Since my B school days, I have heard that a new brand should create a lot of noise. At times I have seen this leading to gaps in return on investment.

In 2011 when I was an year old in my first organization, I got the opportunity to be part of the team planning marketing activities for GITEX (a renowned electronics retail trade event in Dubai). Our COO conceptualized the promotion named 'One gadget from One dirham'. The concept was to open our retail booth floor every hour and offer one latest electronic gadget like a mobile phone from 1 dirham, where the shoppers can call any price above one dirham and the highest price call wins the gadget by paying the called amount.

I had a different view on this promotion, I stated that even though the idea was great, it wouldn't help the retail business in the show booth. Any shopper of the trade show would get advantage where as our customers should be the ones getting advantage, the shoppers could buy gadgets from other retailers' stand and would come to us only for promotion.

I was met with strong opposition from the marketing agency but I was persistent and was able to convince the decision maker (COO). I provided a solution, which was to add a criteria of participation for the people on stand.

Criteria - To participate in the event, shoppers' had to purchase items worth at least 100 dirhams from our stand.

Proactivity - In anticipation of purchase of items under 100 dirhams, I stocked a lot of memory devices like memory/usb sticks and memory cards on our stand.

Value Created - The sales of memory gadgets was so high from one booth in 7 days (event duration) that it made us the best 4th quarter retailer in UAE for memory devices and my organization received its first award for value sales from any OEM. Getting a value based award was very difficult for us, as we had only 3 stores in UAE where as our competitors had more than 15 stores in UAE.