Getting to Know the Newbie
Being the “fresh-out-of-college newbie” in the business world can be slightly overwhelming, but at the same time, it’s pretty exciting. It’s also comforting to know the very expensive piece of paper I was given at graduation was worth it. But nevertheless, with the world as my oyster, and the typical sense of fear and optimism that is in all post-grads (hopefully it wasn’t just me), I set out to land the perfect position that would both utilize everything I had learned in the past 4.5 years and be relevant to my major. To understand how I ended up here, at AFFIRM, I need to take you back a couple of months.
During my last semester of college I was enrolled in a marketing seminar: “Marketing to Transform the World: Be the Change”, which ended up being one of the most influential classes I had taken during my time at UW-Milwaukee. Throughout the semester we were all to follow a different non-profit organization and analyze their current marketing efforts, as well as provide a brand new marketing plan by the end of the 14 week semester. I ended up choosing the organization “Doctors Without Borders”, which was nothing short of an eye-opener. We were also assigned various readings, two of which were Robert Cialdini’s, Influence and Chip and Dan Heath’s, Decisive. Now, I always knew that marketing/advertising entailed some psychological methods, but after reading about the ins and outs of how people make decisions and how we are influenced, I realized just how much psychology can play a role in marketing (spoiler alert – it’s a lot). These books are great at laying out how we make decisions, what influences those decisions, and under what circumstances we make certain decisions. So, taking everything I was reading into consideration along with this semester long project, it finally dawned on me just how powerful marketing can be. If you can understand exactly who your target audience is, creating a call-to-action response can be quite simple.
Now jumping forward to the final months of my college days, I needed to make a career decision. After creating my own mock marketing plan for Doctors Without Borders (part of which you can watch in the link below), I knew I wanted to be a part of creating content I believe in. Upon browsing through the various job postings and descriptions, I came across the Marketing Assistant position with AFFIRM Agency. Seeing as though I’m here writing this blog post, you can guess how that turned out.
One of the big things we strive for at AFFIRM is “Positively Engaging Marketing”, which really resonated with me when I first saw it on our Agency’s website. Creating campaigns like, “Click it or Ticket” and “Dose of Reality” are ideas geared towards making an impact and creating positive changes in the lives of others. This, to me, is what all marketing should be about; using these psychological and marketing tactics to inspire and impact the world – Be the Change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2STOw7Rx9PM
