Students gain marketing edge at collegiate summit
Undergraduate | Jun 27, 2017 | admin
To succeed in marketing, it’s important to find your edge.
Three Gabelli School students were looking for theirs, and much more, when they attended the Marketing Edge Collegiate Summit held at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus.
The four-day experience brought together undergraduate students and marketing professionals from across the nation to network, learn from each other, and improve marketing analytic and data-driven marketing skills.
Justin Reilly, head of customer experience innovation at Verizon Fios, shared insights on the intersection of marketing and customer experience, stressing that customers today care more about the experience a brand provides than the specific product options it has. Companies, then, are no longer competing against other brands; they are “always competing against consumers’ last best experience.”
Matthew McCarthy, BS ’18, said Reilly offered advice to students entering the fields of marketing and product innovation, including to “build innovations that can be co-created with customers, and organize small teams that work well together.”
Advice also came from Brian Wong, founder of Kiip, an incentive-based mobile advertising network, who cautioned that overthinking, instead of doing, can lead to paralysis that can prevent people from achieving their true potential.
“If you don’t go above and beyond,” Wong said, “someone else is going to do it.”
For Roderick Perez, BS ’20, these words really resonated. “It brought me to the realization that to truly achieve my ambitions, my mindset needs to be more focused on the goal because other people are also attempting to achieve similar success.”
With the connections they made and the tips they received at the conference, the Marketing Edge Collegiate Summit attendees are well on their way to finding their edge.