How to provide high school students with career orientation?

Who is really apt to provide competitive career orientation and constructive advice for high school students and what are the means in doing so?

I feel like commenting on this socio-economic question, following recent talks with parents and education providers within a strong recession period, as we all go through for five consecutive years in this country.

No doubt, the selection of a trustworthy, reliable higher education institution parallel to employment opportunities and focus, is in my opinion, a task that has to be allocated to family as the major pillar of socio-economic stability status.

It is the father or the mother who should work systematically and scientifically on examining and cultivating students' skills and competences. In doing so, parents alone need to work collectivelly with their sons and daughters (e.g. through team work and involvement) examining current business trends, career opportunities within developing industry sectors and employability parameters. This is an indeed heavy research study. Obviously, it is parents who should devote time and effort in systematically disclosing at an early stage these special skills and competences that could later develop to professional talents.

On top of this painful process of disclosing and cultivating a set of competitive skills and competences, parents should examine the development of motivation best practices for their kids.

Motivation is the actual term used to describe those processes, both instinctive and rational by which people seek to satisfy the basic drives, perceived needs and personal goals which trigger human behavior.

Therefore, parents should consider the initiation and application of a basic motivation model for career orientation. In view of this model, parents following students' personal, emotional, or even social status needs, develop a set of stimuli aiming at triggering positive behavioural responses leading to job satisfaction.

Most pragmatically, as parents, we need to extract, disclose and apply a set of motivational stimuli providing the basis for a succesfull and focused career orientation. This is again a painful and hard-working process for parents. Otherwise, reputable higher educational institutions will keep on producing more unhappy, unfocused graduates who do not really like their professions and former studies.

Why do we need to add more people to lists of non-specialized and unemployed personnel?

All we need is to integrate higher education with clearly identifiable skills and competencies.

All we need is team work and involvement between parents and students.

Both are key words for:
a) The disclosure of students' skills and competences and
b) The set up of motivational parameters - stimuli to enhance and support future career orientation.

A relational focus sales-rep needs to be prepared...

A relational focus sales-rep needs to be carefully prepared before arranging and finally implementing a sales meeting with a prospective, target customer. Truly, a relational oriented sales-rep is more of a competent, skilful "social status type" of a business entrepreneur investing on the development and enhancement of Long-Term Relationship Marketing practices (see previous posts). As such, planning, organizing and implementing sales action represent necessary business conditions before the actual implementation of any Marketing / Sales activity. Therefore, we may well say that a sequential Segmentation - Target Marketing - Positioning and at the end of the day Brand development process reflects accuratelly on Relational Personal Selling.

Segmentation - Target Marketing - Positioning - Brand Development.
A relational oriented sales-rep needs to perform systemic archiving.
In this sense, sales-reps need to have a systematic, fully controlled Marketing Management business approach to their carefully selected sales points (for example, clear market segments), customer categories identification (e.g. target groups of interest), areas of focus (e.g. market positioning) using marketing intelligence practices(for example, statistical data, name day calendar, work calendar).

Sales-reps' work organization
Efficiency and effectiveness requires best use of time, money and resources. Thus, a relational oriented sales-rep organizes systematically his/her contacts by:
A) Developing and safeguarding a daily, weekly and monthly program allocating optimum resources in an efficient manner
B) Preparing a competition report in accomplishing demanding sales quotas
C) Preparing a competitive "book" of material containing information that might resolve sales issues during the sales encounter process. For example, product / services brochures, flyers, samples, price lists, competition material, invoices, order sheets.

The actual, core job of a relational oriented sales-rep is to satisfy in parallel- performing on a golden edge - the demanding sales goals' performance along with the development and maintenance of a fruitful, empathetic business relationship with his customers portfolio. This a hard and demanding job approach but it pays in the long run.

How do we recruit and select effective sales-reps in services?

Being involved into Sales Management for a long period of time primarily as a Line Manager and further as an Academic, I strongly believe that there are "needed, required elements" in producing an effective and efficient Sales-Rep in services - the sales-reps' identity in services.

The identity of an effective sales-rep is characterized by a set of inherent features and a set of acquired features.

An combination of the two sets leads to a competitive sales-rep's personality which along with managerial abilities provide Administration with an Idealized Sales-reps' Identity Framework. One may argue that the below indicated lists are representing a realistic framework that applies in every industry / market. This is quite true. One should not forget that an idealized design depends on organizational inputs (e.g. predefined corporate set of skills and competences) and organizational outcomes (e.g. performance metrics, behavioural issues). For the sake of this discussion, we need to agree that selection and recruitment of talented sales-reps, largely depends on corporate expectations, organizational support, sales infrastructure and sales / marketing orientation parameters.

Identity of a Sales-Rep - Inherent features:
a) SELFISH URGE FOR SALES GOALS ACCOMPLISHMENT
b) COMMUNICATION / INTUITION
c) TEAM WORK
d) CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING
e) SELF-RESPECT / SELF-CONTROL
f) SYSTEMIC ORGANISATION
g) ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

This is a set of inherent features that I would personally look for plus the "sparkle in the eyes" of the candidate for a sales-rep's position. This is indeed hard to find and even harder to develop. However, as a "people-oriented" personality, I strongly believe that we could develop a set of ACQUIRED FEATURES such as:
a) POSITIVENESS
b) EDUCATION
c) EXPERIENCE
d) KNOWLEDGE OF THE MARKET / PRODUCT
e) POSITIVE ATTITUDE

It really requires a substantial business effort, money and time in building a competent sales-force team. Recession times call for few, yet competent sales-reps in accomplishing corporate set demanding sales-quotas. Nothing should be left to coincidence. We need to plan and implement Marketing with a long-term perspective investing into people - the human asset capital of a services firm.

Axe anarchy commercial - do we need ethics in marketing?

Do we need ethics in Marketing and communication is a question that bothers me most in modern, integrated communications. Clearly, the role of Marketing is to attract attention and this is what the new commercial campaign aims to accomplish. The Brand - with a soulmate, love music background truly appeals to love at first sight that eventually causes chaos everywhere and around them.

How about this specific commercial presented allover in Athens Metro, the www.yahoo.gr wall paper and other media with the following logo:
Axe - New Axe Anarchy for him and for her - Causes Chaos. This is obviously the case of a global brand campaign launched simultaneously to the days of riots, anarchy and chaos in Athens, Greece (last week-end).
Is this irresponsible advertising or a sign of our times?
Where is the ethics part for the Athenians that travel downtown by the Metro to observe burned neoclassic buildings, vandalisms and devastation in parallel to the launch of the specific commercial. What are the hidden connotations for the inhabitants of a city that has paid so much Chaos and Anarchy?
I resent to such business practices. In my opinion, we need to be careful in localization of global Marketing Management and pay attention to timing. One might say, well this business my friend. We are publishing for profits and market share development. True, however we need to pay close attention to local environments.

How can a Fast Food Service firm implement well a customer focus orientation?

In a demanding, competing world, all that a passing customer would expect from a Fast Food Service Firm would be to accurately implement customers' orders and complete business transactions - a totaly transactional business approach.

In view of my personal experiences at the Solonos (downtown Athens) retailing outlet of Gregory’s Food Service Group, the three front-line employees serve customers in an unpredictable, customer-oriented approach. This exceptional customer service turns to a differential advantage for regular passing by customers that turn to loyal and commited simply because they are served on a "first name basis", with a smile, accuracy and speed.

Well done guys!!

Keep on showing some people how to implement expensive marketing strategies well.

I quote from their web site: "As a company, we rely on our customers and that is why we must appreciate their current and future needs, satisfy their demands and meet their expectations". www.gregorys.gr.

Competitive Advantage Versus Differential Advantage

How Marketing Management of a competitive firm accomplishes a long-term competitive advantage?
Does the concept of Differential Advantage reflect on Marketing creativity and brand substantiation?

The answers to these two generic Marketing questions can be facilitated by defining the two terms:

Competitive Advantage is an advantage over competitors gained by offering consumers greater value, either through lower prices or by providing more benefits that justify higher prices.

Differential Advantage means a Competitive Advantage that customers perceive as creating superior value with respect to competition.

Conceptually, the essence of Marketing Management is to build and sustain Differential Advantage through advanced Brand Management, close customer relationships and upgraded service quality standards.

Damian Giannakis

Personal Views

There are strong debates whether the design and implementation of Direct Marketing applications and practices are beneficial or not for the business purposes of customer-oriented firms. In my understanding, Direct Marketing practices can only be beneficial to both customer and organization, if they result as an outcome of an organized and systematic Relationship Marketing Service-Dominant process (Vargo and Lusch, 2004). Most fundamentally, Direct Marketing can produce measurable -thus worthy- outcomes under the following conditions:

 A) Sequencial Selling to existing customer groups. In this case, Marketing Management has processed customers' data in CRM and Data Mining systems to conclude on segmentation criteria, thus targeting specific "product/service solutions" to satisfy specific, existing customer group needs (e.g customer retention tools).

B) Organized Relationship Management corporate approach to 1st year specific customer groups (e.g. customers with shared characteristics / needs). Such a Relationship Management approach involves three distinct stages:

1. The "First-Moment activities". Organization encourages the dynamic interaction between sales-reps and customers, investing into a long-term business-customer relationship (e.g. customer acquisition).
2. Development and application of sound Customer Segmentation Criteria. Marketing Management launches Welcome and Building Relationship cross-selling activities to enhance and maintain a holistic Relationship Management approach (e.g. Customer Activation).
3. Initiation of Direct Marketing campaigns. These campaings should involve sequential direct marketing activities and event management - preferably from the front-line employees, that have already been in contact with the customer / group.

Otherwise, ad-hoc, non systematic implementation of Direct Marketing practices would score low as a Marketing activity, creating customer's mistrust and lack of commitment.

Damian Giannakis, 2010