The final call in the VoiceTAP (what’s VoiceTAP?) ‘careers’ series was on Marketing as a career featuring Karan Punia (account manager at Text 100) as the expert. Perhaps it was fitting that the marketing call be held last, because marketing is field which comes encompasses a bit of everything else we discussed earlier – such as advertising, public relations, sales, event management.
Listen to VoiceTAP Marketing as a career call by clicking here
Marketing as a career in a nutshell
The definition of ‘marketing’ was summed up by Karan Punia as “the ability of a company to communicate its brand”. As discussed in the event management call, ‘below-the-line’ marketing is becoming more important than ‘above-the-line’ marketing; consumers had faith in institutions earlier but now increasingly depend on the opinion of peers when making purchase decisions. A marketing plan with just advertising no longer works these days. A mix of direct marketing, events, and public relations is needed to get the point across these days.
There are two ways to go about starting off with a career in marketing. The first is to join a company on its marketing team. The drawback is that more corporate marketing teams are heavily skewed towards knowledge of advertising only. This imbalanced hands-on training can skew understanding of other aspects of marketing later on. A better place to learn is a marketing agency. Join at a trainee / intern level to find out what you really want to do and learn the ropes. It is suggested that you go about it by working for a few years in an agency handling different aspects of marketing – this is not detrimental in any way. If you want to eventually join the corporate side of affairs then jump ‘buckets’ of marketing for a few years, then join a company.
There aren’t very many undergraduate courses as such for marketing, but there are postgraduate courses. The problem that many graduates face is that they don’t do internship during their course, which can be a good time to learn stuff. Public relations is the easiest way to get into a career in marketing.
Bottom Line
With increasing spends in non-advertising aspects of marketing, it is an exciting career choice for people seeking something to do at a higher level of hierarchy in the art & science of selling products / services.
Further Reading
- Agencfaqs: Indian advertising and marketing news portal. Lots of stories daily on the latest developments.
- List of marketing, PR, social media blogs in India: Compiled by Gaurav Mishra, this is a comprehensive alphabetical list of blogs covering Indian marketing scene.
- themarketingblog: Focusses more on social media and startups.
- Advertising Age: International news regarding marketing and advertising.
