This week at the University of Derby it has been the marketing festival week. ‘Marketing… Beyond 2020’ is a marketing festival put on by the university to bring together students, staff, local businesses and professionals to discuss topical issues facing marketers of today and the future. Today was day one of the marketing festival and we had two guest speakers come in to present. One about CIM graduate gateway opportunities and another discussing the marketing profession and if it is under threat.
CIM
The first speaker of the week was Maureen Wincott, a representative from the Charted Institute of Marketing or CIM. They are a professional body of marketers with thousands of members worldwide. They have come together as a collective to share their knowledge and expertise about marketing. CIM are actually the only professional marketing body that offers internationally qualified recognised qualifications and can award Chartered Marketer Status.
The guest speaker that came in today, came in to discuss the CIM qualification available to us at the University of Derby. They informed us that all of the marketing degrees at the university, including my own are recognised by the CIM as quality marketing degrees, covering the relevant and up to date content. As a result, students at the University of Derby are able to take the ‘CIM Certificate in Professional Marketing’, and be exempt from the two mandatory modules that people not studying our degrees would have to take. Additionally, should we chose to go onto to take the next qualification, the ‘CIM Diploma in Professional Marketing’, we would also be exempt from one of the core modules as well.
What does that mean for me?
What does that mean for me? Well, I am now able to gain another two, internationally recognised, qualifications alongside my degree. It will also take me a lot less time than those who have not got a degree in marketing from the University of Derby which of course, is a great advantage for myself.
She also highlighted in her talk how competitive the market is for graduate jobs with graduate positions receiving on average 85 job applications. As a result, she argued the desperate need to make our CVs and applications stand out. One of her suggestions for this was a CIM qualification and membership.
Marketing Under Threat
Our second guest lecturer of the day was Dr Keith Glanfield who came in to talk about the marketing profession and how it needs to change to stay relevant. This talk was particularly interesting to me because he argued that my future career in marketing is under threat and how I as a marketer of the future, need to up my game to make sure I stay relevant.
Interestingly, he posed a number of questions to us the audience, including:
- Is marketing a function?
- Do marketers do strategy and tactics?
- Do only markers do marketing work?
- Are diagnostic tools valued?
The point of these questions I believe was to get the marketing professionals in the room to discuss this and decide for themselves if marketing is under threat. For example, from the question ‘are diagnostic tools valued?’, one member of the audience, a marketing professional in a local business I believe, began to discuss the fact that diagnostic tools such as TOWS and Ansoff cannot be used publicly. They are seen as pretentious and irrelevant. (A little worrying for me as someone who has just recently learnt all about them!). However from that discussion came the conclusion that as marketers we need to drop the jargon. In order to be taken seriously, we need to have “proper conversations about proper business issues”. Instead of using these tools which potentially alienate other members of the business, we need to speak their language.
Another interesting point I took from the lecture was how face paced marketing practices are changing. With this rapid change comes the rapid need for organisational structure to change. Perhaps instead of deeming marketing as its own individual function, it needs to start integrating with other functions in the business. He explained that it is outdated to structure an organisation so separately, such as accounting, sales, purchasing, marketing etc… Instead, the organisation should be made up of commercially savvy people. As marketing is being encroached on my other professions, we as marketers need to adapt and become more commercially savvy.
What should we do?
At the end of the lecture, he left the audience with a list of things that marketers should be doing.
- Change our orientation to fit the organisation;s needs, whether that be profession, department, expertise, voice.
- Be pragmatic, opportunistic and flexible.
- Influence from the bottom up. Seize opportunities and use them to your advantage to gain respect.
- Use different language and terminology.
- Build and develop own tools/models and grow facilitation.
One interesting quote that I took away from Dr Keith Glanfeild was that:
“Marketers are great at spotting threats externally, we need to be better at it internally”
Overall today was a great success and I feel really inspired as a result. I learnt a lot of interesting things and I would love to your thoughts on these things. Let me know in the comments down below and I hope you have a great day.
