advise

Advising in General

Your School of Business advisor in Southaven and Tupelo is Ms. Carol Mahalitc. Call your center to schedule a time to meet with Ms. Mahalitc. The marketing major requirements are found at Olemiss Marketing. Southaven academic programs page can be found here. Tupelo academic programs page can be found here.

Why Marketing as a career path?

My own views.

What Are The Essential Skills/Traits Of A Good Marketing Manager?
Robert M. Cosenza
Copyright: R.M. Cosenza and Planicom, Inc., , Wecapisca, 2000-2011

Although there are an abundance of driver traits for optimum managerial/performance leadership, nine skills/traits can be immediately identified as optimal traits/skills for success in Marketing Management. Briefly, they are:

THE TWO TOP MENTIONED SKILL SETS FOR MARKETING/BUSINESS SUCCESS ARE SELLING, AND TECHNICAL COMPETENCE IN MARKETING.
TAKE: MARKETING 354, PROFESSIONAL SELLING AND BUS 400, INTERACTIVE/DIRECT MARKETING, BUS 400, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Communication/SELLING SKILLS: Effective communication is a necessary element of marketing management, especially in an age of endless communication delivery mechanisms. Communication affects persuasion and employee change in an organization. Clear, persuasive communication requires continual practice and experimentation both in the classroom setting and through community involvement. TAKE MKTG 354, PROFESSIONAL SELLING.
Commitment: Effective marketing managers must be emotionally and/or intellectually bound to their organizational actions/decisions. The very fact you are a marketing major is evidence of commitment to continuous personal improvement. As a student you must learn to be responsible for your actions- especially in the classroom. This early emphasis on commitment/responsibility will positively affect your emerging managerial role.
Creativity: Managerial creativity draws upon knowledge, imagination, logic, intuition, luck, and constructive evaluation to discover new connections between ideas and objects. Environmental change gives rise to new opportunities that must be identified through creativity. Effective marketing managers anticipate change and deal with an imperfect world through the use of informed assumptions and a little creativity. This will foster the innovations of the present and the future.
Credibility: Credibility begins with a self-analysis focused on the congruence of personal feelings and personal behavior. The university/instructor does not furnish credibility to the student. A good marketing student sets realistic goals with the proper time and resource allocations to achieve these goals. This action enhances credibility and fosters realism for fellow students resulting in emulation of the behavior and greater belief in the leader. Credibility is also enhanced by integrity.
Consistency: Managerial success is accomplished by consistently making decisions that move the company toward the desired strategy. Consistency is a focused trait requiring plans and actions that are well thought out, logical, and implemented meticulously. Consistency also requires an understanding that continual change can de-motivate an organization. If a strategy isn’t working, give it a chance, work with it, refine it, but don’t be quick to abandon it. The ability to analyze situations, develop plans, and implement those plans is the key to managerial consistency.
Competence/USING A DATABASE, TECHNICAL WEB AND DATABASE, CURRENT STATE OF THE ARE INTERACTIVE MARKETING: Competence is more that the possession of knowledge, it is a combination of perceived traits including decision-making skills, personality, and luck. Competence commands respect. It requires an understanding of the knowledge that you possess and the knowledge that you lack, and the ability to ally yourself with those who compliment your strengths and diminish your weaknesses. You must understand how to compliment your strengths, diminish your weaknesses, and develop team personas of competence through a combination of both classroom and social processes. TAKE BUS 400, INTERACTIVE MARKETING
Confidence: Confidence building begins with a belief in one’s self, or the development of self-esteem. Basically, you must like and trust yourself. You must also possess knowledge and the ability to apply it. You cannot fear mistakes, and must understand that when mistakes are made, knowledge must be reapplied more knowingly next time.
Concomitance: Events occur together. Because of this, marketing students should be aware of everything that is going on in the environment. The interactions of environmental elements form the basis of uncovering interactions that foster the development of change and innovation. Governments develop policy on the basis of readers who scour the written word of business, literature, science, technology, etc., for connections that indicate a change may be needed. Concomitance can lead to marketing success that evolves in an atmosphere of creative freedom and innovative vigor.
Connections: Critical thinking is the ability to uncover and incorporate connections into managerial decision-making. Scanning the environment both past and present, with the understanding of concomitance, can uncover new marketing opportunities. How? Through the use of connections. A connection could be a similarity between two or more events that we may conclude has a bearing on some outcome. If Bill Gates is in town to meet with Ted Turner, this might be a present connection that may affect some important conclusion. If the meeting occurs after Bill Gates buys Net TV, it may signal an even more important connection. Is this a simple or complex methodology? It depends mostly on scanning the marketing information sources and using creativity to establish the reasons behind the connections. Use your library databases to establish “linkages” amongst key words.

Trait development is extremely important to the success of any marketing student. The acquisition of these traits will help ensure this success. The acquisition process should be continual throughout the your school career and be an essential, ongoing aspect of the life-learning throughout your career.