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MARKET &BRAND VAULT CAREER GUIDE TO MARKETING & BRAND MANAGEMENT MANAG

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION THE SCOOP

Chapter 1: Functional Overview

Brand Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 Advertising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 Affiliate/Property Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 Price Marketing/Sales Forecast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 High-tech Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10 Marketing Consulting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 Direct Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12 Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 Public Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 Marketing Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 Marketing Case: Creating a Category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19

Chapter 2: Building Your Marketing Foundation 21

The Marketing Mindset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 Three Crucial Marketing Frameworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 What is a Brand? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29 Top 13 Ways to Revitalize a Brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30 The Basics of Advertising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32 Evaluating an Ad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34 The Medium is the Message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36

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GETTING HIRED

Chapter 3: Hiring Basics, Resumes and Cover Letters

Qualifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41 Is Marketing Right for You? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42 How to Create a Winning Resume . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44 Cover Letters that Kick Butt and Take Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45 Networking and Headhunting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48 What Should I Look for in a Marketing Company? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 Marketing Case: Creating Consumer Demand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51

Chapter 4: The Interview

The Inquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53 What You Can Do to Prepare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55 General and Behavioral Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55 The Case Interview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58 Marketing Case: Building a Sustainable Brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .63

ON THE JOB

Chapter 5: Job Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities and Duties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67

A Day in the Life of an Assistant Brand Manager (sort of) . . . . . . . . . . . .70

A More Realistic Look at a Day in the Life of a Brand Manager . . . . . . .71 The Functions of the Brand Manager . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .74

Chapter 6: Career Path & Lifestyle

The Traditional Brand Management Career Path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 Lifestyle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 Marketing Case: Brand Repositioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80 Final Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81

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APPENDIX

Marketing Jargon/Buzzwords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83 Selected Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87 Major Marketing Employers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .91 About the Editors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .116

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General Motors | Hewitt Associates | Boeing | A.T. Kearney | Boston V AULT ' S AWARD - WINNING CAREER INFORMATION

Ford Motor Company | Cap Gemini Ernst & Young | Kraft Foods | Goldman

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Introduction

Are you fascinated by the endless variety of products you pass on your trips down supermarket aisles? Do you like to scrutinize particularly eye-catching cereal boxes or shampoo bottles? Do you watch TV advertisements and think about what type of consumers they are targeting, and how they are accomplishing their goals? Do you see those endless spin-offs of existing products, and think you can come up with better versions?

With an overflow of advertising emanating from ever-forming genres of mass media, and with an economy that allows the masses to increasingly indulge in status symbols, we all live in a branded world. Furthermore, there are people who make handsome livings for thinking like you, or more precisely, for creating and manipulating the branded world in which we live. These cognoscenti are marketers and brand managers. These are the people who devise new products, decide how to package them, how to price them, and most importantly, how to market them. And while Wall Street may yank on our purse strings, and Hollywood may shape our dreams and prurient fantasies, it is the brand managers whose hands guide everything we eat and wear, and influence the way we think about consumption in our society.

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MANAG &BRAN MARKE

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THE SCOOP

Chapter 2:

Chapter 1:

Building

Functional Overview

Y our Marketing Foundation

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Functional Overview

CHAPTER 1

Imagine for a moment that you own a company. How do you make money? You sell products and/or services to buyers. It’s not quite as easy as that, however. You’ve got competition—people who sell the same or similar things as you do. How do you stand out from your competition and influence buyers to spend their money with you?

This is where marketing comes in. It is both an art and a science; skilled marketers use market research as well as their own experience observing consumer behavior to create winning marketing strategies. The goal is to increase sales. Since increased sales equals increased profit, it’s easy to see how important the marketing function is. Each company’s organizational structure and type of customer defines the specific role marketing will play there.

Companies market and sell to other businesses, intermediaries, or directly to consumers. Business to business companies sell goods and services such as office furniture, copiers and payroll preparation services to other businesses; intermediaries sell to buyers who aren’t the end user. For example, textbook publishers sell to professors, who require them for students enrolled in their courses, and pharmaceutical companies market to physicians who prescribe their drugs for their patients. Direct-to-consumer marketers such as Disneyland and Jackson Hewitt Tax Preparers sell directly to consumers.

Many companies, of course, sell to a variety of audiences. Procter & Gamble, for example, sells its products to mass-market stores such as Wal-Mart and also advertises its products directly to consumers. While the particular audience influences how a product is marketed, the specific marketing function remains the same: craft a message and advertise it in a way that drives sales and ultimately increases profits.

Careers within the marketing/branding area can be high-profile. The business world realizes that strong brands and solid marketing programs drive shareholder value, and that companies can no longer make fundamental strategy decisions without truly understanding how to market a product. Companies only make money when they sell the products and services they create. Today’s business challenges—the push for company growth and profit, industry consolidation and deregulation, the emergence of new channels and technologies and the general state of the economy—make marketers even more valuable.

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Functional Overview

Getting down to basics

A marketer can have various titles. Consumer products companies, such as Procter & Gamble and Unilever, most often use brand manager (and its variations including associate, assistant and senior). Financial services and tech companies such as Ernst & Young and Intuit commonly use product managers, and a broad variety of companies use marketing managers.

While the marketing function is a critical part of any business, the marketing department doesn’t always carry the same amount of responsibility in every company. The career path of a company’s top management can yield some clues about this. If a number of its past presidents have spent part or all of their careers in marketing, it’s a safe bet that the department wields more influence within the company as a whole. But if company leaders hail from operational or financial departments, then it might be that marketing doesn’t hold the same internal status as some other departments.

Brand Management

Taking charge of a brand involves tackling many diverse job functions—and different subspecialties. Decide where you’d like your main concentration to lie.

The scoop

The core of brand work is brand strategy. Brand managers must decide how to increase market share, which markets and demographic groups to target, and what types of advertising and special promotions to use. And at the very heart of brand strategy is identifying a product’s “brand identity.” Brand groups then figure out how to exploit brand strategy, or, in some cases, how to change it. For example, Coach has taken its traditionally-styled, high- quality brand of leather goods and turned it into a high-fashion purveyor of not only handbags but clothes, accessories and shoes. TBS, a popular cable television network, rebranded itself as the “very funny” channel featuring reruns of “Sex and the City,” “Seinfeld,” “Friends” and “Everybody Loves Raymond.” In both cases, the brands have benefited from a shift in brand identity, and consequently, a shift in their market. Brand identity is normally created and confirmed through traditional print, radio, and TV advertising. Advertising is usually produced by outside agencies, although brand insiders determine the emphasis and target of the advertising.

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Are you a big-league brand manager?

In a typical brand management organizational structure, positions are developed around responsibility for a particular product rather than a specific functional expertise (i.e. you’re an assistant brand manager for Cheerios). This structure enables you to be the “master of all trades,” acquiring an expertise in areas such as manufacturing, sales, research and development, and communications. In brand management, the marketing function is responsible for key general management decisions such as long-term business strategy, pricing, product development direction and, in some cases, profit and loss responsibility. Brand management offers a terrific way to learn intensively about a particular product category (you could be a recognized expert on tampons!) and to manage the responsibility of running a business and influencing its performance.

Some liken a brand manager to a hub at the center of a hub and spoke system, with the spokes going out to departments like finance, sales, manufacturing, R&D, etc. It is the job of the brand manager to influence the performance of those groups—over whom he or she has no direct authority—in order to optimize the performance of his or her brand or product line. For more in- depth information about brand management careers, see Chapters 5 and 6.

Advertising

The scoop

If you’ve ever read a magazine, watched television, listened to the radio, driven on a highway or surfed the Internet, you’ve undoubtedly been exposed to some form of advertising. When you want to tell the world about your new product or service, you advertise—you create a specific message that talks about your product or services’ benefits, why it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, and why everyone should buy it. It takes many forms, from a television commercial to a flyer posted in a dorm hallway, and can cost millions of dollars to ten cents a copy.

The advertising most of us are familiar with, television commercials and magazine ads, tends to be created by advertising agencies, where creative teams and account executives work on a particular brand. It seems like a very glamorous industry, and in many ways it is. But ad agencies aren’t the only source of marketing ideas—there are business to business agencies such as The Food Group, a division of WPP; interactive agencies like Grey Direct;

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and in-house creative staff, who work on nothing but their employer’s business (such as Aetna Healthcare—they have an in-house creative department that produces a large percentage of their advertising).

Are you an advertising ace?

If you thrive in an active, sometimes chaotic, environment, enjoy working with many different departments, and can multi-task with the best of them, advertising may be for you. Agencies look for people who can keep their eye on the ball and are extremely organized, as you have to know what is happening with all of your projects at all times. Account executives are assigned to one or several accounts depending on the size of the agency. In larger agencies, there may be more than one account executive on an account. AEs (as they are called) are part of a larger account team that can include an account supervisor and account director.

As an account executive, your role is to serve as a liaison between your brand management client and the departments within your agency. Account executives manage the creative production process from beginning to end, from researching what benefits a product offers, to writing the strategy for a typical commercial. Account executives must also handle matters such as briefing the creative department on how to execute the advertising strategies, working with the media department to buy ad time or space, and determining how to spend the marketing budget for advertising. (Will potential consumers be best reached via TV, outdoor billboards, print or radio—or through a general saturation campaign?) Along with managing the creative process, account executives at ad agencies are increasingly becoming strategic experts in utilizing traditional media, digital media, direct marketing and other services.

A good account executive should be very organized and willing to “roll up [his] sleeves to get the job done,” according to Joseph, a VP of Business Development with a large agency. An entrepreneurial outlook is a must as well: “The best account people are able to see the client’s business as their own.”

A Look Inside Advertising

Joseph started his career in college, where he took a class that functioned as a mini ad agency. “From that experience, I realized I could balance my natural strengths, management and creativity, while making

a visible difference towards helping clients reach their goals.” Joseph

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Functional Overview

started in the advertising department of a large bank, and worked with the bank’s ad agency on projects. He then got a job with the agency, and has worked in various positions on the account side ever since.

A career in account management is “never boring and you get to see the results of your work pretty quickly,” and “new technology platforms like cellular phones and video on demand require different ad concepts [which] keep you on your toes.” The difficult part is that since it’s a service business, “advertising can be very hard work and long hours.” Starting salaries in advertising tend to be on the lower end of the scale, since a lot of people are attracted by the thought of working on the next big high-profile campaign, and consider lower pay a trade-off for such an opportunity. It’s possible to advance quickly, however, and once you reach a manager level your salary will improve.

Affiliate/Property Marketing

If you’re working with a major brand company like Nike, Disney, Pepsi, or L’Oreal, chances are you’ll do a lot of cross-promotion, or “affiliate marketing.” For instance, Nike has marketing relationships with the NBA, NFL, and a variety of individual athletes and athletic teams. Disney has a strong relationship with McDonalds; cute toys from the entertainment company’s latest flick are often packaged with McDonalds Happy Meals upon the release of each new movie. L’Oreal works with celebrities like Heather Locklear and sponsors events such as the annual Academy Awards.

Marketers must manage the relationship between any two entities. If Disney wants to promote the cartoon du jour with McDonalds, or Pepsi wants to make sure that all Six Flags theme parks have a Pepsi Ride, then marketers ensure both parties are getting what they need out of the deal and staying true to their own brand image.

Price Marketing/Sales Forecast

Pricing is largely driven by market pressure. Most people, for example, won’t pay more than $2.00 for a hamburger in a fast food restaurant. On the other hand, brand managers always have some pricing leeway that can greatly affect market share and profitability. An increase of a nickel in the price of a product sold by the millions can make huge differences in revenue—

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assuming the price rise doesn’t cause equivalent millions less of the products to be sold. Brand managers need to figure out the optimal pricing strategy for their product, though it’s not always a case of making the most money. Sometimes it makes more sense to win market share while taking lower profits. How do brand managers justify their prices? Through extensive research. Paper towels, for example, may be much more price-sensitive than

a luxury item like engagement rings or smoked salmon. Brand and marketing managers don’t always have free reign over pricing. At

some companies, such as those that sell largely through mail order, or those with complex pricing systems, pricing and promotional offers may be limited to what the operational sales system can handle. Explains one marketing manager at a long-distance phone company (an industry with notoriously tangled pricing plans): “It’s very easy to offer something to the customer. It’s very difficult to implement that in the computer system.”

Another large part of the general management duties of brand managers is forecasting product sales. This means not only keeping track of sales trends of one’s product, but anticipating responses to marketing campaigns and product launches or changes. The forecasts are used to determine production levels. Once a year, brand groups draw up budgets for their production, advertising and promotion costs, try to convince the finance folks that they absolutely need that amount, get less than they ask for, and then rework their budgets to fit the given budget. As one international brand manager at one of the world’s biggest consumer goods companies puts it: “You don’t determine the production and then get that budget; you get the budget, and then determine the production.”

High-Tech Marketing

Not everyone markets applesauce for a living. Many people choose to enter the world of high-tech marketing because they want to work with products and technologies that reshape and improve the word around us. These marketers feel that they would rather change the way a person interacts with the world in a sophisticated way, rather than spend time understanding what hair color teenagers find most appealing. High tech marketers spend much of their time understanding research and development issues and working on new product launches.

Technology companies like Intel, Dell, and Microsoft have recognized the power of branding and are utilizing traditional marketing tactics more and more. Amazon’s extensive marketing campaign in 1998 helped brand that

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company in the mind of consumers still new to e-commerce as the company to purchase books (and other products) online. Intel became perhaps the first semiconductor company readily identifiable to the public through its heavily branded “bunny people.” Marketing in the high tech world will continue to grow in importance over the next decade, as technology companies become more consumer-oriented (see Microsoft’s X-Box). Marketing a service or software product versus a more tangible product is a bit different. It may be

a bit more challenging to understand how consumers relate to the product. Inventory and distribution issues may be tracked differently.

Marketing Consulting

Although most well-known consulting firms are known for their expertise in general strategy, many consulting firms now hire industry or functional experts that focus on marketing issues. These firms need people with expertise in the areas of branding, market research, continuous relationship marketing, pricing strategy, and business-to-business marketing—they tend to hire people with previous marketing experience and value consultants who have been successful marketing managers and have lived through the full range of business issues from the inside. McKinsey and Monitor are two general strategy firms that have begun to hire marketing specialists. Other boutique marketing consulting firms, such as Kurt Salmon, focus on certain product categories like beverages, healthcare, and retail. All major ad agencies are also attempting to reinvent themselves as marketing partners focused on marketing strategy beyond simple advertising.

Are you a marketing consultant?

A successful marketing consultant needs to see the big picture and think conceptually (in other words, can you see the forest for the trees?). At the same time, you need to pay attention to detail, since you’ll be creating and completing a lot of ‘presentation decks’-industry jargon for a collection of powerpoint slides that summarize the consultants’ findings. You should be flexible, too, since you’ll be working on a team, where you’ll have to communicate and deal with the inevitable minor conflicts that will arise. You can’t choose your teammates, so the ability to do your job and get along will serve you well. It’s a pretty safe bet that being able to kick back and enjoy a few drinks with your colleagues will too!

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A Look Inside Marketing Consulting

Kate is a consultant with a boutique marketing strategy consulting firm. She decided to go into consulting for the broad industry exposure and for experience working in a team environment. She also wanted a better understanding of how marketing is integrated into the sales and customer service functions of the top Fortune 500 companies. One of the big pluses of the job, she’s found, is “working at a high level within

a client organization, usually with a Senior or Executive Vice President and the Chief Marketing Officer. Since we are hired by a company when something needs to be fixed, I get to work with a team to create

a strategy for the organization going forward.” She also mentions the opportunity to learn the newest marketing trends that are happening across different industries. The minuses include long hours and the fact that you don’t own the product (or in this case, the strategy) that you produce—so while you work hard to develop recommendations, you aren’t around to see the results. As far as the paycheck goes, marketing consultants can make a very competitive starting salary.

Direct Marketing

The scoop

Direct marketing truly means what it says: it is any marketing that is directed specifically to you. In industry terms, it is commonly referred to as ‘one to one’ marketing, whereas television, print, billboards, etc. are referred to as ‘one to many.’ Pottery Barn, for example, sends you a catalog. Amazon.com sends you an e-mail announcing a promotion. These are sent to you directly because you fit a certain set of criteria that they have defined as their target market. Product marketers determine these criteria through demographics, psychographics and by using third-party customer databases. For example, let’s say you just purchased some dishes at Williams-Sonoma and you signed up for their catalog. Williams-Sonoma also owns Pottery Barn, and the folks at Pottery Barn think you might be interested in purchasing some other furnishings for your home. That’s how you came home to a Pottery Barn catalog in your mailbox.

At Amazon.com, you browsed for some books and placed some in your shopping cart. Based on what books you purchased, you received specific offers for products that other people who bought similar books also purchased. Those offers are sent to you directly based on your specific

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Functional Overview

behavior. That is the goal of direct marketing—speaking to the specific user in a more targeted way. Unlike some brand marketing, the effect of which can

be difficult to measure, direct marketing allows you to see the results of any particular campaign by its response rate (believe it or not, in many cases 1 percent is considered a very good response rate)! Like brand marketing, however, direct marketing can be expensive.

A Look Inside Direct Marketing

Christine is a consumer marketing director at a national women’s magazine and is responsible for all aspects of the magazine’s circulation—from how many copies sell on the newsstand to how many subscribers the magazine can sign up. Christine always loved newspapers and magazines, so she talked to as many publishing professionals as she could before deciding that a job in circulation offered the best fit for her skills. She’s consistently been promoted and now heads the department. She comments that “the best part of the job is that it allows me to be creative and analytical at the same time—many jobs require that you be either one or the other, but not both. It’s fun to develop creative for a new subscriber acquisition campaign- but you can’t forget that you need to test various parts of the creative against other creative to see which package ‘wins’, or gets the best response.” Sometimes that can be a minus of the job as well—“there are a million details that we constantly have to stay on top of, and sometimes it’s not that easy to remember them all.” Compensation can vary widely, but is usually competitive because of the more specific skill sets that direct marketers possess.

Are you a direct marketing dynamo?

As a direct marketer, you need to possess a creative eye as well as critical thinking skills, and look forward to seeing direct results from your work (as in, “great, this direct mail piece got great results” or “oh no—this piece performed pretty terribly”). Above all, be curious; look at a problem from lots of different angles; and take ownership for solving it. The best performers have a high sense of responsibility and accountability.

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Functional Overview

Media

The scoop

The media department can often be the first stop on the young advertising exec’s career path. It provides a good overview of different advertising venues, from television and magazines to outdoor (billboards, bus stops, kiosks) and on-line. In this department, there are generally two functions: media planning and media buying. In some agencies, the same person might do both. Media planners are responsible for spending their client’s media budget in an effective and efficient manner. L.L.Bean, for example, spent over $ 27 million in media in 2004—and with the right planning, that money can buy a lot of ad time and space. It is up to the media planners, buyers and their team to figure out exactly how to spend that money, where to spend it (television? magazines? online?) and how quickly to spend it. Media buyers work closely with these different media outlets to negotiate the best advertising rates on behalf of their clients. After spending time learning media, many people move on to the account side of the business, as an assistant or associate account executive.

Are you a media maven?

To be successful, you can’t be afraid of numbers. But this isn’t high-level calculus we’re talking about. The numbers refer to client budgets, television ratings points, magazine and newspaper circulation, consumer impressions, cost per thousand (CPM), syndicated research and more. Many agencies have their own way of determining the optimal combinations of media and dollars, but you need to consider the most current ratings figures—many of which are released twice a year by third-party research companies such as Simmons or MRI-and advertising rates. To be a killer media buyer, you need to know how to negotiate with the different sales reps to get the best prices per advertising spot for your client. While you certainly won’t make much money as an entry-level media planner (and most often, the starting point in the department is as a planner, not a buyer), you make up for it in free lunches, dinners and goodies that the different ad sales reps from various media outlets who want you to place your client’s media budget with them bestow on you throughout the year!

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Wondering what it’s like to work at a specific employer?

Chapter 1: Functional Overview

Chapter 2: Building Your Marketing Foundation 21

Wondering what it's like to work at a specific employer?

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THE SCOOP

Functional Overview

Getting down to basics

The scoop

Are you a big-league brand manager?

The scoop

Are you an advertising ace?

A Look Inside Advertising

Are you a marketing consultant?

A Look Inside Marketing Consulting

The scoop

A Look Inside Direct Marketing

Are you a direct marketing dynamo?

The scoop

Are you a media maven?

Parts

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