.Marketing in The Communication Age
Dogster, Inc. is casting a wide net to find the perfect Director of Marketing. The question we keep returning too, however, is what the definition of “perfect” is. Marketing and people’s awareness of being marketed to has changed so much in the last 10 years that though we still expect our Director of Marketing to posess many traditional MBA-style skills, we think it would be a big mistake if they don’t understand the modern concept of marketing as a conversation and the fact it’s about people, not eyeballs, silos or buckets.
You can see our job desription on our site.
What do you think we as a company with great word of mouth and lots of friendly press should consider to be ther perfect traits of our future marketer? We have worked hard to generate enough money to fill this role and pay for the campaigns. We really want to get this right the first time. We have also linked to this entry from our job description page and encourage candidates to be involved.
In this modern era of communication what traits would you think are critical, what are nice-to-haves and what should be forgotten altogether?
i have an idea. whoever you hire, make sure you get “verifiable results” of the person’s accomplishments.
not just a lame ol’ Reference sheet either. i mean if the person says they’re an expert SEO, what’s the list of website URLs they’ve personally brought to the top of Google & other major search engines’ top 10 results? what’s the single word keyword?
for instance, i produced my own humble site May of 2000 and a couple days after submission, it was on the top of ALL the major search engines’ single keyword “plumber”. for 5-1/2 years now, it’s still on the top 10. considering i’m completely self-taught for re. HTML coding and certainly consider myself as a non-artist (which is why the site is so ugly), the fact of the matter is and bottom line, i have quantifiable results to prove it. (check it out for yourself.)
moreover, if you type “plumber san francisco” on Google, we’re #1. “plumber san mateo”, we’re #2.
now since these are the only areas we cover (no East Bay or Marin), we’re completely set. we don’t have to pay the local yellow pages’ exorbitant fees either. we know for a fact that our competition pays upwards of $15K a month for a 1 page full color ad layout. we haven’t paid for yellow page advertising for years and we’re completely swamped with work everyday. so swamped that we have no choice but to turn away work daily because we can’t handle the volume that comes our way.
yada yada, just make sure you get to verify the person’s “proudest accomplishment”.
(and oh, i’m not looking for a job BTW — i’m retired. i just like tooting my own horn :)
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on another note, i think it would be super sticky and fun for Dogsters to be able to play dog-related games online. ooh, how about a game that can have 3-4 Dogsters at the same time, huh? that would be cool!
check out this example:
http://www.friendlyplumber.com/free_real_time_games/dogbone.html
if you have the budget or the manpower with skills enough to create a custom one for you, all the better! gotta get that branding down :)
aloha.
oh and for God’s sake, this is a huge pet peeve of mine re. Dogster — a Flash walk-through for newbies on how to use Dogster would be really nice.
even something as simple as this page would really be helpful:
http://www.zunafish.com/howworks.php
a hui hou.
The crux of good marketing is storytelling. The pitfall that many marketing programs fall into is jumping into tactical execution without first figuring out the story you’re trying to tell. The Web 2.0 world offers some new and tantalizing tactics – if you can get a leg up (maybe not the best metaphor for Dogster…) on the latest and greatest tactics, you can garner some short-term traffic hits or ad sales successes. But it won’t be sustainable without a solid, strategic, and well-articulated story to tell.
This has nothing to do with Web 1.0 or Web 2.0 or the changing media landscape. It’s the essence of marketing, what distinguishes brands people love and trust from hollow hucksterism, sloppy sloganeering, and spineless spam.
@jon z
I don’t think dogster falls short in the storytelling department. Holy crikey. This is a dream job. Hell. A marketer with a severed head could see this is the most amazing opportunity ev-ah.
Ted…I blogged about it. The right person will know it isn’t about numbers…that it is about relationships. Dammit…I want to have PetCamp!
I agree with Tara. Make sure they are humble (you have to be if you are dealing with the masses) and creative.
[...] Couldn’t agree with Tara more on this. I’d pursue this opportunity at full speed if only we lived on the other side of the country! Can you imagine a PetCamp with lots of dogs, geekery, coffee, wifi and shared knowledge running around? Mountains would tremble, seas would billow, hearts would catch fire and the marketing world would change forever. Dream JobSeriously…who wouldn’t want to work for Dogster? [...]
I may be a little late on this, but I’d like to add my 2 cents. I have a Kellogg MBA and over 10 years of marketing experience include CPG (that’s consumer packaged goods ala P&G - though not P&G in my case) and web. One thing start-ups don’t understand about marketers is that we don’t have all the solutions or some kind of magic marketing toolbox. What a great marketer does is take a deep understanding of the target consumer and create a plan to deliver clearly defined business goals (numbers based on a budget, something MBAsih like that)..
That said, my advice is to find a marketer who has strategic thinking and discilpined business skills, great communication skills and a passion for your product and the web. That passion will translate to a great understanding of your consumer and the other skills will allow him/her to create and execute a real marketing plan. And make sure you provide him/her with a budget and clear business objectives.
Gosh, too bad I like in NYC. I’d love to apply for this job! :)
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