Marketing

Career Overview

A marketer’s job is often misunderstood. Some people see a commercial on television and think that’s the work of a marketer. Actually, that’s advertising. Other people look at the purchases that customers make and chalk that up to successful marketing. Nope—that’s sales. But behind every successful ad professional or salesperson is a marketer.

Broadly speaking, marketing is the strategic function between product development and sales. The four components of marketing are product, price, promotion and place. Marketing takes a product with specific features and benefits, creates pricing and promotional strategies, and oversees the methods that will be used to bring it to market (that’s the “place” part). Based on whether the product is high-end or low-end, based on its manufacturing specs and its price, the marketing team creates a selling approach that includes strategies for advertising, public relations, and other types of promotion, and the head of this team also coordinates with the sales team to determine how they will make the product or service available to customers. Depending on the structure of the company, this position may be called a marketing manager or marketing director. Other times, these responsibilities fall under the brand manager’s domain.

So, that flashy commercial or eye-catching billboard campaign is the actually a by-product of a complicated process that takes specialized expertise and months of teamwork. Careful demographic and statistical analysis, extensive testing and surveys, supply and vendor management, and strategic thinking—not to mention a lot of collaboration with everyone from product managers to designers to supply chain personnel—all occur behind the scenes before any word is uttered on your television screen. If your creative genius is matched by your analytical acumen, you may find that marketing makes for a worthy challenge and an exciting career.

The uninitiated may mistakenly equate marketing with peddling household products, but marketers know that their roles are far more complex and engaging than that. They help their organizations anticipate the public's needs and position them to satisfy those needs. In this way, marketing is the necessary link between an organization and its target audience, which is now more broadly defined to include customers, clients, investors, and partners.

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