Re: Online 2 offline and vice versa

From: Jeff Swan <sales_at_mazelles.com>
Date: Mon 16 May 2005 08:28:20 -0500

My pov is that the hard switch is from any form of advertising to
"marketing". The two jobs do not overlap very much. It has always amazed
me that so many advertising professionals do not know the basic "4 P's Of
Marketing - Product, Price, Place, Promotion". "Advertising", in all its
forms, is a subset of the "Promotion" P. "Sales" is also a subset of the
"Promotion" P. But a Marketing professional, such as a Brand Manager at
General Mills, spends 80% of their workday on projects and tasks that are
not related to Promotion. When I worked in marketing at Frito-Lay and Sara
Lee, I could go weeks without devoting even five minutes to advertising or
"branding" as people like to call it nowadays. The marketing person can be
responsible for sourcing raw ingredients, such as potatoes, to go into the
potato chips, and if there is a potato shortage, then you need to work all
day and night with your logistics department to figure out how to get those
potatoes to go into your chips, and you might spend weeks on spreadsheets
calculating the necessary price increases, or figuring out which regions
must have the chips, and which regions you're going to short, and all the
implications of those decisions. If you get different ingredients, you need
to get nutritional analysis and new labeling, then get all new packaging,
and figure out what to do with your old packaging, when it will run out,
should you order more of the old stuff before it goes obsolete, and on and
on. You're figuring out transportation costs and more efficient ways of
getting your products from your production facilities to the distribution
channels to the warehouses to the trucks to the stores, or should you use
trains instead of trucks? What new equipment will you need at the plant to
make the stuff? What will happen if we raise prices by $0.05 per box? $0.10
per box? What if we don't raise prices but our costs go up? It's just
spreadsheet after spreadsheet. That's the real life of a Marketing
professional, and maybe 20% of the time is spent on Advertising and
Promotion.

When I was in undergrad, my Marketing professor passed out a sheet that
outlined the job of a Brand Manager on one column and compared it to the job
of Account Exec at an ad agency in the other column and really, the "fun"
stuff was at the Ad Agency. The problem, of course, is that the Brand
Manager or VP of Marketing is the Client, so the ad agency doesn't have
autonomy, but the person with the autonomy doesn't have the time to focus on
the advertising and is by definition more of a nuts and bolts guy, not a
creative promotional person.

That said, I could see a transition between an ad agency job and a job at a
client that was focused only on advertising and promotion, if such a job
existed. For example, at Frito Lay, we had a small team of about two or
three people that worked only on advertising, and they provided expertise
and advice related to advertising to the rest of the marketing dept.



Jeff Swan
President
Mazelle's Desserts
PO Box 59345
Dallas, TX 75229
972.620.0006 office
972.620.0142 fax
sales_at_mazelles.com email
http://www.mazelles.com




Received on Mon May 16 2005 - 08:28:20 CDT