What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?
Jennifer Bellhouse
SPCM 479
Professor Dr. Merolla
March 8th, 2011
As a child we get asked many questions regarding our life. But the question,what do you want to be when you grow up, seems to be the most dreadful question, the question we always seem to dodge. In the early years of childhood, we dream of being teachers, astronauts or lawyers. As time goes on, this question gets more complicated and more real. What do I really want to achieve when I grow up? Where do I see myself in the next five and ten years? Well, I may not know exactly where I want to be, but I do know that the industry of marketing is something I’m very interested in.The major Communication Studies has guided me in a direction to benefit my professional self as well as my personal self in a more positive manner. Life is more complicated than answering a few questions, but with the help of learning about rhetoric, relational/organizational communication, and media it will help direct me into a better understanding into how I fit myself into the complicated world of marketing and just life in a broad spectrum.
When I was growing up in Boulder, ColoradoI wanted to be a Safeway grocery bagger. Obviously, this isn’t the most outrageous job a child can dream of, but as a child I foundthe job particularly interesting. I enjoyed the job for one simple reason; the people were always friendly, loved socializing, telling their story and meeting new people. How perfect, I can work and meet new people, as well as tell my story. Over time, my childhood dream became a reality and I realized that this jobwasn’t aprofession after all, but not all was lost. I knew as a young child, I wanted to meet new people, tell my story and socialize. It was something that I believed I was good at. To combine my childhood dream, as well as my personal attributes, I directed myself into the idea of marketing.
To find out more information I looked into the definition of marketing.MalcolmMcDonald mentions that we use marketing to match the capabilities of a company with the wants of a customer, and by doing this it will achieve the objects of both parties (McDonald 3-4). This being a good start I needed to find the specific tasks that marketing accomplished. I knew that different industries contained distinctive marketing techniques, soI decided that narrowing down which type of marketing industry would overall benefit myself, and change my dream to a reality. With my current research of marketing I have narrowed down my path and driven my attention specifically towards the entertainment or film industry. I wish to focus on social media marketing or publicity marketing, and be living in a city on either the west or east coast. Being close to my family is important to me, and involving them in my life as well working in a marketing field would be the perfect combination for me. In the next five years, I don’t fully expect to be 100 % happy of where I am and complete my dream career goals, because I understand things change. I just hope in the next ten years I will be successful and in a company I fully believe in.
When coming to Colorado State University I believed I would find my passion. But at the age of 17, it was hard to focus on what I wanted to study but knew something would spark my interest. Jumping around from major to major, I always new I was good at one thing, and this was communication. Little did I know Communication Studies was an actual major and would benefit my well being as well as directing my focus on what I really wanted to do.The first topic that gained my attention was persuasion.From a young age I’ve always been able to persuade people to believe my side, or what my work manger once told me, I could persuade a fish to buy water. It wasn’t until my sophomore year at Colorado State University that this idea of persuasion came into my academic life. Attending Rhetoric and Western Thought opened my eyes to a whole new side of persuasion and how it’s used. This leads me to my first enduring question, what is Rhetoric? It took me the entire semester and even after the class to fully process what information I was actually receiving. I concluded that rhetoric is about learning how as a society we study language and how it is used in a persuasive matter.Everyone has his or her own vision of rhetoric and how it’s used, just like marketing. For example, one person believes that their way of viral marketing is better than another person’s. It’s all about selling your idea to the other side, just like Aristotle and Socrates; we may believe one philosopher’s ideaover the other.
Even though we may understand what rhetoric is, the definition won’t helpimply it to everyday life without discussing it piece by piece. This leading me into my second enduring question,why does the study of rhetoric matter for your everyday life? As I mentioned before, Rhetoric is used to for persuasion. Traditionally marketing communication was used to identify as persuasion, and this being on a one-way communication form. Now in the marketing industry, a shift is starting to take place and we are starting to see marketing relationships instead of just marketing communication. This is using communication as a form of relationships to inform, listen and answer. This requires a two-way communication form (Anderson 169). Using the form of persuasion in a relationship matter will overall guide you in a better direction. By using the knowledge from rhetoric, I can form my persuasion into a two-way communication form instead of focusing on just my company’s well being, but of the customer too. Which will help target a more specific audience and concentrate on a customer’s wants and needs. This is exactly what marketing is all about, keeping those personal connections and being able to persuade your products into the lives of others.
Keeping those personal connections is an important key when it comes to marketing. Without these connections, marketing would be hard to accomplish. These relationships aren’t always easy, especially when it comes to marketing. Since relationships are a key component to marketing, my third enduring question is how do you sustain, dissolve, and manage relationships? The customer relationships are one of the most important relationships in marketing. “Using the three classical rhetorical elements, we may see this process as developing an understanding of the communicator's intentions and qualities (ethos) and the communication climate (pathos), both of which are necessary for engaging in constructive dialogues with customers (logos) ” (Anderson 167). Using the fundamentals of rhetoric (ethos, pathos and logos), they will help overall sustain the basis ofcustomer relationships. But to every positive relationship there is a negative relationship. In marketing not every customer is going to approve your product. Every relationship is important, so instead of dissolving the negative relationships focus on the areas that need to be improved. Dissolving relationships will only hurt the company. When having a positive customer out base, as a marketer you feel a sense of accomplishment and feel like you’ve been productive in your goals. The management department in a company hopes that this productivity can lead to a happier work environment. According to the University of California in 1986 there is no research that ties productivity and being happy together, but instead there is research on how we can shift management to influencing the “perception” of a job so employees are persuaded that their jobs are interesting, which could make them happier (Straw 53). Now over 20 years later we are starting to develop new ways into tying these two aspects together. By making an employer think their jobs are more interesting, and this will give them a purpose to succeed, which will give greater results to a company. Purpose is the secret to motivation, without purposea employee will perform below their potential. Performing below potential would cause the opposite affect for management when trying to deal with employee job satisfaction. (Pink 236). So overall focusing on personal achievements and motivation within the internal business, and shifting away frombroad management relationships to specific management relationships which will benefit every individual in the company and make the marketing team that much stronger.
While managing relationships, certain guidelines need to be addressed in your organization and interpersonal self. This leads into my fourth enduring question,how can you effectively manage interpersonal and organizational conflict? To effectively manage conflict in an organization, management should try to eliminate the conflict before it happens. A marketing guideline would be beneficial for employees. As a marketer you want to be on the same page as your other employees so conflict doesn’t appear. For example setting norms is a particularimportant function in management. “ In the absence of supportive norms, it is not possible for parties whose specific assets are at risk to acquire vertical control. Instead those parties lose control because of their dependence.” (Heide and John 35). So without the important function of norms a marketing company could start on a completely bad start, and setting it up for failure. This could also relate to your interpersonal conflict. Specifically you want to keep your personal self separated from your business self. With all the networking involved, a customer does not want to hear about your own personal issues. Expressing a situation from a outside work incident could lead to breaking a work and even a personal norm, which could cause a negative impact in a marketing team.
Guiding a marketing team with positive impact is a beneficial tool. With this constant networking, it’s always important in marketing to be associated with the latest technology and media. Media is starting to play a huge role in how we advertise and get the message across due to its broad range of language.This leads me to my fifth and final enduring question, how will you make sense of the forms and messages of media? Media is now seen as a media environment, conduit and a language. This meaning that the forms of media are altering. Media being an environment is causing a new social context and content for communication as a whole. The conduit is transmitting these certain meanings, and the language being transmitted is in code or it’s having it’s own sense of grammar (Bovill and Livingstone 2-3). This is very important to understand in marketing, because getting your message across to a target audience is an important factor when it comes to the job. Transmitting these messages as well as using media code needs to be done correctly. How do you understand these forms and messages correctly? By using research and developing a comprehension of the latest forms, which is exactly what marketing is all about, research.
I may be able to research in what I want to do, but it will take time to fully understand what I want in my life. In life we are only trying to find our purpose and where we belong. One major goal or purpose I want to attain in relation to my personal life is being successful like I mentioned before. Having a strong and successful mother has always inspired me to go above and beyond, and live my life to the fullest. Being successful doesn’t necessarily mean being rich and famous, but having a concrete and solid foundation for my family and I. This may sound a bit cliché but with the help of Communication Studies it has pushed me in doing exactly that, going above and beyond and giving me the solid foundation for the rest of my life.This foundation is strengthening my own relationships to make me an overall better person. Classes like Woman and Communication gave me the foundation to understand my younger siblings better. How they function, interact and are developed. Communication Studies also gave me the tools to understand people outside my personal boundaries. For example, in the class nonverbal communication I learned how to understand different specific gestures like facial and body language movements. This will help me in ways to read people and comprehend what they are trying to communicate.The balance and attributes of all the different types of classes has pushed me in a positive direction to overallstrengthen old relationships to setting me up for relationships that I haven’t encountered yet.
Having these strong relationships will help guide myself to successfully maintaining the goals I have planned for the future. Even though my childhood dream of being a Safeway grocery bagger will never be an actual career it has given me basis for my life in finding a career. Being social and loving to network has benefited my life by helping find the career path for myself, which is marketing. Using rhetoric, relational/ organization relationships and media has helpedme understand more how marketing is used. With studying Communication Studies here at Colorado State University, I can learn to strengthen my relationships to overall benefit myself as a person. For now, I may not understand fully where I want to be in the next 5 or 10 years, but I am getting closer and closer as the years go by answering that dreading question that people keep asking, what do you want to be when you grow up?
Work Cited
Anderson, Poul H. "Relationship Development and Marketing Communication: an Integrative Model." Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, VOL. 16 NO. 3. 2001. Web. <
Heide, Jan B., and George John. "Do Norms Matter in Marketing Relationships?" The Journal of Marketing.No. 2 ed. Vol. Vol. 56.American Marketing Association, 1992. 32-44. Print.
Livingstone, Sonia, and Moira Bovill. "Young People and New Media." LSE Research Online.The London School of Economics and Political Science, 1999. Web. <
McDonald, Malcolm. "Understanding the Marketing Process." Marketing Plans: How to Prepare Them, How to Use Them. Amsterdam [etc.: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007. 3-4. Print.
Pink, Daniel H. Drive: the Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. New York, NY: Riverhead, 2009. Print.
Straw, Barry M. "Organizational Psychology and Pursuit of Happy/Productive Worker." California Management Review XXVIII.4 (1986): 40-58. Print.