SYNTHESIS POST

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.