Final Blog

This semester has given me an opportunity to look into “The World of Marketing,” and has given me a much better understanding of all what marketing is and how it can be used. Before taking this course, I was under the false impression that marketing was something that was mainly used by large corporations to advertise their products. However, marketing is a tool that can be used by so many different people.

As I began this course I found myself wondering- will I ever use marketing? However, as I progressed throughout the course I found myself becoming very interested in some of the topics that we were covering, and the ways in which I could potentially use them. As I began applying for internships in the spring, a lot of the internships tied together my interests in marketing and the environment. One internship involved product branding for environmentally friendly products. Another internship involved marketing electric cars. And the last one was with public outreach for 350Vermont.

Many of the techniques that we learned in marketing focused on the most successful ways to reach our target market. Your target market can be any group of people; you just need to know who you’re trying to reach, and how you want to reach them. A company is trying to reach out to potential customers, while a non-profit environmental organization like 350VT is trying to inform people about a specific environmental problem and convince them to make a change.

There are a lot of ways to reach your target market. We just finished making our video promotions in class; a video message is a great way to reach your target market. Social media is another great way to reach your target market. This is especially great for non-profits because social media is free. Blogs can be another form of marketing. You can use them as a way to “market” your personal work, or a message that you would like people to know about.

As this course comes to a conclusion, I can say that I would like to pursue future courses in marketing; if not at Saint Michael’s then hopefully in graduate school. I am very passionate about communicating environmental problems to people. It would be valuable for me to know the most effective ways to make an impact on peoples behavior.

A week ago I was speaking with a man who works for the Sierra Club in New York State, and he was working on a project to raise awareness for the need for renewable energy in New York. The Sierra Club is working on a campaign for this and planning a day in June when hundreds of people are gathering to bring attention to the issue. This is a perfect example of a project the needs someone to do a great job marketing their event for the Sierra Club if they want people to know about it, and about the issue. I would love to be involved in something like this in the future.