My new position at Dell Storage is technically a marketing position. People have asked me – you just got your master’s degree in education – how can you do marketing (this is usually after jokes about a techie crossing over to the dark side…).
I have always thought there was lots of education skill needed in marketing. And let’s be honest – right now in the storage industry things are moving so fast that the early adopters are being taught by the technical marketers.
Then I read a post by Alistair Croll that convinced me I was right about the similarities between education and marketing. His post outlines the three questions all marketers must answer:
- Who’s the audience
- What specific action do you want them to take?
- Why will they take that action? What’s their motivation?
This makes the similarities between marketing and education pretty apparent to me. The first one (from an edu point of view) should set up what sort of knowledge a person should have coming into a course. The second question speaks to what action a learner should they be able to perform after taking the instruction – learning objectives 101. The third one is all about motivation – how do you get a learner’s attention so they will want to learn what is in the lesson.
The point is, good marketing and good education have one core tenant in common – it should be all about the end user. I’m excited to use my education training in a new discipline – even more so since I get to be technical!
@storagezombies wanted me to mention that both education and marketing have zombies. Since I am scared to death of @storagezombies, I am mentioning that here.
Scared to death? We only want your braaaaains.
Thanks for sharing your experience. All are valuable points. But in my point of view good education is not mandatory for marketing. If we have good communication skills, fluent in English, and able to make client satisfy. There are the main things needed for Marketing field.