19 | Talking to an LSR and ISB Grad and a Principal at a Digital Agency - with Megha Chawdhry

Megha Chawdhry | Marketing & Business Strategy, Treemouse

Megha enrolled at Lady Shri Ram College after graduating from Sanskriti School with the intention of pursuing a career in communication design and marketing.

After college and two years of work experience, she wanted to explore the fundamentals of marketing and strategic communication, which led her to the Indian School of Business to pursue a MBA. Today, she heads Marketing and Business Strategy at Treemouse.

Episode Takeaways

Career in Communication Design and Marketing

Immediately out of Sanskriti, she knew she wanted to pursue a career in communication design and marketing and felt that being in India was a very interesting space to tap into that. The multiple narratives without a unified identity of who’s Indian made her very excited to continue studying in India. Foray on Digital in India had started out in mid 2010 after her undergraduate degree and she thought that it would be great to be part of this incredible spectrum, even though she’d gotten an opportunity to move to the UK. 

Out of College

She spent two and a half years after college working at Drizzlin, a dynamic workplace wherein she learnt the strategy side of a business, and her team taught her to think digitally, among many other skills. However, the market was still evolving and to her, an MBA made sense because she wanted to understand the “nuts and bolts” of marketing and strategic communication. She also hoped to gain from the experiences of her peers, hence ISB appealed to her. Nonetheless, coming from a different professional background took her some time to adjust to the large atmosphere of a business school.

MBA at ISB

The biggest thing that worked for her was that it was flexible and exposed her to a lot more than she had anticipated through electives. She came in wearing blinders about figuring out the larger picture about marketing, but over the course of the program, she became interested in sustainability, finance modelling, and film. These had a significant impact on the career choices she made later on. In the second batch of the Mohali campus, a lot of the faculty was international, so the diversity in pedagogy was incredible. However, since it was a business school that geared towards preparing towards consultancy-based practice, you had to go deep into subjects that may not been at the top of your consideration, a great way to make you push yourself. Nevertheless, what was inspiring was the diversity of experiences and spaces that people coming from different backgrounds had to offer to her learning.

Synchrony between ISB Mohali and Hyderabad

You do have access to resources across campuses, but of course as you spend time on a particular campus, you tend to nurture your affiliations there. As the second batch, it was still half the size of the Hyderabad student body, so everyone was very well connected and rooted; everyone knew each other by name. However, there was a lot of collaboration between students in clubs and events. You could even choose to switch campus depending on your concentration.

Reality Vs. What ISB prepares you for

ISB prepares you to anticipate rigour in your future job. You’re taught how to think in terms of digital mediums for marketing. As an institution, it goes beyond the 360 degree view, showing you all the perspectives of marketing. She joined the strategic marketing group at Godrej, where she learnt how to keep a birds-eye view on marketing, branding, and research. The Godrej Properties was a unique project wherein she wasn’t only doing marketing, but also got to work in an in-house property design studio. From here, she became interested in the design side of marketing, getting involved in the process within a corporate was very different from what she thought it would be.

Role at Treemouse

Treemouse is a company that focuses on understanding the behavioural nuances of people and how these can help solve issues in marketing or product development. Using this approach, the research and work is rooted in understanding people. Her role is to look at the business development side of the projects, and she aligns the behaviours of people with big business decisions. The company works with agility in each project. As a team, she finds that the staff come from different industries and bring new thoughts and approaches to each discussion.

3 Words That Describe Her

Perseverance, generalist, earnest.