Advertising Management, and a Fellow Programme in Management- Communications, a doctoral level programme that encourages both fundamental and applied research in the communication domain, with offerings in the sub-areas of Communication and Media, Communication and Marketing, Communication and Culture, and Communication and Social Change. Corporate Citizen met up with Dr. Nagesh Rao, President & Director, MICA , an intellect, who completely thinks out-of-the-box. Dr. Rao’s scholarly interests are in the areas of intercultural communication, global leadership and health communication. After completing his doctoral work in intercultural communication from the Michigan State University in 1994, Dr. Rao taught at several U.S. universities, including University of Maryland, Ohio University and University of New Mexico. Before joining MICA, he was Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). By Ma
MICA was started by Mr. AG Krishnamurthy, who was the head of Mudra Communications, based out of Ahmedabad. In the mid to late eighties, he realised that there were no institutes or colleges creating leaders for the advertising industry in India, though there were some MBA schools in Mass Communication and journalism. In 1991, his dream and vision translated into MICA. In the first three years, they were running short term programmes in the city. From 1994 onwards, post-graduate programmes in communication commenced, with a focus on management where the students joined the advertising industry as leaders.
There were three phases to MICA—the first en years completely focussed on advertising, account management and client servicing. In early 2000, Atul Tandan as the Director of MICA, from Hindustan Lever, who brought in focus on marketing and brand management. So MICA focussed on marketing and brand management in addition to advertising and communication in the next eight to nine years. Two years ago, we were the first management institution to offer a second year specialisation in DCM, which has the whole spectrum, right from data analytics to market research, consumer insights, campaigns and so on. When I took over in 2012, I saw there was this worry amongst MBA students about how much money are they going to make after two years, which was perfectly fine. But I said, we will have to equally think of the planet and people, while also thinking about profit. So we decided to make the triple bottomline of people, planet and profit, kind of a way of life in campus and infuse it in our curriculum. We introduced a specialisation this year in ‘social change leadership’ for students who would want to work for a small or large NGO like UNICEF, or SEWA, or get into the Corporate Social Responsibility wing of companies and do CSR work. We realised that small NGOs had the champions but did not know how to manage projects. Large NGOs have the project management in place, but have forgotten the passion. So connecting the passion and project management with the whole spectrum of other activities motivated us to do it. Simultaneously, about five years ago, we started a doctoral programme in communication. If MICA has to be an institute of national and international repute, scholarship and research is the key. The third programme is Crafting Creative Communication (CCC), which started ten years ago as a six-month programme and initially focussed on students who wanted to become copywriters or art directors in advertising agencies. Two years ago, we made it a one-year programme. With this, besides copywriters and art directors, you could also become a creative in a digital agency or in a bank or some other area. We also realise that the online space, is important for working executives and for others who want to keep upgrading their skills for professional development. We have four one-year programmes in the online space, targeting mid-level executives from market research to advertising. So our programmes are a combination of residential and online. We also run MDP programmes/workshops throughout the year, which could be a three or five-day programme on marketing, general management, healthcare and hospital management, focussing on how to be effective communicators.
(Laughs) Well, because we are so niche in some ways, I don’t know if there’s an institute just like ours but there seems to be an overlap with Symbiosis Institute of Media & Communication (SIMC) in terms of marketing, brand management programmes and so on. Broadly if you take marketing only, then we are in competition with the IIMs and other management institutes. If you take the creative side, like the CCC programmes, we have design schools in the country where one part of what they do would be communication design. Thus there are some overlap areas. But there’s nobody doing what we are -- combining management, strategic marketing and communication. Interestingly, even when I travel across the world, I don’t see programmes like ours. Institutes do offer programmes specifically in communication, management, creativity design, and mass communication and so on but not like we do.
Leaders, today or tomorrow, have to be equally good in their left and right brain capacities. As I joke, he/she should be able to crunch numbers and write poetry equally well
One, right from the beginning, thanks to our history, because the idea was to create leaders in the advertising space, there’s always been a strong focus of what I call the right brain and left brain classes... we have a set of classes in communications and creativity in the first year, as we also have classes in finance, economics and so on. Leaders, today or tomorrow, have to be equally good in their left and right brain capacities. As I joke, he/she should be able to crunch numbers and write poetry equally well. So our classes are set up in a way where there’s this integrated perspective of saying that while I am going to work on working on excel sheets, crunch numbers but at the same time, it is equally important that I am able to frame a problem, ideate, think out-of-the-box, which is why when a MICAn looks at a case study, he/she will look at it differently as against someone who is coming from a traditional B-school. Secondly, the experience on campus plays a huge role on who they become. All 360 students stay on the campus and we’ve always had a very open and liberal campus where the hostels are close to each other, there are no restrictions on the timings, there is a lot of social interaction between the students. Right from the beginning, over 50 per cent of our students are females, which is not true for most business schools. If you take all that plus a whole lot of co-curricular activities, a strong theatre group, strong focus on sports, and their interest in pursuing their own interests, it makes them different. All this starts right from our admission process.
I was in the US for a long time and I had found MICA a director driven institute, in that the head of the institute played a key role in recruitment, decision making and so on. So at one level, I spent the first couple of years making MICA a purpose-driven institute-- if I leave tomorrow, the purpose, process and procedures should still be in place and should be transparent for people to understand them, in terms of faculty, structure and so on. It took some time because they were not used to it but now of course everyone says, ‘wow, we now have a policy and system in place where there is a goal and how to get there today.’
Students give the Common Admission Test (CAT) and one of those other exams which the AICTE wants them to go through. We do have about 60 per cent students who are engineers, but I would say these are those who never wanted to be engineers in the first place. Next in the process, they take the MICAT exam. The MICAT exam is more to check their holistic and creative ability so we want to see how they analyse and view issues differently. Then we have an interview process and a group exercise, all to see whether he/she has the left and right brain capacity, can they be on the edge, holistic, can they think out-of-the-box, and so on. So in some ways, they have to look at things differently even before they come in. Then we have the curriculum and the campus experience, which creates the ‘MICAn’ at the end of it. After which they follow their passion and what they are good at, which I simply love. Selection is completely merit based, we have no control. There is an increase of 20 per cent of non-engineering students this year. We think it is a better idea to have a mix of both engineers and non-engineers, So, very consciously, about two years ago, we started to pitch to non-engineering schools who are into commerce, arts and other streams, to let them know more about MICA.
In the Us,even in MICA, students aren’t challenging the teacher but the idea. In India, if you challenge the idea, it amounts to challenging the professor’
We get around 6000-8000 applications a year, for the PG only, out of which we take 160 students, every year. For the CCC programme, we get about 250-300 applications, out of which we take 24 students. For the Doctoral programme, we get about 100 applications, and we take five. So it is pretty competitive.
It’s not compulsory, but we see a trend where 60-70 percent of students who come in have a two-year work experience. So the average work experience tends to be about 1.3 years. About 30 per cent are freshers. We have not formalised the prior work experience criteria as a rule as such, but for me I do see value in the combination of freshers with those having some prior work experience. It helps interactive learning. A youngster who is about 19-20 years old would bring in a fresh perspective as against someone who has about three-four years work experience. The conversations in the classroom between them is also different. But there’s no formal rule in MICA on whether he/she should have prior work experience or should be a complete fresher.
We’ve had eight students who successfully completed their doctoral course and bagged academic roles as assistant professors in leading institutions like SIMC, and are doing very well. Out of the CCC batch, 95-99 per cent of students get into advertising agencies as copywriters, art directors, to start off with. I know of this young 27 year-old guy, working in the US as a financial analyst, who gave up his plush job and came to MICA to do the one-year CCC programme because he wanted to be a copywriter. Well, it takes guts to do something like this. CCC students get placed primarily in advertising firms.
About 30 students today want to specialise in this area, in the second year. Digital marketing is a hot topic today, and we have some youngsters doing work in that area. We do have traditional marketing and accounting classes but we don’t have enough teachers coming forward to teach this subject. If you see, a lot of them want to get into a start-up or into digital. I thought two years ago all 160 students would take up digital. The reason for just 20-30 students opting for it is because they are hedging their bets and finding out if we can get the quality of people to come forward and teach so that they can get good jobs. As we have seen that happening in the last two years, slowly these numbers will increase. Also, in MICA, if you specialise in brand management, you can still take most of the digital classes. So even though you specialise in brand management, there are students who are getting jobs in the digital space because they have taken the digital classes too. But we do have a digital advisory board, so the top companies come in, and the students opting for the course in the last two years are growing. Students who specialise in DCM course have to do a live project with their own idea, and make a pitch to a venture capitalist. Out of them, only one or two continue the project and stay with it, most of them join digital companies like Google or Amazon. We have about 15 MICA incubates working outside MICA on projects. We have youngsters working on an entrepreneurship project in the digital space, where we give them small seed money, mentors, resources like computers, so they work for about 2-3 years and take the seedling to a level where they are able to pitch it to an angel investor. Once they pitch to an angel investor, they are out on their own. Not just incubators, we are also building up a small entrepreneurship kind of classroom where people want to start their own venture.
‘I spent the first couple of years making MICA a purpose-driven institute-- saying if I leave tomorrow, the purpose, process and procedures should still be in place, and should be transparent for people to understand them, in terms of faculty, structure and so on’
With the students, I put in much more academic rigor. There was a sense that we were much more a ‘party school’ and a ‘happy school’ and that we had moved away from the importance of academics. So I really pushed academics as an agenda across all programmes for the students. To be honest, there was a lot of resistance and pushback saying ‘we need not change’. If you ask the students they will say that the director is making it so difficult by focussing on academics all the time, but the ones who have graduated and come back, whether after one or two years, thank me. They realise that it’s not just about their first job. If they have a strong foundation here, academically with co-curriculars, they benefit from it. The other change was bringing about the digital programme and social change programme for the PGP students. For the Fellowship Programme in Management, we are increasing the level of rigor, quality, and placements, and on CCC, moving away slowly from advertising to ideation to creativity. We also do a lot in the area of leadership and scholarship, like giving funds to faculty to conduct research, giving them significant amount of monies to travel domestically and internationally for their conferences, each year, providing research and support for their work to be translated into journals and publications and books. While this is a long term process, we are building equity in that particular direction.
‘They have 2200 departments of communication in the Us, where you can study public speaking, interpersonal communication, organisational communication, cross-cultural communication, health communication and so on. For me that reflects the fact that we are far behind’
We have good interaction and connection with the students. Some part of it is because of the push I gave to academics, when they saw me as a ‘villain’ for some time (laughs) . Some change that happened is because my wife and family used to live in Ahmedabad and very consciously we moved into the campus. So now I am able to connect with them walking around, and there’s a different level of interaction that is helping.
We are a small group, very dedicated team and extremely diverse. One part of the faculty takes care of finance, economics and operations. Then we have a marketing area and communications area, where we begin getting into more “right brain” things and then we have faculty for designing courses which is completely “right brain”. So again, I often joke saying I have faculty from an extremely left brain to an extremely right brain. Because not all of us come from the same side, we sometimes do have tough conversations. We do have disagreements. I am convinced that the most interesting and creative ideas come out when we have people from diverse backgrounds coming together. There may be different perspectives during recruitment and hiring. Recruiting and keeping good faculty is a challenge. Today, we have 22 full time faculty, seven adjunct faculty who come, maybe for a week, every month, teaching and consulting. Guest or visiting faculty are about 100, from the industry, who come for maybe two or three days or a week. We hope to have eight more full- time faculty members this year, across divisions, maybe some in the digital, social change, general management, economics and marketing area and data analytics.
Since we are a private institution, the government does not support us. In the first five years of starting the institute, Mudra Communications supported us, but since then we’ve been self-sufficient. We’ve been able to manage our finances well.
Not at the moment. MICA decided to focus on high quality with presence nationally and internationally rather than having branch campus/es in different places. As one of our Board member jokes---‘There’s just one Harvard University, in just one place, Boston, Massachusetts.’ Similarly, we are only in Ahmedabad, at least for now. But our work should have an impact nationally and internationally. We’ve heard stories that branching out to different locations could dilute your brand. It is also extremely difficult to get good faculty.
Yes, but not much. Actively there are about three to four schools where our students go to...in fact we should be at a higher number but we do have a number of MOUs with different universities. But we are pushing active international exchange programmes for students to get more exposure to the communications field.
In 2012, when I joined, the average package was between Rs 8.5-9 lakh. Today, we are at an average of around Rs 12 lakh. A big chunk would be in the marketing and brand management space. Today there is a race between brand management and the digital space. Digital may take over soon, in terms of recruitment. If you look at our placements, it is from a very marketing corporate context. From a business perspective, our placements have always been 100 per cent from the day one, and our average salaries have gone up significantly over the last 20 years. Even in the last three years, average salaries have gone up by 30 per cent and 99.9 per cent roles are in the corporate context. So if the students are going to L’Oreal, P & G, Google, they are all getting into corporate roles. From a B-School perspective too, we’ve done well and continue to do well. We are not a traditional B-School but we have a PG in Management, Communication. We are a B-School as much as a Communications school.
In fact I don’t even have to do much, it’s already there. But if someone wants to do something, like three years ago three students came ahead and said they wanted to have a music band but didn’t have enough equipment, we got guitar, a room and other equipment for them. There is this wall on the campus called the “Chhota Wall,” which is entirely their space, to express themselves on whatever they are going through. Independently, they have some amazing things to create like artwork, music, lights and so on. It’s part of the MICA ethos & culture. So I push them academically and on the creative side as well.
Among our alumni, those who went into advertising roles in the mid 1990’s are all CEOs and holding top positions today. Most of the MICAns hold top positions (CMO & CEO levels in marketing division) in Leo Burnett, Ogilvy & Mather and other media firms as well. In companies like Tata Beverages and Starbucks, top two or three positions are all MICAns. In the last five to eight years, a lot of MICAns have joined companies like L’Oreal and P & G. Independent of that, some of them have gone ahead to do what they are passionate about. For instance, Anil Srinivasan, PGP 2003-04, classical pianist, who gave up his corporate job, is today using Music to teach Math in Tamil Nadu, only for Government school children. There’s Evam , an entertainment entrepreneurship formed by ex-students of MICA, who have an extensive background of theatre craft and film behind them, and have come together in Chennai to start this venture. A lot of them are also into market research because we have strong focus on market research and data analytics. So advertising agencies, market research, data analytics, entrepreneurship are some of the areas MICAns get into.
The whole process has been going since a while because of the B-School and C-School subject. But in 2013, the Governing Council here said that this is something we must talk about. Also that if you ask people outside MICA, very few people know what the abbreviation stands for. Some may say Mudra Institute of Communication and Advertising, some may say Mass Communication Institute and so on. As we were rebranding, we thought that everybody needs to know us as MICA. In our work, we are not just localised to Ahmedabad only. We started in Ahmedabad, but that is not our affiliation. We have a national and international affiliation in what we do. We have global aspirations in MICA. We knew it’s going to take nearly five years for people to know MICA as MICA, just like ITC Ltd or IBM did it. So we were very conscious of our choice. Our overall focus will be on leadership in strategic marketing and communication as we want to create strategic leaders. We also changed the logo. The spiraling triangles encapsulate our growth journey while retaining our distinct identity. The colour red symbolises strength, passion, commitment and dedication. The lines in the logo go to say that we are not fixed, we move around. The campus too went through a complete change. So all our flags, names, boards changed. We are completely done with the rebranding exercise.
I would say India is still very nascent, not the communication industry as such, but the role of communication in what we do professionally. While it has improved a little bit, we are still way behind. For example, there are 2200 departments of communication in the US, where you can study public speaking, interpersonal communication, organisational communication, health communication and so on. When I was at IIM-A, this student once told me that the ‘cream’ of the students would get into finance, followed by marketing, operations. The last option would be “communications”. So that’s the kind of importance given by students to this field. He also added, in the same breath, that when recruiters come, the top three things they look for, and no matter what job, it is “communication”. That’s the kind of irony in India, where people are beginning to understand the value of communication but are unwilling to put resources there. Ideally, we should have hundreds of programmes in schools and colleges focusing in communication. For me, communication is first strategy and then skill. I will first think what I am going to say, broadly, and then say it. So in the Indian context, we need to do a lot more in the communications field.
I think it’s here, it is going to impact us in a big way, but one must remember that only 50 per cent of the world has access to digital resources, whether it is the internet or the web. Half of the world, even today, does not have access even to electricity, computer, web or any other digital resource. So we are only talking about its impact to about 40-50 per cent of the countrywide.So whether you are in Government, health or Marketing, the role of digital is only increasing...but we are all scurrying because the digital field is growing so rapidly and we are not able to catch up in terms of learning. From the media space if you see the digital spends, it’s still not humongous but it is growing. Will we come to a point when print and television advertising is going to die? Not yet. In India, we are growing at a phenomenal rate, thanks to the mobile platform. Countries like the US and parts of Europe have gone through this stage by stage but India took a massive leap as our mobile/ smartphone penetration is increasing and is set to increase to an extent to which access to digital resource is going to dramatically increase.
‘For me, communication is first strategy and then skill. I will first think what I am going to say, broadly, and then say it. so in the Indian context, we need to do a lot more in the communications field’
I grew up in a middle class Brahmin family in Madras, originally from Bangalore. I did my B.Com from Vivekananda College, and worked for few companies. I was doing my part-time MBA at Loyola College and working as well. At one point in time, I thought what is this corporate world all about? Fortunately, a cousin of mine came down from the US in 1986 who was doing a Masters in Communications and when he talked about what he was doing, I was fascinated. I thought, here’s the field which is so important in what we do, personally and professionally. Of course, in India, we don’t and didn’t have communication programmes like interpersonal communication, organisational communication and so on. We just have mass communication. So in 1987, I jumped ships, went to do a small programme in Masters in Communication in Mississippi, became a Teaching Assistant and that’s how it all started. Later, I did my Doctoral in Intercultural Communication from Michigan State University. For 23 years I was in the US, teaching across universities. In 2010, my wife and I decided to come back to India since my mom was unwell. Luckily, my wife found a job here and I joined IIM-A. My daughters are 11 and 9, so I think this is an exciting time to be in India.
In the US, in the academic context, because US is very independent and self-driven, the working style and process is very different from India. For example, a student in India, before asking a question may think twice, or have some hesitation before going ahead with the question because there’s a teacher in front of him. However, in the US, even in MICA, students don’t question the teacher, but are challenging the idea. In India, if you challenge the idea, it amounts to challenging the professor.
My Vision is that by 2020, anywhere in the world, anyone looking at strategic marketing and communication, as a student, professor, recruiter, policy maker—we should be in the top five of their list. In the Indian context, we are doing pretty well. There are lots of people who know us well, but there are also people who do not know MICA. So how do we go about doing it? People wanting to collaborate with us, students wanting to come to do the complete two-year programme and not just as a foreign exchange student, the type of scholarship we create, the type of placements we have nationally and internationally...currently its mostly national, so we want a top-of-mind response saying if I were to go abroad in the next five years, and I mention MICA, he/she should say, ‘wow, so you are from MICA, the marketing and communication school in India’—that’s what I want.
By Mahalakshmi Hariharan
