Explore a bright future with Marketing

By Dr Alvin Lee

Marketing is the key to success for all businesses. Marketing is the front end of the business that looks for future markets that will bring sales to the company. Typically, without sales, a business will not survive for long. Sales brings revenue to the company that is used to pay for marketing and other staff and for operations. Revenue that is surplus to operations becomes profit that can be reinvested or used by other purposes.

Statistics indicate that marketing is a booming sector. Astute market managers have always relied on numbers to make their decisions. This practice is now called market or business analytics. The sector is booming in terms of jobs because of the ease by which businesses can access market data and the decreasing costs to capture their own data.

One of the key emerging trends is the use of analytics to derive marketing insights to create marketing strategies.

Below let’s take a look at the scope of pursuing a career in marketing and various opportunities to explore.

Skill-gap increasing day by day: The gap in marketers’ skills to gather, prepare, analyse and interpret the data that is available is growing by the day. The data is becoming ever more complex. The data mountain in companies are growing by the day and many marketers who have not trained in this area, are unable to cope with this new reality. It is no longer a “fly by the seat of your pants” world in marketing. Decisions are now data-driven. You have to have solid predictions and generate models that account for return on your marketing spend. This is where marketers who are well-trained in handling marketing data and intelligence will begin to assert their abilities to rise to the top of the profession.

Demand for professionals globally: Unlike other professions where automation has cost jobs, advancement in technology has traditionally created more employment for marketers. The fundamentals of marketing does not change substantially, but the inputs and outputs to do the job pivots substantially with each new generation of technology. Because technology changes on a global scale, this creates demand for marketing professionals around the world who are up to date with technological advances.

Diverse career choices: Any business that has a customer (even an internal customer) will need marketers. A great marketing professional possesses the foresight to see potential future markets, the courage to take risks to create that market, and the smarts to create products and processes to commercially harvest from the market. This means that marketers work in every industry you can imagine, from the largest government organisations to the tiniest one-person firm.

Sectors of work: Marketers typically work in advertising and sales promotion, brand management, product management, business to business marketing, customer-based business strategies, international business, global branding, and market research and information systems.

Marketers are riding high on the crest of the technological wave that is sweeping most industries. This is driven by our new preference to communicate, find information, buy products and seek entertainment through the internet. Marketers are the people who communicate directly with customers. They need to be on top of the game and be the Pharos of social media, control the influencers and create and control word-of-mouth.

Increased sophistication in data analytics and segmentation mean that it is now common to have personalised data-driven marketing techniques. These boost sales. What was mass marketing being now mass customisation of content that matters to the individual audience member. Marketers take it as the next step to elicit behavioural change through this communication. This means that marketers are better than ever before at meeting consumer demands and expectations. We can predict what individuals will look at, when they are ready to buy, what they are thinking and how they will act.

To reach to future markets, marketers are using linksters (post-millennials) – what will be needed are savvy professionals that will know what customers want even before the customer realises it herself.

The world of marketing holds a lot of promise. The blurring of boundaries, politics, communication and culture mean that smart, capable, hardworking and innovative marketers will rule markets of the future.

About the Author:

Dr Alvin Lee is a Lecturer in Marketing for the Deakin Business School and the Director of the Master of Marketing. He received his Doctor of Philosophy, Univ. of Western Australia in 2008 and his Master of Business, Edith Cowan University in 2003. At Deakin University, Alvin teaches Strategic Marketing, Branding, Business to Business and Marketing Management. He has experience in delivering international and local industry projects for multinationals, non-government organisations and government bodies.