As an economics and philosophy major at the University of Chicago, I have gotten some weird looks when I tell people that I am interning at a marketing firm. Sure enough it is not a surprise that the other interns are marketing majors or minors and I am the odd one out in that sense. Perhaps it is because the U of C doesn’t offer a marketing major or minor, but I would rather like to think that it is something about marketing that particularly interests me.
The economics program at The University of Chicago is notoriously theoretical and mathematically rigorous. It follows the assumptions of neoclassical economics, and then uses advanced mathematical and graphing techniques to take those assumptions as far as possible. Due to this intensity it is easy to get caught up in the whole thing and not realize the assumptions you are making for granted. For instance, and this is perhaps what drove my interest in marketing, one of the key simplifying assumptions is that the consumer has perfect information. One assumes the consumer knows exactly how much “utility” or value they are going to receive from a purchase. This means they know the quality, durability, uses, and all other relevant information about every product in the market. They then make the rational choice of the combination of goods that will give them the most utility or value based on this information.
Obviously this is far from the truth. However, this assumption is rarely relaxed, even in high level undergraduate classes. If relaxed, a million variables come into play and the models and graphs collapse. The idea that not everyone has perfect information requires that in order to understand each consumer’s choice one would have to know exactly how much he knows. This would have to be done for everybody, creating a whole mess of variables and computation. It would be pretty much impossible for economics as the science it tries to be to come up with anything tangible this way, so it settles for the idea that consumers make their choice as if they had perfect information.
In the real business world, however, information matters. My philosophy classes have taught me that assumptions narrow one’s view, and certainly economics has a way of doing that. In this case the concept of how information affects consumer choice is kind of ignored in my economics classes, but I know that it matters. In fact, the whole field of marketing is based off the idea that information matters. Marketers look for the most effective way of communicating the value of a product to a certain consumer or business. They know that if the right consumer or business has the right information about their product that they will choose it over another product. Certainty and reliability in a product can be built by marketing, and it is all about how to disperse information. The where, when, who, and how of communicating with consumers about a product is the science of marketing, and the why is added by experiential marketing.
The next obvious question is why Situ8? What could this internship and company teach me? What I realized is that Situ8 takes a unique and interesting view on marketing. As an experiential marketing firm, they pay specific attention to how and why marketing techniques affect individual people in their connection to a brand or specific product. They aren’t throwing up billboards or spending millions on commercials that go into a mess of saturated information. Rather they focus on the experience of products and brands and how to get information through to a consumer so that you can build a sustainable relationship with him or her and why do they make the connection. This is a much greater task then just throwing information out there in hope that it reaches the most people and is the right message. Creating product-customer interactions allows consumers to gain information through experience instead of just words. Consumers immediately experience the product instead of just being blasted by a commercial or billboard. Moreover, experiential marketing provides immediate feedback. The presence at the point of contact generates an opportunity for immediate improvement of both how to market the product and how to make the product more appealing to consumers from a production standpoint. Thus a dialogue and relationship is immediately formed between consumer and brand or product, through the medium of the marketer.
To me this is why marketing, particularly experiential marketing is so interesting and worthwhile. It seeks to turn the idea of the product or brand into a reality, not just a billboard. A firm works closely with their clients to try to get as much information as possible, and effectively use it to create an experience for consumers that will connect them with the brand or product. This means working together with clients to develop a strategy of not only introducing the brand or product, but providing an experience that relays such positive and robust information to a consumer that he or she wants to continue with the brand or product in the long run. Realizing that people are just not rational machines is important to this process, as the idea of an experience reaches an emotional level. This connection to the consumer is what drives improvement through the constant flow of information and understanding how that information is affecting consumers on the most basic level. Being involved in this field offers real-time learning and first-hand knowledge of how the imperfection of information creates a market of its own. This will no doubt be an enlightening and worthwhile experience.
-David Grothouse