What is a Career in Marketing like? What are the different roles offered? Just what does one do? These are some of the questions which every Graduate or MBA thinks about.
The general perception is that Marketing is a “creative profession”. To be honest, like all other professions, Marketing is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
To understand the different roles offered under the broad category of Marketing, let us first understand what Marketing is supposed to do in an organization. Marketing is the profession which tries to develop and/or modify products and services to suit consumer needs – and do it better than the competition. To do so, there are a series of activities which need to be performed – and these activities get translated into the specific roles which come under Marketing.
If one is to develop and/or modify products and services to suit consumer needs, the logical starting point is knowing what these needs are. This is the role performed by the Market Researcher, who constantly collects feedback from consumers in order to track trends. This information is collected by conducting surveys, from published data sources (such as the Census) and from social media. Some of this information needs quantitative analysis, thus necessitating comfort levels with numbers. Other information needs qualitative analysis, necessitating a good understanding of sociology and psychology. Always remember that if the performance of a product or service is poor, it means that (1) maybe your need identification is incorrect, (2) maybe your competitor is satisfying that need better or (3) both of the above. The Market Researcher also tracks the performance of a product of service to identify if any of the problems listed above are happening – and to pinpoint the problem. Since the data available today has shown explosive growth thanks to the usage of social media, today’s Market Researcher gets much more information to process and arrive at conclusions.
Once the information from consumers has been received and analyzed, it needs to be designed into a product or service. This is the job of the Brand Manager or Product Manager. The persons doing these are usually referred to as the Marketing Team. Hence, the Brand Manager could be designing a brand new offering – or incorporating changes in an existing offering (based on the feedback received). For example, if a company is marketing Soups (like say, Knorr), there could be a Brand Manager trying to fix a problem faced by, say, their Tomato Soups (and that could range from decreasing the salt content to changing the color in the pack to offering a smaller pack size to induce greater trial). There could be another Brand Manager looking at new soup flavors to be added on to the existing range of flavors. Or, to explore whether Knorr could offer products other than just soups. Like say, Wraps. Please bear in mind that in all the three cases above, these decisions are based on market feedback collated by the Market Researcher.
To be continued . . .
- By Prof. Govindrajan
For Career in Marketing Phase-2, click here and for Phase-3, click here.
The general perception is that Marketing is a “creative profession”. To be honest, like all other professions, Marketing is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
To understand the different roles offered under the broad category of Marketing, let us first understand what Marketing is supposed to do in an organization. Marketing is the profession which tries to develop and/or modify products and services to suit consumer needs – and do it better than the competition. To do so, there are a series of activities which need to be performed – and these activities get translated into the specific roles which come under Marketing.
If one is to develop and/or modify products and services to suit consumer needs, the logical starting point is knowing what these needs are. This is the role performed by the Market Researcher, who constantly collects feedback from consumers in order to track trends. This information is collected by conducting surveys, from published data sources (such as the Census) and from social media. Some of this information needs quantitative analysis, thus necessitating comfort levels with numbers. Other information needs qualitative analysis, necessitating a good understanding of sociology and psychology. Always remember that if the performance of a product or service is poor, it means that (1) maybe your need identification is incorrect, (2) maybe your competitor is satisfying that need better or (3) both of the above. The Market Researcher also tracks the performance of a product of service to identify if any of the problems listed above are happening – and to pinpoint the problem. Since the data available today has shown explosive growth thanks to the usage of social media, today’s Market Researcher gets much more information to process and arrive at conclusions.
Once the information from consumers has been received and analyzed, it needs to be designed into a product or service. This is the job of the Brand Manager or Product Manager. The persons doing these are usually referred to as the Marketing Team. Hence, the Brand Manager could be designing a brand new offering – or incorporating changes in an existing offering (based on the feedback received). For example, if a company is marketing Soups (like say, Knorr), there could be a Brand Manager trying to fix a problem faced by, say, their Tomato Soups (and that could range from decreasing the salt content to changing the color in the pack to offering a smaller pack size to induce greater trial). There could be another Brand Manager looking at new soup flavors to be added on to the existing range of flavors. Or, to explore whether Knorr could offer products other than just soups. Like say, Wraps. Please bear in mind that in all the three cases above, these decisions are based on market feedback collated by the Market Researcher.
To be continued . . .
- By Prof. Govindrajan
For Career in Marketing Phase-2, click here and for Phase-3, click here.
Tend to disagree with that last sentence. Most decisions are not (and cannot be) based on Market Research. Perry
ReplyDeleteThank you Sir. Looking forward to the blog to relive the classes attended.
ReplyDelete