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Gabelli students teach professor a lesson in marketing

Areas of Study , Faculty , Marketing Stories | Sep 22, 2011 |

Beth Egan, a Gabelli adjunct professor, published a great column on the advertising/marketing industry web site Adotas.com about how her Fordham students taught her a great deal about marketing to today’s teenagers and college students.

“I entered Duane 351 at Fordham University on that first day of “Advertising Principles” excited to share everything I know about advertising to a room full of eager young minds,” Professor Egan writes in the opening to her column. “I left that room five weeks later wondering if I, in fact, had learned more than they had.”

Professor Egan’s reflections on today’s marketing methods and trends, inspired by teaching a summer session of Advertising Principles at Gabelli, demonstrate that the learning between Gabelli professors and students can — and should — flow both ways.

She writes that her students “taught me that we need to stop looking back and start looking to the future” — that not all the marketing lessons to be learned can be gleaned from the past. Today’s consumers are new and different. It is the successful marketer’s job to truly understand them — not to be blindly reactive to trends or the latest methodological bells and whistles.

“As marketers, we keep chasing the new, shiny object rather than focusing on understanding the shifts and consistencies in consumer behavior: ‘Everybody is talking about Facebook — we need a Facebook page!’; or ‘People can read their news on an iPad — we need an iPad ad!’ Instead, we need to be curious and ask our consumers, ‘How and why?’” she writes.

Click here to read Professor Egan’s remarks in full on Adotas.com.

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