A New Semester….
June 20th, 2006
And thus, the second half of the trimester begins. Today is my first session of Marketing Strategy, a class I suspect will be six weeks of a reasonable level of work, but annoying nonetheless because it happens in the middle of the summer, conflicts with Soccer, and will guarantee that Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays will be spent working on class foo. What’s particularly annoying about this class is that for the second half of the term the classes run for three and a half hours. Yes, that’s right, I get to sit listening to the guy from 615PM until 945PM for two nights a row, and hope that I can glean some kind of understanding from the man. If that wasn’t enough, I have the same instructor for both of my classes, so I get to see the same guy for 7 hours a week, lecturing on two different topics.
Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to it. That’s because this is information directly related to what I’m doing for work. One class is Marketing Planning and Strategy, the other one is Brand Management. Together, I think they’ll sync well to get me into the magical world of understanding how various brands get sold.
Why is that… well, I’ve found that as I progress through this program I gain a significantly different perspective of the world, especially when I go shopping. I no longer buy at large-brand stores unless I like the tricks they’re using to get me to shop there. I prefer independent boutiques because they tend to carry higher quality products (Penzey’s Spices is a great example, but then I’m a bit of a cooking snob). It really all grows from an increased sense of awareness- yes, others might look at wal-mart and cite articles and studies and other miscellanea in an effort to discredit them, but none of them really know exactly what tricks ‘ole Walt is pulling to nevertheless be a frightening moneymaking machine. Or maybe they know, but they can’t see how it all fits together, or so forth. I’m not trying to insult anyone here, it’s just that once one can put names to specific pieces of the puzzle it demystifies the nebulous nature of sales and marketing. Instead of some amorphous blob of ‘businessmen are evil’, I’ve learned to look at an organization and see its upstream and downstream, its stakeholders, pricing model, market position, etc, and wrap all these things into a single mental framework that explains it all. The catch…. once it’s demystified, I can’t hate it anymore. The decisions that were made appear perfectly rational, and in some cases are even peculiarly brilliant.
And yet I retain a disdain for shopping at Wal-Mart and other stores. Self-analysis brings me to an interesting conclusion- it’s no longer about what the company does, because I know what it does now. It’s about what I see myself as doing. Shopping at Wal Mart would be an insult to my pride. I know how things work, I know why they make money, and I know why it makes economic sense for everyone else to shop there…. therefore I’m better than them, and should separate myself. And yet there’s a reversal: when I walk past Fifth Avenue or any of the trendier places Downtown (that mind you in no other town would be seen as I’m about to describe them) I don’t go in. Why not? Because I’m not good enough for them. Unless I can whip out a Platinum card and walk in smelling like million-dollar trust fund, there’s no way I’m going to walk in there. Hell, I’d even think about getting dressed to go shopping to walk into some of these places. Odd, huhn? Both of those, the ‘better than’ or the ‘not good enough’? That’s the power of Brand and Image.
Which brings me back to my roots. Because on some level, I’m still wearing sneakers, still in denim and a t-shirt, no matter how much money I gained/lost in the market today. I’m that guy who walks into Primanti’s for a beer and artery-clogger and wipes his hands on his pants before walking into Sack’s Fifth without batting an eyelash. You don’t know if I’m rich, you don’t know if I’m poor… the only thing you know is that I seem perfectly comfortable in my environment.
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