MY NESTLÉ INTERNSHIP: FROM "CALL TO ACTION" TO UNDERSTANDING THE REAL INDIA
When the commercial head at Nestlé asked me what CTA meant during my interview, I answered confidently: “Call to action: the button that gets people to click on an ad.” It’s what every digital marketer learns on day one. He smiled and told me I’d learn a very different definition over the next two months. He was right. By the end of my internship, CTA had come to mean something rooted in shelves, retailers, and real people walking into real stores, not a button on a screen.
That was my first brush with shopper marketing, a term I’d never even heard before landing at Nestlé.
WEEK ONE: LEARNING TO SPEAK FMCG
My internship began with seven days of market immersion. I tagged along on sales team roll calls and watched an ASM (Area Sales Manager) manage his team, warehouses, returns, and something called “bad goods.” I learned what CD and DC points were, what a DOR (Daily Operational Review) is, and what a “program outlet” means on the ground. I was scribbling down acronyms in my notebook like I was cramming for an exam. Honestly, by day three I was a little overwhelmed. By day seven, I could actually follow what people were saying. I could finally follow a sales conversation without asking what half the acronyms meant.
PROJECT 1: SHOPPER MARKETING
It was peak Delhi summer, my first time in the city, and definitely a baptism by heat, when my first big project took me into four rural towns in Haryana. I spoke with 20 retailers and dozens of shoppers to understand how rural buying behaviour differs from urban: what drives brand switching, how promotions land, how much retailers themselves influence a purchase, and how POSM (point-of-sale material) actually changes what people pick up. I ended up analysing shopper switching, promotions, and retailer influence across three categories to help shape trade strategy, and realised how much I still had to learn about “the Indian consumer.”
PROJECT 2: URBAN CTA
BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER
Once all four regions had wrapped their fieldwork, it was time to make sense of it, 11,500+ shopper data points, to be exact. I’d never touched Power BI before this, so I used the Coursera access BITSoM gives us and basically taught myself over a weekend. Built dashboards in Power BI and Excel for the leadership reviews and then presented the strategy to ASMs across all four regions to help them shape their GTM plans.
FINAL NOTE
What actually helped me get through it were Coursera (Provided by BITSoM) that got me dashboard-ready in record time, GCI sessions which taught me how to present to a room full of ASMs without freezing up, and consumer behaviour and marketing classes that quietly shaped almost every call I made in the field, even when I didn’t realise it in the moment.
My advice to future interns would be to ask questions, even the dumb ones, since nobody expects you to know what a DOR is on day one. Be curious, talk to as many people as you can, retailers included; they know more than any report will tell you, and lastly, don’t just stick to your JD. Some of the best things I got to do were things nobody technically assigned me.
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