Marketing Communications Today is a collection of resources for marketing communications
professionals filled with industry research, marketing trends, and career
information about integrated marketing and data-driven communications.
Learn industry insights through the Marketing Communications Today blog,
podcast, as well as Integrate Online.
Direct marketing —an approach that uses all types of advertising media to motivate
a response, which is tracked and stored in a database—is fast becoming indistinguishable
from modern marketing today. Join us as Ron Jacobs, one of the preeminent
authorities on this topic, explains the evolution of direct marketing thinking
and where it’s headed over the horizon. Hint: Some marketing challenges are
not likely to be solved anytime soon, but Ron says new tools and technologies are
on the way.
Cyndi Greenglass: Can you define the characteristics of what we call direct
marketing and take us on a little journey of how we got to where we are today?
Ron Jacobs: My textbook definition of direct marketing is the interactive use
of advertising media to enable an immediate behavior modification in such a way
that this behavior can be tracked, recorded, analyzed and stored on a database
for future retrieval and use. And if I break that down, what we're saying is we're
using a lot of different marketing channels to capture behaviors of what consumers
do and users do. Then, we’re storing that data in a database so that we can pull
that information up and use it for future marketing efforts. You can also see that
that pretty much is the definition of what marketing is today, so it is easy to
see how this has become a modern way of thinking about marketing, which goes back
to an awful long time ago. Today direct mail is still a pretty dominant use for
direct marketing. Email is another and if we look at direct mail and email, they're
so similar.
The Marketing Communications programs at WVU have aided brilliant and talented people
in achieving their dreams and have also helped them find success within the industry.
Meet some of our alumni and find out why they are grateful!
I'm grateful for the knowledge, confidence, and connections that I've made through
this program. Even though it was an online course, I was able to grow
my network with many like-minded people."
Learn about the exciting job role of product management in tech markets from our
guest, Laura Marino, Chief Product Officer at TrueAccord. While tech product managers
have little direct authority, they hold great responsibility to represent the needs
of the customer and influence others in the firm—engineering, marketing, finance—to
deliver products to market at a profit. The future is bright for these professionals,
as Product-Led Growth becomes a strategic imperative. Tune in especially as Laura
names four characteristics of a successful product.
Cyndi Greenglass: Laura, could you first start out by helping define what product
management is and how is it different from product marketing?
Laura Marino: I've been in product management for many years and the question
about what product management is something that has come up always. It was a discipline
that wasn't well understood for many years. If I were to describe the difference
between product management and product marketing at a very high level, product
management is responsible for leading the creation and evolution of a product.
Product marketing is primarily responsible for leading the go to market of the
product. Now, there's a lot of interaction between product marketing and product
management. Product marketing brings information about the competition, the industry
to product management and then product marketing works very closely with product
management to understand what the product is so they can best communicate it to
the market. Product management really is at the core of leading the development
of solutions. The product manager leads the product teams, and the product teams
are charged with solving customer and business problems. Product management works
very closely with engineering and with design to come up with effective solutions
that have to have these four characteristics. They have to be valuable for the
customers who choose to buy and use them, they have to be viable from the business
perspective, so considering the constraints of the business, they have to be usable
so the users can figure out how to use it and they have to be feasible from a technical
perspective. They must be possible to build those solutions, given the technology.
Of course, a lot of the usability and visibility fall on the design in the engineering
team, but product management is working with them and really making sure that the
whole team is building the right product.
