Nobody tells you this when you pick a degree, but the actual value of it rarely shows up as direct content (at least for me, as a marketing and sales girl, it didn’t). It shows up later, as a way of looking at things, and you only notice because you catch yourself doing it. I’ve been asked why economics — by relatives, by managers, by juniors who probably think I have a better answer than I do. I think I’ve finally landed on one, a work in progress as it may be.
I’ve forgotten most of the actual syllabus at this point. One year in, and I genuinely could not reconstruct half of the answers I wrote. What’s stuck instead is habit — a kind of discomfort with taking a number at face value (I’m sorry I know it might sound like a cliche, but hang on). Shoutout to HUL leadership too, honestly — the obsession everyone here has with making you find the “why” instead of just reporting the number is doing something to my brain, for much better.
There was this pricing project — working out whether a brand should price itself against the category average or one specific competitor. And the regression modelling itself wasn’t the hard part. Excel does that. Honestly, it’s just one AI prompt away. The actual hard part, the bit that felt like the degree paying off, was figuring out what to even ask the data in the first place. Elasticity used to just be a dumb formula I memorized the week before an exam. Somewhere along the way it turned into an actual instinct — that one point of mispricing can quietly cost crores.
What I didn’t expect is how little of the useful part was even economics. I’m a proud humanities kid underneath the econ degree, and it turns out psychology and sociology — stuff I did years ago in a DPS classroom and assumed I’d never think about again — keep showing up uninvited. Community building for a brand relaunch isn’t a stats exercise. It’s closer to figuring out why an entire group of people quietly decided a brand “isn’t for them” anymore, and then just… continues to justify their way of life, until someone gives them a reason not to. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy wearing a market-share number as a disguise. You don’t get that from a spreadsheet. You get it from sitting through consumer immersion after consumer immersion — which, I’ll be honest, get repetitive so fast ugh — until the pattern just, somehow, clicks.
The sociology mattered even more anywhere I was dealing with actual communities instead of clean spreadsheets. Why does one part of the country pick up a category while another one just doesn’t? Throwing more distribution at it isn’t the fix, as was very bluntly pointed to me. It’s a readiness problem — ritual, language, trust, habits that existed long before any brand walked in and decided to care.
And then there’s the tiny bit of game theory hiding in all of this, which I definitely did not properly get in college. Made a lot more sense once I was actually sitting there pricing a brand against a competitor and realized the “right” price isn’t a number that exists — it’s a moving target, a classic prisoner’s dilemma with a P&L attached. Feels obvious now. In the moment, my instinct was still to go hunting for the correct number, like it was sitting there waiting to be found. It wasn’t. Nobody in the room calls it game theory. It’s just running quietly under every pricing call anyway, textbook or no textbook.
If I had to actually answer the “why economics” question properly: it’s not answers. It never gave me answers. It gave me a some basic analytic lenses and just enough judgment to know which one a situation is actually asking for. It’s like second nature now. Project charters don’t show up labelled “pricing question” or “sociology question.” They show up messy, somewhere between a spreadsheet and a room full of people, and you’re the one stuck figuring out what you’re even looking at before you can start solving it. I wish I could paint a beautiful love story of me with Economics, I’ve stopped trying now though- there’s beauty in just blending that rigid structure with more human instincts I learnt elsewhere.
