What We Talk About When We Talk About Marketing

Today more and more people major in Marketing and want to do marketing in the future, including me. But what is marketing on earth? I keep asking myself. Plus, why does it attract me?

Frankly speaking, two things push me to do the decision in the first place. 

• I hate the other subjects in the business area – finance, accounting, human resources, etc. Every time I think of these things, I feel sick.
• I learn that doing marketing gives me opportunities to do business with celebrities, which is fancy and awesome. I can show off to my friends. 

However, after doing an internship in the marketing department of Unilever, I know I need to deeply reflect on my thoughts. 

In episode 4 season 4 of Better Call Saul, the judge told the main female character, who is a lawyer and dreaming of a big and exciting case to fulfill her career, that those once-in-a-lifetime case only exists in movies, what I got coming up next is a janitor who threw his pee on his boss and a woman stabbed her boyfriend over a grilled cheese sandwich. 

                          

                         

Yeah! Welcome to the real world. It sucks.  ❤

In the real marketing work, most of our scope is arguing with various suppliers, agencies, and clients. The clients always have unexpected demands, and we need to do the most to meet them. They never want to work overtime and pursue a work-life balance. So, we always work overtime and don’t know what work-life balance is. 

But when it comes to suppliers and agencies – we are their suppliers – things are still bad. They are always unable to get what we truly want. It turns out the design of a poster needs to be reviewed and changed many times. 

Communication is hard. There is so much noise. 

But you may ask, what about the fancy part, even if it’s small. Well, the truth is, when you really get close to those fancy things, you don’t think it’s a big thing. 

Yes, I got the opportunity to run an event involving celebrities and influencers.

SO WHAT?

WHO CARES?

After the event – let alone the event has nothing helpful to my career development – I’m still one single normal person. Nothing changed. 

Anyway, now the last very question is why I still do marketing. Because I’ve learned that all the work, most of the time, is not that interesting. If we still live on the earth and must figure out some way to make money, we need to get along with those boring things. 

But more importantly, I still desire to do my own brand and create a marketing campaign that can shock the entire world. 

All my daily repetitive work is for that moment.