Marketing

[NAAFI]

Can someone give me a crash course in marketing?

I'm going for some job. I never expected them to even acknowledge my application. I have no education in this field and no experience in it or anything like it. I was just applying to literally every job ever. But they got back to me and somehow I bullshit my way through the phone interview and the first interview. Is that all marketing is? Just bullshiting people? I have another interview coming up in about a week or so.

I expect they would want me to say more in depth shit instead of the vague bullshit I was spewing. Gimme some cool shit to say and all that jazz. I researched their company a bit and on their website they just had a bunch of vague bullshit that was hard to decipher. I talked to a guy in a pub once and he was a marketing student at the local university. He just ranted at me about how people give other people money in exchange for goods and services.

[stdio.h]

Yeah, it's all bullshit. As simple as figuring out why a potential customer might find your goods/services to be useful, and then determining an effective way to convey this to them. I can't believe they actually teach this crap at university.

[fanglekai]

Marketing is sales. The ones who are good use statistics to find out things like how much it costs to get a new customer with advertising vs retaining existing customers ie preventing attrition. Ive never taken marketing but khanacademy might have some info. Torrent some books. It's basically a common sense field where you look at how to generate sales and retain customers. And looking at costs for those things. Sales is all about features and benefits. An object has features. Those features offer benefits to consumers. That is literally the entire basis of sales. I shit you not. Ive had multiple sales jobs. Its always feature-benefit to sell.

[Max Headroom]

You need to have a basic understanding on what constitutes a good business slogan, be presentable, make your product more appealing than other people in the same niche, see what they do to make their product or service more desirable, learn from successful competitors and make sure you have an appeal that is original that will make your service or product different from the rest. First strive to be competent and reliable, don't focus on getting sales fast right away. Over time you'll build a reliable customer base and a certain feel and from that point improve as best as you can

[Idiosyncrasy]

It seems that you have enough common sense to get through it.  That's mostly what marketing is.  Getting to that value proposition and all that.  To me, marketing is the whole set of activities that occur in order to get your product sold through and delivered to your customer.  Marketing is not just sales - it doesn't end there.  Most people equate marketing to advertising, but it's more than just that too.

I recommend googling a few things related to marketing, but can you tell us what the job is so we know what aspect of marketing you will be doing?

[NAAFI]

Thanks everyone. My Fed buddies were wrong. You guys are alright