Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

I've been in marketing for many years and I have never worked with Adobe Photoshop. I know others in marketing who use it all the time. It all depends on what you want to do within marketing. There are a lot of different disciplines in marketing. Read the definition of marketing I gave you in your previous question:
“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.” The role of marketing, the organizational function is to develop the set of marketing processes to fit the firm’s role in the business world – to create value to deliver to customers, communicate that value to the customers, and manage customer relationships. Done properly, these processes result in a tangible benefit to customers, the firm, and stakeholders of the firm."

Marketing is the study of the customers and their needs, the words and images influences them to make "buy" decisions. It's the study of competitors to understand how well they satisfy the customers' needs and where they don't. It's the study of the company to understand core competencies and how those can be utilized to develop unique selling points and to satisfy customers' needs better than the competition. Marketing is the development of strategys like the position of the firm and its products with respect to competitors, within the marketplace (which customers are more suited than others to benefit from the firm's products and services), the placement versus other products and services the customers purchase. Marketing is about product and service strategies, pricing strategies. Marketing is also the development of activities to promote the company and its products and services - reaching customers to inform them of the benefits they will derive from purchasing from the firm. It's about tracking those activities to make sure they are achieving the goals you set out like market share and sales and profits. Marketing is the development of creative words and images used in ads. It's about developing tag lines and colors to drive the company image into the minds of the customers so that when they hear a generic category like jeans, they think Levi or soup, they think Campbell or computers they think Intel.

So should you learn Photoshop? Photoshop is just a tool - one out of many. If you want to work in the creative side of marketing with pictures and images and arrange them in ways that attract customers and you like art and think in colors, Photoshop is a good tool. There are many others too and every creative marketing person has their favorites.

Other areas you may wish to explore: You may want to study psychology so you can understand how people think and react. Study writing and speaking so you can communicate well. Study statistics so you know how surveys are developed and how to look at the data to draw conclusions. These are some other ideas.

I hope this helps you.

Wayde

Jaun,

You have a lot of options ahead of you. Follow what you enjoy and follow your heart.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you also.

Wayde

If you are going to be working on the Internet then learn about Databases, XHTML and related technologies.

You should also try to get some basics in Accounting and economics.

If you are planning on going into advertising then you need to know about music, art, history etc.

Anyway like most things it depends on what you plan to do. Dont just count on working at your fathers business the rest of your life, because eventually you are going to want to travel and possibly get another job.

Remember a GOOD marketer NEVER stops learning, you will need to constantly keep learning new stuff as new methods come along and new technology becomes old. Life is only going to get faster and more confusing for the people that cant keep up.

Merry Christmas

Carl