Faculty in the area of Marketing Management, Marketing of Services, Consumer Behaviour and Product and Brand Management, Jaipuria Institute of Management, Noida, Professor Jones Mathew speaks about his love for Marketing as well as his philosophy of “immersive education”.
Professor Mathew’s love for Marketing was born while he was pursuing his MBA from BIT, Mesra, Ranchi (Class of 1989). However, as he says his calling as a teacher came in 2008 when, during a stint as VP (Sales & Marketing) in an Indo-US Joint Venture Company in the fitness industry, he ended up training an entire sales force from scratch. “It is then that I discovered that I loved teaching and training and felt the urge to take it up as a career.”
Professor Mathew then shifted to Academia in 2009 and then finally joined Jaipuria Noida in 2012. On his reasons for joining Jaipuria Noida, Professor Mathew says ‘In the NCR region, Jaipuria Noida occupies place of pride among PGDM institutions. The large number of aspirational students, talented faculty colleagues, four campuses, a strong reputation for academic excellence, a proactive Director, and a congenial work environment were the main reasons I joined Jaipuria, Noida faculty family and chose to teach here.” And his experience at the institutes has further firmed his belief “Teaching at Jaipuria Institute of Management, Noida has been different from teaching at other institutes. At Jaipuria, the well set organised systems for teaching and mentoring students foster an ideal academic environment and give immense academic freedom to faculty for course designing and delivery”.
In fact, on his first working day on campus, the Jaipuria Noida Director asked him to plan the Sales Management and Business Development course he was requested to anchor – thereby ensuring that students get to learn the latest practices. “Another important feature is the “Uncampus” strategy where geographically distant campuses of Jaipuria Institutes are all connected by a common curriculum. This has helped develop a strong consistency in the “educational delivery” according to Professor Mathew.
Professor Mathew’s pedagogical technique is what he calls “immersive education”. Unlike traditional learning technologies, Immersive Education gives learners a sense of “being there” and greatly enhances the learning experience. Thus, students are encouraged to live the marketing experience in everything they do – watching movies and advertisements, getting into the market to do their projects…creating videographs of interesting consumer behaviour insights, treating case studies as the next best thing to the real thing, and being extremely participative in class. “Students must be able to explore, relate and apply on their own. That is the objective of immersive education,” he says.
The Professor, who did a PhD from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi in 2015, has several publications to his credit like The Vanca: Dilemmas of an e-Commerce Entrepreneurial Start-up, co-authored with Dr. Pinaki Dasgupta and published by the Ivey Case Foundation, Canada, 2015, which he feels might be his best work. This is because “the case covers the areas of entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, role of IT as an important backbone of a 21st century e-commerce organisation and a quick idea-to-market implementation strategy.”
Professor Jones Mathew who believes that there are no shortcuts in life says that mentoring has always been a passion for him. In fact he says that likes to go beyond mentoring and move to sponsorship of students. On his roles as a student sponsor he says “I have sponsored students under the mentoring initiative and recommended them to industry managers in specialist areas such as Marketing Analytics and Digital Marketing through my network. This entails finding suitable job opportunities/summer internships (in addition to the college’s own efforts) as per the mentees’ preferences, then helping them link up with suitable industry professionals, helping them frame their letters of intent, writing letters of recommendation vouching for the candidates’ suitability and then following up with the industry persons till the student is placed either for SIP or final placement. I have also sponsored faculty and ex-mentees to get selected in foreign universities for teaching and higher studies respectively on the strength of Letters Of Interests and Letters Of Recommendations created by me.”
