Week 12

With the end to this module, my peers and myself are closer to entering the workforce with what we have been equipped with, but a notion of challenging ourselves will do us greatly as none of us will and fully grasp current concepts in the marketplaces. An article on the Harvard Business Review writes that life-long learning is imperative and important for both the CEO’s of firms and the majority staff. This brings me to think of the widely used Product Adoption Curve (PAC).

Which states that 50% of the population falls into the Late Majority (34%) or Laggards (16%) category. This is a huge number and just shows that at some point of our lives we are going to be late to the party so to speak. There is definitely much room to improve and humility is much needed for a continuous life-long learning mindset. And frankly, what we do learn in our education would be a tad out of date to the real-life expectations, an involuntary lag of the education system. Therefore, crucial to wearing our ‘purple-cow hat’ with finesse and humility.

There were many insightful and thought-provoking content from the Mark Ritson’s video on what really matters in marketing. Especially how many a times a message is being focused on so heavily, a huge chunk of proper marketing insights are discarded and deemed unneeded. Better described with his compressed version of what marketers do.

There has been a fad as exposed very brutally by Mark that there are ‘anti-intellectuals’ who deem an education or training of marketing is useless or just so out of touch.

Communication is the sought-after end result and because of that the key elements in marketing that holds a strong foundational presence such as the Diagnosis phase followed by the Strategy phase. Without proper target segmentation and brand development, Mark shows every other brand comes up with the same positive human race movement. Even though they are worlds apart as a brand and as a company. Greatly insulting this over 100year old study of marketing further.

The part that really hits me is that as a marketing undergrad, I am guilty that the communication part of the triad has been often overly glorified and overlooked that sadly the more traditional side of marketing is left not utilised correctly.

Thus, Mark’s message to the RMIT undergrads on not magnifying ‘tactification’ which is the lack of diagnosis and strategy, delivers to the world half-baked missions and communication, this leaves a mark on me (no pun intended). To be a better ‘real marketer’ of tomorrow.