Marketing simply means selling, but marketing careers go well beyond the simple act of giving something to somebody in return for money. Marketing concerns the advertising and promotion of products to the general public in ways that will enhance the sales of those products. Every large company that manufactures a product or offers a service has a marketing department to promote that product or service. Many companies exist that do nothing but promote products, mostly for companies that do not have marketing departments of their own or that need the added expertise of a company that specializes in letting the public know about products and convincing potential consumers that the product is something that they cannot live without. Search for a marketing college.
The most familiar of marketing careers is advertising, and there is an industry built up around it. In the advertising industry, you would create ads for a number of:
media: radio, television, the Internet, magazines, newspapers, billboards, perhaps even for the sides of trucks and pizza boxes. The world is filled with advertisements, and marketing careers are full of opportunities for creating them. There are many different careers within the advertising industry itself. You could be a graphic designer, the person who lays out ads; a photographer or artist who creates the images in the ads; or a writer, the person who creates the text in the ads. Or, you could work directly with the newspapers, Web sites, and television networks where the ads ultimately appear.
Another of many marketing careers is in public relations. As a public relations spokesperson, you could be responsible for getting messages out about products, events, organizations, or even political candidates. You would do this through press releases, telephone calls, e-mails, press conferences, or even personal visits to the people you want to get the message across to. All of these are marketing careers.
Other types of marketing careers include brand management, where you are in charge of maintaining the image of a popular brand - a product, a company, a service - and making sure that it remains in the public eye in a way that will be conducive to sales; market research, where you study what the public wants and decide how to satisfy that desire with a product people want to buy (or an advertising campaign that makes them want to buy it); and of course, corporate manager, where you would be the (very well-paid) person who supervises all of these other marketers. There are many different kinds of marketing careers.
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