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Why Marketing?
Marketers are involved with nearly all aspects of business
activity, beginning with defining the firm's mission, through assessing consumer
wants and needs, developing strategy based on assessment, designing products and
services that meet those wants and needs, implementing the promotion, pricing,
and distribution that support sales, to monitoring consumer satisfaction.
Characteristics Marketing majors need to develop:
Flexibility - marketers are dealing with the firm's environment,
competitors, suppliers, technology, economic/regulatory forces, and consumers
that are constantly changing.
Understanding of people - marketing is based on the fundamental
premise that firms succeed by understanding and responding to consumer wants
and needs.
Problem analysis and solution ability - because marketers rarely
face routine situations, they recognize problems, even anticipate them, and
create new ways to deal with them as they go.
Creativity and tolerance for ambiguity - often marketers must solve
problems that have no objectively best answer, under conditions of incomplete
or imprecise information.
Quantitative skill - marketers must be able to apply sophisticated
statistical, mathematical, and analytical tools in order to make the best
possible use of available information.
Skills that the Marketing major develops:
Communication - clear and effective written and oral communication
skills are an absolute requirement.
Persuasion - marketers learn to make the best possible case for
their positions, both when dealing with consumers and with other people in the
firm.
Opportunity spotting - markets try to anticipate the market, to be
there before the competitors, even before the consumers.
Analysis of markets - marketers determine the relative profitability
of various market alternatives through various sales and cost estimation
techniques.
Creativity - successful marketers increase their native creativity
by learning to become effective problem-solvers and thinking in new ways.
Research - marketers learn to apply scientific method in defining
problems and acquiring information to address them.
Quantitative analysis - marketers learn first which numbers are
important, then how to include them into decision making.
Professor of
Marketing Carl Obermiller says his
students study problems ascribed to
marketing and their social implication.
"An
important topic today is the energy
problem and the environment, for example
marketing sport utility vehicles versus
high-mileage cars," says Obermiller.
"With regard to this, my goal is to
help students understand how effective
marketing can be done while encouraging
pro-social behavior. Several
high-profile speakers and consultants
collaborate with my classes throughout the
year."
Obermiller
adds, "Once students graduate, they
take the ideas and techniques they've
learned here at Albers School and later
come back and tell us it is working in their
workplace. That's when we know we've
done our job."
Excerpt from
an article "A Better Graduate
Business Program", in Connect It,
Seattle's Business-to-Business Journal.
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