On February 13,  the Chatham Business and Entrepreneurship Department hosted a networking mixer entitled, “Fall in Love with Marketing!”   As part of a new trend for the mixers, we also hosted a keynote speaker from Pittsburgh’s marketing community.

Andrew Garberson, the Director of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics, spoke at the mixer, providing insights into the current marketing  environment during his talk entitled: “Making Data Decisions in the Age of Analysis Paralysis.”  LunaMetrics, which is also a partner with Google,  provides digital marketing and web analytics consulting services.  However, many of their clients currently experience a sense of “analysis paralysis.”  Mr. Garberson attributed this fearful feeling to a wide variety of reasons:

• First, the amount of data that exists in the world today has rapidly grown from that of roughly 10-15 years ago. Floppy disks of the 1990s, for example, have now given way to countless server farms that hold over an estimated 24 trillion zettabytes of data around the globe.
• Second, the amount of data itself has led marketers to change their outlook and advertising strategies as well. In the early days of the millennium, businesses judged the performance of a website by how many “hits” (or views) that it had received. Now, the performance is based on the quality of the experience that individual users have while visiting any of the online platforms.
• Finally, marketers have agreed upon forming strong relationships with consumers to build an equally powerful website, application, or other online product. All of these swift developments have thus presented many challenges to people in the digital marketing and data analytics fields.

My primary realization was that one does not necessarily have to study digital marketing and/or data analytics in order to be successful. Many currently working in those fields actually have varied educational backgrounds. In fact, Mr. Garberson even refers to his own team as the “liberal arts rock stars” with degrees ranging from the fine arts to history. He believes that this makes his team more efficient as they better understand human languages and interactions. This then led me to believe that I can incorporate my liberal arts education at Chatham with my courses in computer programming and business in order to be more successful in my professional career. – Daniela Beck, BA Management Information Systems and International Business, ’20

Andrew Garberson gave a really engaging presentation, highlighting the applicability of marketing for many different audiences.  It was especially useful to learn how to enter the marketing field, especially understanding how data analytics is used by practitioners. – Maura Rapkin, MBA/MA Food Studies, ‘19

 

For more information on marketing course options at Chatham, please check out other blog articles about Andrew Garberson teaching a digital marketing course, previous marketing networking events, and off-campus events. The Business and Entrepreneurship Department strives to provide professional opportunities to students, broadening their expectations and horizons for future growth and employment.  We thank Daniela Beck for her insights and thoughts on the mixer, which provided the foundation for this article.

Karen Sudkamp is a second-year dual degree student, looking forward to graduating in the summer of 2018 with a MA in Food Studies and an MBA.   She is interested in all things related to building a more sustainable and just food system and to find a role for business to participate in that journey.