Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

The companies for which I worked had the following functions:

Product Marketing - this is equivalent to a "brand manager" and this marketer has control of the strategy and day to day marketing for a product line. Types of activities: pricing (tactical and strategic), competitive analysis, generation of sales tools, market analysis, product definition, product launch planning and execution (kind of a project management activity), branding, conceptual defintion of ads.

Marketing Communications - these guys did the creative stuff - advertisement copy and formating into what magazines needed. They also did PR and managed the PR firms we used. They managed our conference participation and the actual booth.

Strategic Marketing - this person looked at the market at a corporate level at an aggregate - all product lines - and developed a longer term strategy for the company as a whole.

Market Intelligence - they managed the research firms and kept the right market data at hand that the product marketing and strategic marketing guys needed. They also helped with analysis and put together aggregate corporate data - like competitive positioning from a corportate level.

Names will change, depending on the industry. This was a B2B organization in Semiconductors. P&G has Brand Managers and Gibson (musical instruments) has Product Managers in place of Product Marketing.

Hope this gives you some insight into the various functions and their responsibilities - even if the names are different.

Wayde