@Joey Davis , shared with us the required skills for the AV marketers. That brought us several opinions among colleagues, where @Sergio Enrique Gaitan Serrano, CTS mentions us to tell our POV, and @Lisa Matthews, CTS asks: What special skills and knowledge did you bring to your role as an audiovisual marketer and how did you acquire them? Did you start at AV in another role and bring those experiences to marketing? Did you take AV/IT courses, participate in webinars, devour trade publications, attend InfoComm…? and that was how the realization of this post arose.
My first experience was as a trainee in a multinational, dedicated to the massive consumption of flavored drinks. We know that multinationals generally have many processes, marketing plans for 2 and 5 years, a mainstream campaign (in which I had the opportunity to participate), events, internal actions, dealing with agencies and also performing administrative tasks. But if there is something that really marked me here, it was the fact of not having a leader to follow, but rather that you have to become yourself. Having a relationship with all areas of the company, getting to know each one of the people that integrates it, learning, asking, discovering, and in this way acquiring various skills, including adaptability, flexibility and not neglecting the analytic part. So important that usually many of us say, marketing has no numbers, marketing is a soft career, full of events and fun moments... Have you heard it? At least I do, quite a lot, in fact haha, I was one of those who thought it was like that until I had my first day of classes at the University. They made me responsible for analyzing and pulling Nielsen reports (at that time the platform used to obtain market information), and that's where the numbers, probabilities, statistics, took hold of me and that's where I start my analytical skill development.
Shortly after I changed of drink, I went to coffee (much better right? Haha) a world based on consumer experience. Beyond being a product and mass sales company, it was an SME. Direct contact with the owners, you had a name, you were not just one of the bunch, you could propose and you were listened to. The big difference here, in addition to what I mentioned in terms of work experience, is that it was still a product but each cup of coffee was a cup full of culture, Colombian, African, Nicaraguan, etc. A 100% sensory experience, here the market information was much more restricted, we did not always have that sensitive information. So we had to be creative when generating the plan and the actions, work closely with the trade and commercial area, to understand what was happening in the markets, at the different POS. And then understand how the actions were performed to meet and understand the consumer, the one who chose our grains and not the competition's. And here also arises a super interesting skill and that I really enjoyed a lot, the technical incorporation, how to make a good coffee? Knowing the different types of machines, learning to operate an espresso coffee machine, the different varieties and their qualities, blends, being almost a barista...
Would you make coffee at an event? Would you put on your apron and serve coffee to the attendees? Listening to people at the most genuine moment of request and choice is essential to learn what they want, what they like and what represents the product to them.
And lastly, sorry, not lastly….for now, I am walking through a great opportunity that @Newtech Group gave me. At a time when mass consumption was already a bit boring, I was interested in learning about other areas, and there came the opportunity to enter the AV world, the world of services and technology. And if there is something that technology offers you, it is the ability to be flexible, adaptive, creative, a world that is constantly changing and that we don´t control….it arrives….it settles…and we have to evolve. Incorporate this new technology, get to know it and adapt it to our services.
Today the most representative example is Artificial Intelligence. It´s here to stay, it´s here to help us, to be our complement and thus be able to offer you more personalized solutions. Not to mention the information we have today compared to what we had 10 years ago… the tools, the channels, the way of advertising, the contact with our customers and potential customers. Perhaps here the technical part is the most difficult to acquire, when you get to know a product or a solution, they are already testing the new version, or it is discontinued due to obsolete. That is why a good relationship and communication with the pre-sales team, technicians, experts and the sales force is SO IMPORTANT to be able to lead the market. Finding that differential as a company, as a team, being able to tell others why they choose us over the competition and being able to provide good service. Not to mention the good relationship between Partners, today the market demands joint communication, joint experiences, and the willingness to work together to achieve technological transformation of an organization that needs it.
This was a simple summary of my experience, the different opportunities I had and what I was learning. This marked me as a professional, giving me skills, tools and the ability to face the challenges that we have to surf. Today I have the chance to lead the Marketing area, have a great team and make it so that together we can evolve, grow, transcend and above all be disruptive in the technology world.
What was your path to be where you are today?