Many of the readers may have gone through the bitter experience: You enter an apparently well-maintained grocery. The salesman looks up, poker-faced and without the slightest hint of a query or a gesture of welcome. Since we Bangladeshis are used to this grossly ill-mannered behaviour, you go straight into enquiring about the item you have gone there for. If that thing is available at the shop, the salesman will quietly bring just one piece from the rack, and put it before you. Then he gets busy with other customers over some different products.
You might feel willing to ask for some other varieties of the item. Watching the preoccupation of the salesman with others around him, you cannot muster the courage to ask for more samples. You have to remain content with the lone item, say a razor, pay the price and leave the shop. No "Thank You", no "Come Again, Sir".
Majority of us are used to this treatment at shops, be it a grocery, a stationery-selling shop or an electronic goods store.
To one's ill luck, if any item of his or her need is not available at the outlet, and he or she asks for it, the salesperson brusquely says, "No". They do not have the faintest idea about showing you some other brands of the same object. You cannot be blamed if you make a conclusion of the experience by saying salesmanship is the art, which is completely alien to Bangladesh. However, there are exceptions too.
Let's see the enactment of a similar scene in the neighbouring Indian city of Kolkata. If the salesman happens to be a typically Paschimbanga inhabitant, or a non-Bengali, say a Marwari, both of them will flood you with varieties of the item of your need or choice. You'll feel compelled to buy the thing from the shop. The spectacle of pampering a customer with sales objects is widely noticed in the sari outlets in Gariahata or Kolkata New Market. Not that the salespersons pour all their love onto you out of any special consideration; what remains at work at a subterranean level here is business strategy. It is this trick that genuine and sincere businessmen have long been employing to achieve success in their trade, and, that too, with honour and goodwill. This is very much the part of business ethics.
A businessman eyes profit, because it is his means of livelihood. The capitalist society, opposed to that controlled by the state, and to be politically correct -- the society dominated by market economy, is by its very nature consumer-inclined. To the profit-focused businesses in today's open economies, the consumer or the client is veritably worshipped as a god.
The discipline of marketing in the area of business administration occupies a predominant place in both developed and emerging economies today. In spite of being a seemingly fast-emerging economy, Bangladesh, has, unfortunately, failed to understand the critical need of wooing the right entrepreneurs in the right manner. They are treated like the grocery shop customers mentioned earlier. Only the perspective is different.
Coming to a broader plain, we find the same old scenario. Most of our bureaucrats look tired, exhausted and ritual-bound, when they are entrusted with the task of properly approaching the foreign direct investors. The ministers concerned perform their jobs as part of a formality. The case for hyper-active ministers is different; they are notable exceptions. But the rest are just the face of the government in power. It is the bureaucrats who should wield the gadgets of wooing the prospective state clients. How far they have been able to win over the latter is best explained by economists who are disillusioned by their performance.
To speak bluntly, we have not yet fully learnt how to greet customers to our yard, leave alone explaining to them the reasons why they should prefer us.
shihabskr@ymail.com
Wooing customers to our yard
Shihab Sarkar | Published: September 14, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00
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