Messages and Media of Marketing
or
How I Make a Living
By GUY D. JOHNSON
MAY 22, 2021
To keep myself in ink pens and yellow note pads, Microsoft and Adobe subscriptions, web hosting services, domain names, WordPress plug-ins and the like, and coffee (the tools of a writer these days), I work in marketing communications. This means I come up with the words and images necessary for companies to market themselves. Most of my recent experience has been technical in nature in support of academic and government research, offshore engineering, litigation and tech startups.
My creative work includes writing, graphic illustration, animation, photography, building and maintaining websites and intranets, presentations, advertising and brochure layouts, and I’ve designed a few trade show booths.
These skills work together. To define a brand effectively, marketing communications must be professionally approached, tightly integrated and consistently applied. The sum of a company’s messages determines its presence within an industry. Consistency wins trust and recognition.
The most exciting examples of my work would have to be the 2D and 3D digital images I create to visualize complex concepts and sell technical designs and services, including the animated videos I have produced for startups pitching new technologies to investors.
My career in marketing communications began in my own small animation studio in Southeast Texas, where I worked on projects for the petrochemical industry, television stations, advertising agencies, small businesses, hospitals, a school district and a museum. From there, I moved up to “virtual reality” modeling and simulation research for the U.S. Navy, and finally broadened into rendering technical images and performing a wide range of communication tasks for an offshore engineering firm in New Orleans.
WHY NOT JUST CALL IT MARKETING?
Marketing communications is not a well-known term. Simply put, marketing encompasses everything a company does to beat the competition, from researching markets, to deciding what products to sell and at what price, to advertising, public relations, all of it. Marketing communications is more narrowly concerned with the messages and media a business uses to win potential customers – that’s my specialty.
My work is a journey of constant learning in the ever-evolving world of digital communications. As soon as I learn how to do something, it all changes. Keeping up is not optional.
ONE-PERSON DEPARTMENT
I am a one-person marketing communications department. I believe my job is to help co-workers and clients successfully use what I create for them. This involves asking questions about how content will be used, testing file formats on the client’s end, offering advice about giving presentations, even sometimes showing up when my work is presented to provide technical support if necessary. That’s follow-through. You are not done when you deliver the files and attach an invoice. If you want repeat business, which is the best kind, you’d better try to help your customers succeed.
I am a stickler about the initial planning phase of any communications project. What problems are we trying to solve and what outcomes do we want to achieve? Who is the customer and are we sure about this? What are our true strengths? Will this be profitable? Answers to these fundamental questions must drive marketing strategy.
THE FACE OF THE COMPANY
I see my job as more than words and pretty pictures. My work is often the very face of the company; it gets into business and engineering reports and is all over the Web. It is displayed in magazines, plastered across signage at trade shows, carried onto airplanes and presented all over the world. It must be done well and with a thorough understanding of the company’s capabilities, goals and potential markets.
The most satisfying part of my job is when the difficult, sometimes contentious task of refining company communications compels management to set a hand on the tiller and reassess company vision and strategy, prepared to adjust course if necessary. When that happens, I am given a more accurate marketing road map – one that might lead us to where we want to go with the fewest wrong turns. After all, a company’s marketing cannot work if it is not driven by well-conceived business goals. The world changes. Markets change. Companies must evolve with them.
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