The Marketing Industry - Overview

Marketing is defined by their Institute as ‘the management process that identifies, anticipates and satisfies customer requirements profitably’. To you and me that’s the department of a company which helps it deliver the right product, in the right place, at the right time, at the right price. A marketer can find themselves involved in any process that helps achieve this whether it be conducting market research groups, devising new products, designing new packaging or coming up with innovative new distribution channels or ways of selling their product.

A large part of a marketers job is managing their companies overall brand and those of its products or services. As a result marketing departments often work very closely with Advertising, Event and PR agencies. The benefits of working agency side or as a marketer (client side) are hotly debated and it is quite common for people to switch between the two. From what we saw the big plus of an agency is the breadth of experience you are able to gain quite quickly by working across multiple clients. You also get to focus on the part of the communications mix you most like. The benefit of client side is that you get a much more in depth understanding of your business and a broader understanding of marketing communications. Being involved in every element of campaigns also means you’re able to have a more tangible impact on the success or failure of them.

Salaries vary quite a bit depending on the size of the company you work for but typically an entry level marketing executive would be in the low 20’s. A marketing manager would be in the £40-60K range and a Marketing Director £60K plus.

To find out more about graduate jobs in marketing, check out the videos below:

Graduate Jobs in Marketing

Graduate Jobs in Market Research

An insight into the Marketing Industry

Graduate Jobs in Marketing

My name is Hamish Rickman, i'm the advertising manager at Virgin Atlantic airways. I'm Martine Ainsworth-Wells and i'm the director of marketing at Visit London. My name is John Beasley, i'm the marketing manager for Red Bull. I'm Tim Davis, i'm a brand project director for Added Value.

Marketing is about all the points of contact that the brand or product has with consumers from how much it costs to where it’s sold, to how it’s packaged, to how it’s positioned. It will also cover off product and the formulation of the product.

Marketing is essentially communicating the existence of your product on one level and then making people desire and want to buy that product on another level whether they have a need for it or not.

I think marketing is about the business of creating emotional bonds to a product or service. So consumers choose brands because they make them feel the way they want to feel. But from a marketing perspective it’s really understanding why they choose those brands, what do they want to feel, how do they feel like that, what makes them feel like that.

Marketing is understanding what consumers want, finding the right product and selling it to them.

Our goal as an agency is to kind of be the marketing inspiration behind iconic brands so essentially we are a bunch of creative problem solvers who deliver strategic solutions to a brand’s problem or challenge.

My job in its simplest, simplest form is to get people to come to London; to get people to come from London, from the rest of the UK and from all over the world and take a short break or a long vacation here in the city.

I essentially look after the advertising at Virgin Atlantic and that encompasses all the above the line advertising as well as direct sales opportunities and promotions to a certain degree.

A lot of what we do is about finding new opportunities whether that’s new events that we can support, new opinion leaders who can help talk about the brand or new technologies that can help us to integrate our message in whatever media they happen to be in.

Often it’s ultimately about repositioning their brand so the brand is not performing as well as it has done or they might be launching a new brand off a current brand or whatever it may be. One of the local projects based in the UK was that a snacking brand came to us, more specifically in the crisp category, they wanted to know how to refresh the category, how to appeal to or how to create a brand, create a new product to appeal to what they called the more premium consumer so those with slightly more income to spend on snacking and they came to us wanting to know how do we redefine that market, how do we create a new brand that is going to capture the imagination of that consumer, be a premium brand that they would spend a little more money on. So we spent a huge amount of time understanding that category, understanding the consumer, really understanding what makes that category tick and going into a lot of detail with semiotics and finding out actually what the different images mean, what the different icons mean, what is it that people are looking for when they go into a store whatever it may be. A huge amount of research was done. We then done a lot of work with consumers themselves so consumer panels, a lot of taste tests, a lot of packaging tests but really going into a huge amount of detail and really getting down to the granularity of that industry, that category. Then we came up with a specific brand, a completely new product that was packaged differently, that tasted differently, that had premium ingredients which has been really successful, fantastically successful and has almost created this theme of more premium snacking whether it be crisps or whatever it may be.

Marketing has a huge breadth of opportunities within it. You might be really interested in market research for example so that’s the bit where you actually sit down and understand what consumers want and why they buy products. You look at statistics, you analyse information, you perhaps run your own surveys, pull all of that information together and define a profile of who that customer is and what they actually want. You can also work perhaps in the creative side so once you’ve decided who your customer is how are you actually going to communicate with them? What kind of advertising, what kind of pictures should you use, what stimuli should you use to get that customer to buy your product. There is also product development, so right; we know that they like toothpaste but what should that toothpaste taste like? What should it look like and then how should we advertise it? And then more defined disciplines for example, brand management sits within the marketing portfolio and brand management is really about not just a visual identity and a logo but what that logo stands for and ensuring that every single person within that organisation lives and breathes those values and that ethos. So there are lots of different jobs within marketing. It’s not just about getting a budget and making some adverts and putting them on TV.

You’ve then got events marketing, so that’s looking at developing new event ideas and then actually delivering them, working with our project managers and also external project management agencies. Then you have sports marketing managers and athlete managers who look after the athletes we sponsor and work with. Culture managers who look after our interests in film, music, fashion, art, they also work with opinion leaders who could be celebrities or they could be fashion designers or they could be graffiti artists, b-boys, all that kind of stuff.

The standard day is probably from 8.30 to 6.30 but we do do quite a lot of travel so you are sitting in your hotel room, wherever you are working at strange hours of the day or night.

We don’t particularly have a dress code, I’m sure somewhere in the HR policy there’s a dress code about not wearing bikinis to work or something but there isn’t anyone naked walking around the office, we don’t have to wear a suit other than for a formal business occasion.

It’s relaxed. We’re quite a young agency, average age of early 30’s. There is a good vibe to the agency. We spend a lot of time talking to each other using our own experiences, expertise on different projects so it’s a relaxed atmosphere; it’s certainly not a formal dress code it's very much jeans and a shirt or whatever you feel comfortable in.

Are there more men than women? I would say it’s quite balanced. My team is all girls. I have 20 people and its all girls but for no reason other than they were the best interview candidates. Our digital team is mostly guys because they were the best candidates.

The opportunities that are afforded by working for Red Bull are incredible. We get such unique access; we’ll do the backstage area for so many gigs and events and concerts.

I think you’ve got to enjoy consuming media for a start off. You have to understand the media landscape. If you don’t like watching TV, reading newspapers, looking at websites, understanding how mobile phones work, if that really doesn’t interest you, you’re not going to like marketing because those channels are the way in which we communicate with people.

I think you need all round skills, all round business skills and one of the important ones is obviously a certain amount of understanding of creativity, but an understanding of people and how to motivate people to buy your product.

Have a broad range of experiences behind you, have a passion for brands, have an interest in brands and just be willing to develop that theory so know about marketing, know about the basics of marketing. Obviously you won’t be expected to know the full theory but come with a real desire to learn.

It’s so rewarding to know, to see the direct impact of what your activity had, to see what campaigns worked, to see how when you use a particular media, whether online versus mobile to see what impact that had.

I think it’s the consumer at the end of the day. There’s a huge buzz, a huge passion about when you actually see a brand that does take our advice, that does implement the strategy, the changes that we have made and you see it out there on the market place and you see the consumer watching something, buying something and you know that you were ultimately involved in perhaps changing someone’s perception within that brand to what is being played out in front of the consumer. It’s very exciting to see it being played out and knowing that you’ve challenged someone’s perceptions internally to ultimately benefit the brand.