During my college studies in Global Marketing and Sales (Commercial Economics), I learned all about Kotler's 5 Ps. This was soon followed by the customer journey and Pareto's law, among others - models and theories that prepare you well for practice. Right? In this blog, I talk about the theories that would have helped me a bit more in practice at the media agency where I was an intern. Who knows, it might be something for the future.
Sharp
The aforementioned 5 p's (personnel, place, price, promotion, product) are of course an excellent introduction to marketing. But I would also have preferred to learn a bit more about the theories and models of, for example, Byron Sharp, Binet & Field or Kahneman. Sharp, in his book "How Brands Grow," even debunks some marketing myths such as, among others, the claim that customer retention is cheaper than acquiring new customers. But also that the ratio in Pareto's law, the 80-20 rule about what proportion of customers are responsible for what proportion of sales, is in reality much less extreme and rather around 60-40. My suggestion: pay more attention to Sharp's in-depth - and award-winning - research.
Grip
Even unstructured students learn to deal with deadlines and deliverables during their studies. Still, from college, I would have liked to learn more about managing your time efficiently. And as a peer coach of first-year students, I recognize (especially among boys) the call for help regarding planning. During my internship, along with other colleagues, I read and discussed Rick Pastoor's book GRIP. 'Sanctifying' your agenda and transforming tasks into actions helped me tremendously with working efficiently. As far as I am concerned, Colleges include this book in the curriculum.
Focus
Like learning to work more efficiently with the tips from Grip, I only really started to focus on my tasks during my internship. Out of enthusiasm, I said 'yes' to every request for help from colleagues, which resulted in 300 e-mails sent in the first two weeks of my internship. I soon discovered that I had to start prioritizing and above all; distinguish between urgent and important tasks.
I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent. - Dwight D. Eisenhower
Together with my internship supervisor, I started thinking about 'where I want to go' and which tasks fit the route to get there. It would be nice if more attention was paid to this from the study, I'm sure that would help with the intrinsic motivation of students.
Conclusion
Could I, along with my fellow students, have learned all this from school? The models of Sharp, Kahneman, Binet and Field perhaps, but I also think the overwhelming feeling of all the unknown is part of starting in a new position. And so an internship is actually perfect for that. It's also just a matter of getting wiser over time. Anyway, the next time I come to school I will leave the book GRIP in the teachers' lounge.