Finally you get to read a bit of the content from my half-arsed attempt at writing my first book, which didn’t even get as far as halfway through the first chapter before I completely lost interest in it. Hopefully my boredom threshhold has grown a little wider since then.
So here is the first half of what I wrote on the subject of this posting:
HOW TO BLAG A JOB IN MARKETING
If you are already employed in the wonderful world of marketing, or if you have no desire to be whatsoever, or if you have your own business, then please skip this chapter as it is not written for you, although you may still find it interesting and amusing. It is really written for people who have not yet decided upon what they want to do when they grow up. People who are still at school, college or university or young twenty somethings who are drifting aimlessly from one unfulfilling job to another, trying to find an interesting and lucrative career.
If you are expecting to finish reading this book and then walk into a job as Marketing Director of ICI or British Airways the next day, then I am afraid that you are going to be disappointed. Sorry, but I’m not giving out any refunds. After all, I couldn’t get a refund on my ‘Speak German In A Month’ book even though after one year all I could say was ‘Guten Morgen’. The publishers’ only reason as to why they were not prepared to give me a refund was quite lame, I feel. Apparently they ‘assumed that I would realize’ that I would have to actually read the book to the end before I could actually speak German! No, I am afraid that, in order to make yourself a successful career in marketing, then you will not only have to read this book, but also invest a great deal of time and effort in order to achieve your goals, as this is not a ‘Get Rich Quick’ type book.
If you are looking for a ‘Get Rich Quick’ scheme, then one of the most simple and amusing is one that I once saw in Exchange & Mart, the comic for grown up men which can provide hours of amusement as you scan through a literary Aladdin’s cave of stick insects, army surplus ground sheets and incontinence pants.
Being an entrepreneur wannabee from a very early age, I always found the ‘Business Opportunities’ section to be extremely fascinating. All of the advertisements looked extremely dodgy, making outrageous claims about driving Ferraris and living in mansions and asking for vast sums of money in order to divulge their secrets. One intrigued me enough to respond though, the main reason being that they only wanted a fiver off me, which was just about the maximum that I was prepared to risk. The ad. made all of the usual claims – make money fast, blah, blah, work from home, blah, blah, no capital required, blah, blah, send me your money now, blah, blah, blab. But I was young and dumb, and so I did.
What I received for my fiver was a few badly photocopied sheets of paper explaining the ’secret’ which, in a nutshell, was to place advertisements in papers like the Exchange & Mart telling suckers that you will sell them the secret of how to make money fast for only a fiver! Even though I was a fiver down on the deal, I did not feel ripped off as I definitely learned something from the scam. It was great, because he had proved to me that the scheme would actually work and I was the sucker that had proved it! But I digress.
Back to the plot. If you have decided that you would like to try for a job in marketing, then the next decision that you need to make is what is it that you would like to market? You have a very wide range of options available to you, as everything needs marketing. From tampons to tractors, just about every company that you have ever bought a product from has a marketing department and thus will be looking for staff at one time or another. When you are looking for a product to market, it’s a good idea to try and find something that genuinely interests you. In order to succeed, you are going to have to put in a lot of work and educate yourself by finding out everything that you possibly can about the products which you are marketing. Because of this fact, you’re going to be a lot more motivated if your job is also your hobby. It is going to be very hard work to become one of the world’s leading experts on chewing gum if the real love of your life is wind surfing.
Be prepared for your plans to mutate over the years. It is quite likely that you will end up marketing something completely different from that which occupies all of your time when you’re in your late teens. It all depends upon the opportunities that present themselves during your career. For example, the great love of my life in my early twenties was music and I thought that all of my dreams would be shattered if I ended up working in any other industry. In the end, however, I moved from music into video and then into computer games, neither of which were of any interest to me five years before I started working with the products. However, I soon built up a fascination for the products which I needed in order to be motivated enough to become an expert in both of the fields.
So, you’ve decided that you want to try for a career in marketing, and you’ve decided upon what you believe would be the most interesting product to work with. That’s the easy part, I’m afraid, because, if you’ve just left school or have been drifting from job to job, then you are probably of absolutely zero interest to any potential employer. The first step is to learn the following simple piece of anatomy. Your ‘arse’ is the fleshy piece of your body that you sit on. Your ‘elbow’ is the knobbly bit in the middle of your arm that allows you to bend it. Learn this simple lesson and you will have already overcome the first preconception that most employers have about today’s school leavers. The second step which you need to take is to get yourself some experience, any experience, relevant to marketing the product of your dreams. This can be one of the most difficult stages of the exercise, and the options available to you will depend very much upon your chosen product and also upon your geographical location. If you live in London, then virtually anything is possible, as there should be plenty of companies involved with your product within easy reach. If, on the other hand, you live in Brinklehampleton-off-the-Map, then you are, to a certain extent, stuffed, unless you are committed enough to achieving your goal that you are prepared to leave your nice bedroom in Mummy and Daddy’s nice house, your nice girl/boyfriend and your drinking mates behind and go off to the big city in search of fame and fortune.
It can be done, however, because that’s what I did. My goal was to become the Marketing Manager for a major record company, which meant that I started off at a significant disadvantage from having the misfortune of being born and bred in the sleepy non-Metropolis of Stratford-upon-Avon. I realized that the first step that I needed to take in order to achieve my goals was to move to London, and so I started planning my escape route.
That’s all for today. The second (and final part) of what I wrote will be posted tomorrow.
