Advice for student FFF

By Ned Roberto, Ardy Roberto
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 04:15:00 01/16/2009

Last week, in “A marketing student and his future” MarketingRx published the letter of a graduating marketing student who, feeling that his four-year education will be inadequate for a marketing career, fears for his future.

Perhaps the same fear is felt by those who were transferred to marketing from a different field. We see that all the time. Those in HR, sales, IT — and even nursing, the arts and engineering are assigned to a management position (or are running a business) that requires a working knowledge of marketing.

Learning fast

As for me (the Jr. MRx-er), I had no plans to get into marketing. My initial career path was either law or journalism. Out of college, I started writing about business, entrepreneurship and health for a monthly lifestyle magazine. Later, I found myself in a management position for the publisher of an international business magazine that tasked me to market books to Asian managers (a new spin-off business of the publisher). I had to learn fast, since the previous manager I had replaced was gone and there was no turnover or formal training. The publisher had faith in me — or rather the fact that I was the son of the Sr. MRx-er, the professor of international marketing at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM).

I remember doing several things to help me prepare for the position and the responsibility. These three daily “To-Dos” also helped me when I started our business.

1. Seek mentors. I picked the brain of the best available resource person on marketing that was available to me — my Dad! The Sr. MRx-er and I carpooled to work every day. The commute from Parañaque City (south of Manila) to our respective offices in Makati City became my “University of South Superhighway” with Dr Ned Roberto as my professor. Thankfully, our offices were located within five minutes of each other. As there was no skyway then, that were about three hours of marketing lessons with a teacher to student ratio of 1:1.

First hand, I’d learn about my Dad’s clients and the different challenges that they asked the Sr. MRx-er to help them with. You may not have the blessing of having a marketing guru as your father, but you can certainly seek marketing mentors either in the company you work for or as you mentioned, in the various marketing associations and clubs that you have already joined.

Marketing mentor

I also considered my boss, Ashok Nath, the publisher and president of the publishing firm where I had worked, as one of my marketing mentors as well. He was an encouraging influence who allowed his managers to be entrepreneurial. Mr. Nath also introduced me to battle-scarred marketing veterans who generously shared their expertise.

While you’re still in school, offer to be the research assistant of marketing authors and consultants like Philippine Marketing Association Agora Award recipients Willy Arcilla and Karen de Asis.

2. Read. The best marketing mentors can be consulted for a few hundred or thousand pesos 24/7 through the books and articles that they have written. Since I marketed books, I had access to the best and latest business books published by Harvard Business Press, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, John Wiley, etc. Publishers would send me free review copies.

Those days are over, but I still invest and budget a princely amount for books every year. I learned much from the classic career autobiographies of advertising legends, Lester Wunderman and David Ogilvy. When I started my business on a shoe-string budget, I consulted Guerrilla Marketing founder, Jay Levinson through his Guerrilla Marketing series of books, starting with “Guerrilla Marketing for the Home-Based Business” coauthored with Seth Godin. (Little did I know that a decade later, I would be hosting Jay Levinson in Manila.)

Another book that I used to refer to a lot when I became an entrepreneur was Josiah Go’s “The Marketing Plan” book.

Right now, I’m going through “Lovemarks—the future beyond brands” by the Worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, Kevin Roberts. It’s an inspiring, enjoyable read (brilliantly designed also) that details what he has learned about brand marketing since his start in P&G in 1972.

3. Go back to “school.” Yes, I know that you’ve just graduated and are probably glad to be out of school. But you need to go back and continually upgrade your knowledge. A management consultant once told me that the knowledge of a graduating IT student becomes obsolete just three to six months after they graduate. Given that the graduating marketing student’s knowledge may have more shelf life, you still have to keep on upgrading and updating by attending “school.”

So attend cutting-edge seminars and conferences where the latest ideas and case studies in business and marketing are presented. Create your own curriculum. Allow me a shameless plug right here: Include the Dr. Ned marketing workshops being offered through Josiah Go’s Mansmith & Fielders in your “marketing school calendar.”

Lastly, don’t be quick to dismiss what you’ve learned at school — at least you’ve been exposed to the basics and have a good foundation. What’s more important, I think, is that you’ve learned the discipline of hard work (assuming that you are studying and working hard) while still a student.

Once you get into a corporate marketing position fresh from college, the boss wouldn’t be careless and throw the weight of running a marketing campaign to a new hire.

Hard work, discipline

There will be a process of company acculturation (“This is how things are done here”), orientation, training and mentoring. You’ll have to learn fast on the job. The discipline of hard work that you hopefully learned in school will be your best friend. Hopefully, you also learned how to work with different people and picked up people and leadership skills with all the group projects that were assigned to you in school. In business and the corporate world, you won’t go far if you prefer to work alone. You’ll have to learn to work with different people.

We’ll end with a reply from one of our readers who responded to last week’s invitation to send their two centavos’ worth of advice to student FFF:

“Marketing is one of the most challenging jobs out there — precisely because it is very hard to define. Marketing usually does so many things all at the same time that it really is hard to create a textbook teaching marketing to students … What’s important is not what’s in the textbooks but rather what have you really learned while in school, like how to network with other students, how to build an organization, how to learn the importance of teamwork in sports activities, how to court a girl and how to influence others — this is what’s more important and this is what every student can use when they join the corporate world.” — Jay Jaboneta, Customer Business Development, P&G Distributing Philippines.

So, FFF, we hope we’ve answered two of the four questions that you asked last week (“what reading materials could you suggest to a newbie like me which could be very helpful?” and “what else should I do that could supplement my education?”)

Next week, the Sr. MRx-er will answer the other two questions raised by FFF (“what am I to do about my situation without offending my professors?” and “could you please give me an idea of how it is to be a professional marketer and what the industry is like?”

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Keep your questions and comments coming. Text us at +63918 3386412. Or send them to MarketingRx@pldtDSL.net or post them on www.marketingrx.org.