Know-How Exchange : Career/Training

For entry level positions, it is common that they would hire from marketing programs. Not all the time, but that is the easy route for the company. Don't stop applying, and think through how you could show how your background would be beneficial for marketing.

It is a catch-22 - once you get experience, the education doesn't matter. But it i hard to get experience without the education. There are ways around this. Internships, taking a job at a small company (where you do many different things, as small companies don't have a lot of resources - make sure you do the marketing side of things), etc.

Dear Pokeronomist,

Hello again.

It's been a while, hasn't it?

My humble, two-cent answer to your question is: it depends.

Some do, some don't. The trick? Keep applying.

You see, there is a wall around the world of marketing and advertising—an invisible wall.

It's made up of bricks of MBAs and other assorted advanced academic or career achievement that is, in many cases, firmly seated on the deeply dug and entrenched foundation that marketers are made and developed in university lecture halls or
by dint of "must have a minimum of 2 years ad agency experience".

This notion is false.

No, actually, I'll go one step farther than that ... and yeah, verily ... and as a chilly mist did descend upon the hallowed halls of advertising marketing across the land, did he spake the words:
it's crap.

There!

The monster's out of the box! Run away little monster! Be free.

Go forth ... and multiply!

To be clear, here's my point again: marketers and advertising people are NOT made in universities and colleges and ad agencie meeting rooms. Academia and ad land can prepare CERTAIN elements, but they do not make anyone waltzing out of a college or university with an MBA certificate a marketer, nor do they make anyone that's worked in an ad agency in any position for two years or so into an effective ally for the client.

Only experience of working in the trenches (and yes, this means
in other areas and in other industries), creating and delivering RESULTS, or acquiring and refining knowledge that can be applied to marketing can do that.

The thing about hiring in marketing and advertising (and please, God, let more of my fellow ad land and marketing professionals that DO the hiring finally WAKE UP TO THIS) is that for someone fresh out of college, having an MBA in marketing means zip.

For anyone fresh out of any school as a dewey eyed 20-something, studying a course in marketing or advertising and waltzing out of academia into the gleaming world of commerce, degree certificate clutched firmly to one's bosom, means bugger all.

The piece of paper and the two years or so invested in "earning" it (at college or in an agency) are irrelevant.

Why?

Because all that's happened is that the MBA holder or the staffer has had all kinds of information crammed into their noggin about creativity or metrics and theories, and God alone knows what else.

But these snippets of information and these things ALONE do not a marketer or a creative make.

Take a good long look at 95 percent of the (how shall I describe it? Crap! Yes, that'll do) take a good long look in the steely light of day at 95 percent of the crap that's peddled in the business to business and business to consumer world as "marketing" or as "advertising" and you'll see that most of it fails to convey solid:

1. customer benefits,
2. practical solutions,
3. value propositions,
4. risk reversals,
5. social proof,
6. solid guarantees,
7. reasons why,
8. calls to action,
9. solid offers that compel people to buy through persuasive logical progression.

Pick a market sector.

Pick a niche.

Pick a product and do this in ANY newspaper or TV commercial and I'll show you how that marketing's reason for taking up space and reason to interrupt people's time fails to meet most if not all of the points above.

Why does such a great deal of marketing and advertising like this fail? Because it's created, driven, planned, ordered, dreamed up, placed, positioned and sign off on by people who have little or no regard for people's willingness to buy.

Notice, brothers and sisters that I did not refer to people's willingness to be sold to. So-so marketing sells. Great marketing moves people and it's that emotional element that compels people to buy: there's a difference.

What's the CURE for, what in truth is the issue of the wrong people doing the marketing and the creating?

For more ad agencies and marketing shops, for more brand outfits and design studio hiring managers and HR professionals to cast a wider net and for those same people to stop reading résumés and to stop placing ads demanding "paradigm shift managers" and for them to be recruiting the brightest and the best from OUTSIDE the world of marketing—to hire people with other world experience.

When advertising and marketing people hire other advertising and marketing people, they hire people that are just like them ... which means the RESULTS of the advertising and marketing are just the same as they've always been ... which creates same old, same old, vanilla-based, "me too!" marketing that drones on and on about how great the company or widget or thingy is but that largely ignores the needs, wants, desires, and solutions of the customer.

Note: consumers of marketing do not buy the marketing, they buy the result that the thing being marketed will give them. A lot of marketing people don't get this, which is why oh so much marketing blows.

But when you hire from a wider pool (and with a wider net), you pull in all kinds of other fish from deeper, sometimes far more exotic waters.

And this mix? When it's applied and refined, when it's directed and added to effective strategies, that's what compels people to buy.

I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
The Direct Response Marketing Guy™
Wilmington, DE, USA