MKT 3401 : MRKT3401midtermstudyguide
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Marketing 3401- Midterm Study Guide
❖ Success – Karam in 2001 had dinner at an exclusive Country Club and talked to a successful business man
named John Kant. From the conversation, he took notes on a napkin about how to be successful not only I
marketing, but any kind of job. This lead him to come up with the following philosophy:
● Things you must do in order to be successful/make the company you work for be successful:
1. Package/market yourself- you have to be able to know how to present yourself and make
people you. You have to target the right people with the right idea.
2. Sell yourself- you have to have those skills that make you stand out and make people want to
“buy” you. This is the only one of these four things that there is a model for.
3. Networking- you have to know people. (he used the example of the NOLA Mold Guy that used
his connections to make a huge profit in New Orleans right after Katrina)
4. Maintain contact- stay in touch with the people you do work with because you never know when
you’ll need them. Each individual person has their own way of doing this.
● Traits you need to be successful/marketable
1. Creativity-figure out how to problem solve and be innovative. Create a way to make things
better. The little “tweaks”, or adjustments, to things can make all the difference in
success/failure.
2. Aggressive- “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again”. You have to keep trying, even when it’s
not as easy as you wish it would be. You have to stay focused and determined, and never give up,
even if you have to start from scratch. (exp- Ford motor company was all but dead, but they
didn’t give up, and now they are a juggernaut again.)
3. Enthusiastic- you have to have a little bit of fire or snap in what you’re doing. You can’t be a
drain on a company, or you will be fired. You have to have a certain energy/light about you. This
is kind of like the “it” factor.
4. Intelligence- you have to be smart/bright. You have to have a good feel for every industry you’re
in. are you able to do what someone tells you to do, and do it well/accurately.
5. Honesty-you have to be trustworthy/will do the right thing. You need to be dependable, and
won’t fall under temptations such as giving out company info to other people for certain
incentives. Business ethics are wrapped around the concept of honesty. (exp- look at Enron.
Dishonesty is what made the entire company collapse). A good example of honesty can be seen
in one of Karam’s former students. Karam wrote down the wrong score by over 100 points. (the
kid’s grade on moodle said he got a 190/200 when he really got a 90/200.) The student went to
Karam and told him the truth, causing him to lose his A in the class. That is the definition of
honesty and morality to the extreme.
● How do you sell yourself- AKA Personal Branding:
-Personal selling- you’re always selling yourself. This is about how to represent yourself. It’s about
who you are and how you can package yourself to be seen by the market you’re trying to sell yourself
to.
- We’ve all had to do this at one time or another. (Patrick Peterson is doing this at the NFL combine
trying to increase his draft status/ we all did this when we went through rush)
1. LIKABILITY
(Hilary Clinton is not President today because she just didn’t get this while Obama did)
o Al Mehrabian’s study: he did a study on the emotional impact an individual can have to
get people to pay attention to them/be drawn and attracted to them; as well as the
individual getting people to do whatever they want them to do. the emotional impact
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you have are judged by these few broad things:
▪ 55% VISUAL DELIVERY- 55 percent of the emotional impact you have to make
someone like you/dislike you is judged by your visual delivery.
➢ A lot of this is based off of facial expression
- Exp- Les Miles looks goofy with his facial expressions and some people
thing he is an idiot because of it.
- Exp- Jay Cutler in the NFL Championship game. He got hurt and was
stuck on the sideline. His facial expression/way he carried himself
wasn’t very good/enthusiastic. He took a huge PR hit by the
media/fans because of it.
➢ Default look- personal branding and someone’s facial expression starts
with this look. It is simply the everyday look that you have when you are
going about your business and people are looking at you.
➢ In 1/24th of a second, an image is created and a person’s brand can be
created, destroyed, or modified.
- Exp- Ricky Jean Francois told everyone on the football team that
Karam was “one mean dude”. He said he saw Karam walking around
the business school and thought Karam was mean because if the
default look he gave off.
- Exp- Gov. Blanco’s default look during Hurricane Katrina. She looked
scared and overwhelmed at the press conferences. No one really
remembers what she says, just the mental image of how she looked-
pathetic, helpless, and useless.
- Exp- Rudy Giuliani, the Mayor of NYC after 9-11. Before the event he
had low approval ratings, but after the disaster, the way he carried
himself made everyone fall in love with him. They didn’t fall in love
with what he said, but with the way he looked and carried himself
during a time of crisis. He had a strong presence/believability factor
about him.
- Exp- Karam’s example of a doctor telling someone they have the flu. If
they give off a facial expression of them not caring, the patient
probably won’t go back to the doctor, or recommend them to a friend.
➢ It only takes one bad encounter for someone’s
reputation/credibility/likability to crumble
➢ Dress/cleanliness is important, but facial expression is the most important.
- Clothing style, tattoos, piercings, etc., are what make you who you are.
They are part of your personal branding.
➢ Eye contact- be careful with it (too much/too little)
➢ Don’t overreact to people that don’t look enthusiastic about your
presentation, some people’s default look doesn’t really represent how
they really are feeling/who they really are.
- Exp- Karam went to some meeting on personal branding and was
talking to everyone about default looks. There was a lady at the
meeting that pulled out a little compact mirror thing and looked at
herself in it. She started crying, and said she now knows why she had
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been fired so many times in her 31 year career because she looked so
angry and mean. For 1 hour and 58 minutes the woman sat at tables
looking at the presentations and gave off a bad look. It wasn’t her 2
minute presentation that people hated, but the 1hour and 58 minutes
of her sitting listening to everyone else. If people don’t like you, you
may not keep your job.
➢ Visuals carry vocals, which leads into the rest of Mehrabian’s study
▪ 38% VOCAL DELIVERY- 38 percent of the emotional impact you have is your vocal
delivery.
➢ Be enthusiastic
➢ Tone is the most important part of the vocal delivery
➢ A shaky voice is ok….the biggest myth in vocal delivery is that if you sound
nervous it will discredit you, and if you don’t sound nervous, it doesn’t
mean you are good.
➢ The big killer is boredom. It will kill your delivery more than anything else.
➢ Also, a bitter tone that makes you come across like you don’t care will kill
your delivery as well.
▪ 7% VERBAL ARRANGEMENT- 7 percent of the emotional impact you have is the
verbal arrangement of the message.
➢ This means memorization/PowerPoint isn’t as key as you would think it
would be.
➢ It’s not what you say, but how you say it. That said, the content still needs
to be good.
o Likability relates to the fundamentals of marketing
▪ Good customer service leads to good satisfaction.
➢ You can’t have good customer service if you don’t have the likability factor
due to not knowing how to present yourself.
o Perceived vs. desired image
▪ Desired image- what someone wants people to see them as
▪ Perceived image- what people actually view you as. May or may not b the same as
your desired image.
o Major threats to image
▪ Social media-be careful: once you say it in social media, it is out there and
people are reading it. It only takes one email, blog comment, Facebook post,
etc. to ruin your personal brand.
➢ Exp- Maurice Jones-Drew criticizes Jay Cutler on Twitter. Now the media is
ripping him apart for it, and his personal brand is tarnished
➢ Getting involved in social media is like being given a glass sword with the
sharp end pointing up….you have to be careful how you handle it.
2. CREDIBILITY
o How believable are you by your peers/people you’re trying to persuade.
o Factors that impact it:
1. Trust/Honesty/Sincerity- Can people trust you to do the right thing.
➢ You have to admit mistakes (exp- BP and the Oil Spill)
➢ Exp- if you lie on a resume, you will most likely automatically be
