Keeping a blog
on my intended major throughout the course of this semester has been a very
effective way of learning the different aspects of marketing. After
researching, watching videos and documentaries, interviewing, and experiencing
the marketing world for myself, I have begun to feel more comfortable as a
soon-to-be business student here at MSU. Furthermore, not only am I more
educated than I was before, but my writing and researching skills have improved
as well. Each blog post I created enabled me to be somewhat interactive in the
field of marketing, which ultimately contributed to my reading, writing,
research, reflective and people skills. Now that I’ve come to the end of this
project, I feel much more knowledgeable in the field of marketing. I’ve experienced
it as a professional and I’ve learned about it on the Internet. For these
reasons, I’ve been able to respond and think back to why this blog project was
so effective for me.
There was one
post I did that I keep thinking back to. I assume this is because it taught me
more than I expected and it truly opened my eyes to the marketing journey that
I will be embarking on. I wrote the post after I watched a video which focused
on Steve Jobs and “thinking differently”. Jobs’s insight on marketing taught me
that it revolves around values. His belief was that the people who can think
differently are the ones who can change the world for the better. In other
words, with enough passion and consistent values/core values, a company can do
what has never been done before. He uses Nike as an example. He claims that
Nike doesn’t even need to really talk about their product to gain its true
success as a company. Instead, they “honor great athletes and athletics”. This
helps them fit in to the rest of the world, and helps the rest of the world
render Nike successful and interesting. I enjoyed listening to Steve Jobs speak
because it opened my eyes to how much creativity is needed to be involved in
marketing. Jobs really knew how much thinking outside the box had to be done.
What I mainly learned from Jobs is that a company should promote their beliefs
to the world so the public can relate to those ideas, and not just the product
itself.
Another post
that had a huge effect on me was my response to a documentary called Objectified. This documentary made me
realize how the design and manufacturing stage of a product go hand in hand
with the marketing aspect. I learned how the simplest of objects take up a huge
part of our lives, whether us consumers realize it or not. Because of the
design stage that took up so much of that creator’s time to ensure that it
would be easy to use, each object in our lives are pretty much one of a kind.
In my reflective post in which I wrote to respond to this documentary, I again
brought up Jobs and what I learned from him. The posts sort of intertwined with
each other because they both in some way revolved around the importance of the
consumer’s well being. The design stage of almost every product is what ensures
that it will be easy to use for whoever will be using it. The documentary also
discussed how humans will never stop creating and for this reason, every object
has some sort of value and tells a story of who we are. Lastly, the documentary
said that it is important to look and anticipate what will be popular in the
future, rather than what has already been created in the past. This, I
realized, is completely relevant in the marketing world.
After concluding
this blog project, I’ve come to realize how fitting marketing will be for me.
It was really helpful for me to create responsive posts about my personal
experiences working, as well as what I learned from different meetings and
interviews with professionals. I think I’ve always been a people-person but
what I really gained from this blog project was professionalism and a true
understanding of the importance of marketing. Now that I have gained this
knowledge, I believe I am ready to continue my business education as a
marketing major. Although I still wonder where exactly I will end up in the
future, I can sense that I am on the right track. Not everyone is exactly sure
of what they want to do with their lives, right? At least I can say that I’ve
gained an understanding of my major, and I have done so with personal
experience, research, and being able to write about my all of this on my
marketing blog.
Work Cited:
"Best Marketing Strategy
Ever! Steve Jobs Think Different / Crazy Ones Speech (with Real
Subtitles)." YouTube. YouTube, 21 Apr. 2013. Web. 27 Jan.
2014.
