Industries

Experience in Education 

Aidias Consulting Group has extensive experience in the Education sector with different types of educational institutes. Few are highlighted in this section. 

ICA Edu Skills- Presently, ICA is one of the largest players in the skill development industry in India. Aidias Consulting Group has been associated with ICA since 2005 and has been an integral part of the growth and journey of the organisation. ICA is a classic case where Aidias Consulting Group has deployed all the services offered by itself. These are: 

• Marketing, branding and ‘Go to Market Strategy’ based on market research amongst students conducted at an all India level 
• Introducing HR policy including designing and successful implementation of the PMS process in the organisation 
• HR Audit to reorganise teams when the manpower count increased dramatically after the skill development initiative undertaken by the Government of India 
• Customised training at all levels of hierarchy including managerial effectiveness and leadership development programmes 
• Build-Operate-Transfer the digital marketing function for ICA which included the identification and purchase of lead management software and its integration with the existing ERP of ICA 
• Deployment of mpower-u for assessment of managerial staff in the government business and training thereafter to achieve business targets 
• Guiding the owners in preparing ICA for external funding successfully 
• In 2005, ICA reported a turnover of 3 crores with operations in and around Kolkata. In 2020, ICA reports a turnover of 160 crores with operations in all states of India. 

Sushila Birla Girls School- Sushila Birla Girls School (SBGS) was residing under the shadow of the boys’ school from the same group. The imagery of the school was not attracting students from educated families where the head of the family was working for any corporate organisation. Majority of the students were from families with trading background and the composition lacked cosmopolitan flavour. Aidias Consulting Group guided the school in rebranding and repositioning the school to address the business issues. A well-designed digital marketing and promotion strategy was formulated and executed to continuously and consistently enhance the image of the school. Results suggest that SBGS now features in the top 3 positions in customer surveys regarding schools and the mix of students has shifted by 7 percentage points within 3 years of the implementing the new strategy. 

Cambridge Marketing College, UK- Aidias Consulting Group has observed the growing propensity of Indians to avail foreign education. It believes that foreign education imparted in India will have great demand. The market is already buzzing with institutions like IITs collaborate with prominent global universities to offer programmes in India. This is operating at the top end of the segment. Aidias Consulting Group partnered Cambridge Marketing College, UK to bring International Certificate Programmes to India. The services offered to Cambridge Marketing College included ‘Go to Market’ strategy, executing the strategy in India including digital marketing, student counselling, tutor identification and certification and delivering the programmes. Aidias Consulting Group has admitted and trained over 50 students in digital marketing certificate programme and launched a PGDM in Digital Marketing in collaboration with an Indian University. As a part of the initiative Aidias Consulting Group took a batch of 15 BBA students from J D Birla College of Management to Cambridge for a week-long immersive experience. 

Hospitals and Healthcare 

Aidias Consulting Group has extensive experience in consulting and training in hospitals and healthcare sector. Few highlights are presented here: 

Fortis Hospitals- Fortis Hospitals had launched in Kolkata with high decibel advertising and media coverage. They had also recruited top consultants in different specialties on full-time basis. The business challenge they faced was lack of referral patients from general practitioners/doctors in private practice only to these reputed consultants. This was impacting the profitability of the hospital severely. Aidias Consulting Group was hired to train the team which used to call upon these private practitioners to motivate them to refer patients to Fortis Hospital. Within 45 days after the training, 67% private practitioners who had been approached earlier and were not referring patients to Fortis, started referring patients to Fortis Hospitals. Encouraged by the success of the programme, Aidias Consulting Group was given the mandate to conduct similar programmes in Bangalore and Mumbai. 

ILS Hospitals- Aidias Consulting Group has been associated with ILS Hospitals since 2004. At that time ILS was a 48-bedded nursing home which was trying to reposition itself from a nursing home specialising in laparoscopic surgery to a multi-specialty clinic. Currently, ILS Hospitals have four units offering a combined bed strength of 500 beds and is considered one of the most profitable hospital in its segment. PE investors have invested twice and had their targeted share of returns. Aidias Consulting Group has provided the following services at ILS Hospitals: 

• Overall business strategy 
• Marketing strategy including launch strategy of the subsequent units 
• Recruitment strategy of clinical and non-clinical staff while opening new units 
• Development and deployment of HR policy and strategy
• Mentoring of the next generation of the owner’s family into the role of Head of Business 
• Training of staff, doctors and leadership teams continuously 
• Digital Marketing Audit with recommendations for improving the ROI on digital marketing 

Smile & Profile Dental Clinic- Smile & Profile was the pioneer in ‘branded’ dental services under single roof. The brand grew at a rapid pace till the customer experience got impacted since the operations did not keep pace with the business growth. Moreover, new units were not getting patients despite being in operation for few years. New ‘branded’ options had mushroomed providing greater choice to customers. Aidias Consulting Group intervened with the following: 

• Creating a new brand identity to rejuvenate the brand 
• Reengineer processes and manpower deployment to enhance customer experience 
• Continuous training of staff in soft skills to generate positive word of mouth 
• Setting up a back office to monitor multiple locations using technology and data 
• Naming the new, exclusive unit as Smile & Profile- Advanced instead of Smile & Profile-Premium which was being considered by the owners and launching the same effectively 
• Formulating local area marketing strategies for units not getting enough footfalls to increase the business at those clinics
• Currently, Smile and Profile-Advanced is unable to accommodate patients due to the huge demand and all but one unit have become independently profitable 

 Premium Retail 

The journey of Aidias Consulting Group commenced on 1st January 2004 with the consulting assignment of P C Chandra Jewellers which is the leading jewellery house in Eastern India. The association continues till date. There are several accomplishments to be highlighted from this association: 

• The journey began with basics of brand and marketing management. The A&P budget was structured and tightly monitored to reduce unnecessary and whimsical expenditure. 25% savings was generated which was ploughed back in marketing 
• Introducing and implementing the science of brand management like methods to select advertising agencies who will provide the creative services; selection of media planning and buying agencies; creating internal benchmarks for media buying and scheduling; selection of models and organised market research to understand the customer (primarily young women) and customers (their parents). 
• Many stars modelled for PC Chandra during their initial modelling careers. Deepika Padukone and Yami Gautam need no introduction and their success is well documented. Aidias Consulting Group played a vital role in choosing them as models for PC Chandra when they were presented as ‘options’ along with several other models.
• Conceptualising and implementing several customer engagement ideas to attract new customers and build loyalty amongst existing customers. These types of engagement programmes were designed for India as well as international markets, especially London and US. One of the programmes to connect with the young woman, GoldLites Diva is currently in the 5th edition. The winner of the second edition is the fastest rising star in Bengali cinema and few others are now top models in Kolkata as well as Mumbai. 
• Conducting mystery audit to capture showroom experience resulted in defining customer experience in showrooms. 
• Mystery audit was followed up with intense training programme of all showroom staff to improve the customer experience. 
• HR audit was undertaken by Aidias Consulting Group during rationalisation of manpower and reducing attrition when number of showrooms from competitors increased and they started on staff of PC Chandra 
• Digital Marketing Audit to align the digital marketing with the overall marketing strategy of the brand 
• ‘Go to market’ strategies for expanding the footprint of PC Chandra in new markets is an ongoing engagement of Aidias Consulting Group 

Blue & Blues Fashion- Blue & Blues is an uncommon choice of brand name for a premium leather accessory brand. Aidias Consulting Group was approached by Unique International-then a large exporter of premium leather accessories to international brands like Pierre Cardin and similar brands with no presence in India-to help them launch Blue & Blues, which was registered as a trademark in Italy, in India. Aidias Consulting Group undertook a classical brand launch and ‘Go to Market’ strategy to introduce the brand. Moreover, since the owners did not have any experience of selling and distribution in India, Aidias Consulting Group provided the complete support in distributing and selling the brand at a pan India level. The services offered were: 

• Appointing ORG-MARG as the market research agency and supervise the entire market research 
• Formulate the brand strategy based on the MR findings 
• Unique brand positioning- research had revealed that customers could not believe that genuine leather can be in any colour other than black, brown or tan 
• Selecting O & M as the advertising agency and shooting the campaign in Milan, Italy- the human skin is the purest form of leather-therefore models were painted in the colours of the bags and used in creatives 
• ‘Go to Market’ strategy was to place the brands in multi-brand premium stores. The first store who was convinced to stock the brand was Khazana at Taj Hotels.  
• This was followed by placing the brand in Shoppers Stop 
• Results- Within 18 months of launch Blue & Blues became the second largest selling pure leather brand in Shoppers Stop. More importantly, Hidesign, the market leader, was forced to change their advertising campaign and introduce items in coloured leather 
• The first brand store in Gurgaon was designed by an alumnus of NID. For the first time someone had used Corian (Du Pont Research product used in kitchen) to make the shelves of the store. It was written about extensively in trade publications. 

Media 

Aidias Consulting Group has impacted business results of several media companies. Few of the highlights are given below: 

Prabhat Khabar- Prabhat Khabar is the leading Hindi news paper in the state of Jharkhand and has an impressive presence in the state of Bihar. Aidias Consulting Group got engaged with Prabhat Khabar after it had managed to thwart a hostile takeover bid by a rival media house. During two years of association with Prabhat Khabar the business impacts were: 

• Increase in circulation of Prabhat Khabar in Jharkhand by 65000 copies 
• Relaunching the newspaper in Kolkata and quickly grow to the number 2 position by a growth of 45000 copies 
• Advertisers from national markets who advertise in Prabhat Khabar grew by 86 advertisers resulting in the advertising revenue growth by 400% from national markets 
• Set up new stream of non-circulation revenue by creating several customer engagement initiatives with different brands 
• Streamlining of processes in news gathering, editing and enhanced judgement in prioritisation of positioning of news which resulted in giving the printing team additional 50 minutes in printing the newspaper in the night
• Making all the district editions independently profitable and increasing the overall profitability of the brand to 28% EBIDTA 

Star TV (Hindi Movies Division)- In a competitive media scenario, there is tremendous pressure on the revenue marketing teams of all media houses. Under these circumstances, around 40 revenue marketing executives have undergone an intense training programme by Aidias Consulting Group followed by group mentoring sessions. The results have been encouraging. All except 5 people have been able to convert an advertiser (used as a live case study) in a competitive channel to an advertiser on one of the options offered by the Hindi movie channels of the Star Group. 

Mint Newspaper- During the launch of Mint Newspaper a team of 30 hand-picked sales professionals were put together to introduce Mint to the advertisers. These people had come from diverse media backgrounds. Aidias Consulting Group received the mandate to train this team. The unique step undertaken by Aidias Consulting Group to understand the expectations of the advertisers provided the building blocks for the content and method of training the team. At that point of time this type of a pre-training market research was never done in the media industry. The team which launched Mint was rated the best team amongst all media marketing teams in the country for three consecutive years by PITCH which is the leading magazine of the advertising industry. 

Dainik Jagaran- Dainik Jagaran has always considered Dainik Bhaskar as its greatest rival. Never had Jagran been able to overtake Dainik Bhaskar in market capitalisation. Two years of continuous training of the revenue marketing team finally helped them achieve their long-standing dream. Their CFO has gone on record appreciating the role and contribution of Aidias Consulting Group in this achievement. During that year Dainik Jagaran’s advertising revenue had increased by 11% where the overall industry has grown by less than 5%. 

The Jung Group (Pakistan)- Aidias Consulting Group has conducted several training programmes for the senior management of the Jung Group. These training programmes have helped the senior management to strategize and steer the group through turbulent times which exist in their country. Deepak Pramanik was also given the responsibility of being the Programme Director to conceptualise and execute the Annual Congress of the All Pakistan Newspaper Society in Karachi in 2011. He received a standing ovation after the programme for his concluding presentation (the topic was marketing newspapers to advertisers in 2020) and the overall conduction of the Congress over three days.