Grad School Adventures: Tips for Stimulating Creativity, Leadership, Perspective, and Innovation: Be Curious!

Tips for Stimulating Creativity, Leadership, Perspective, and Innovation: Be Curious!

 

As I was looking at material for another post that I was writing, I kept coming across articles on with titles like “50 Things That Make You an Entrepreneur Without Thinking” or “20 Things Successful CEO’s do Daily” , etc. I am sure many of you have seen and read these articles. There were many common and awesome tips and I thought about, how many of these do I do, and can I apply to being a Master’s Student. So I decided to create a list of 10 things that Master’s Students can do daily that will help balance life and stimulate Creativity, Leadership, Perspective, and Innovation.

1)   Read Daily:

•  Even just 5 minutes a day, know what is going on in your markets, and the world

2)   Network:

•  Always be growing your network, you never know who you will meet and what they can do for you either personally or professionally

3) Weed out Negativity

•  Life is too short to be surrounded by negativity, strive to surround yourself with positivity. Surround yourself with people who will help you grow, inspire, challenge you to be the best version of you.

4) Exercise physically

•  This is the best form of stress relief and will take your mind off the million to-do list you have to do, take 15-30 minutes daily, whether its yoga, running, or weights, find time away from school.

5) Talk with strangers

•  You never know who you might meet, and how you or they will affect each others lives

6) Go out and be social

•  Part of balancing life as a student is to enjoy time with friends and live a little. Nothing will re-energize you like a good meal and conversation with friends and classmates

7) Be Curious and Learn from everyone

•  Everyone in your class brings something new to the table, be curious, find something that you can learn from everyone you meet and talk to

8) Forget the idea of perfection

•  No one or thing is perfect, know your strengths and weaknesses and always work to improve, and know that sometimes mistakes will be made. Handle them with poise and learn from them.

9) Live your Personal Brand

•  Incorporate your brand values in your everyday life.

10) Never Stop Learning

•  Whether a new skill, technology, game, or method; always be a student of the game. Continuing to learn will always help you gain perspective and grow.

When studying in a Graduate Course, you are exposed to amazing sources of information, use them, enjoy them, make the most of the situation. You are preparing and molding your personal brand to take out into the world, and you just never know where you creativity will be sparked and lead you. Why are you not making the most of it?! 

Grad School Adventures: Content is Key in Building your Personal Brand:

“Content is King”- Bill Gates, 1999

How many times have we heard this?

In today’s fast moving society, we always hear content is king, but what exactly does that mean?

Seth Godin, a Marketing Guru, (look up his TEDtalks), said that “Content Marketing is the only marketing we have left.”

In Marketing, Content has to do with the what, why, and how of your product or service you are selling. It is a way to promote and market your product online to “differentiate”, another key marketing term. You can read all kinds of articles and blogs on content in terms of business.

But what about the Content that YOU share. With our digital community we are always using social networks to like, share, post, discuss, promote, rave, rant, etc. But how is it affecting your brand positively or negatively? Do you share the same content across platforms, or do you differentiate based on platforms?

I believe that we as Marketing and Business professionals should read, watch, and post content weekly. We are in the ‘Content’ business, we are the passionate and excited people that love “innovation” and new products. So why not talk about it? It is extremely important to read what is going on in not only business, but sports, current events, etc. to truly understanding what is happening in the markets all around the world. There is no longer a concept of Marketing to the Masses, people want the “experience” and we have to give it to them.

Start by challenging yourself to read 3-5 articles daily and share 1 piece of content a week. If you just read a great article about a new campaign that excites you tweet it.  Did you just watch a great TEDtalk? Share it. Did you earn an award for a great presentation or portfolio? Is it on your LinkedIn? It should be. Competition is the world is HIGH for new graduates, how do you differentiate yourself from the competition to potential employers if you have little to no experience? You can create a portfolio of content, when they look you up on social media, they should see that you are talking about relevant topics. They should see your work, this gives them a glimpse of your skills and long term potential.

As you continue to become more confident in sharing content, take the next step and write about it. Share your voice with the world, whether you decide to start a blog, use Facebook, or publish a post on LinkedIn, try it. Start connecting and talking with the world. If you truly want to work in this industry you have to be competent across markets and understand what is happening.

Challenge yourself to be bold and daring, start reading, sharing, and posting!

Grad School Adventures: "The Value of IM4 Partners"

The Value of IM4 Partners:

To me our partnership opportunities are one of the most exciting and important opportunities available to us at MIP, and is a reason it really sets itself apart.

The 1^st edition of the IM4 or Master’s of International Multichannel Marketing Management kicked off in September of 2015. Since starting it has been a flurry of activity, experiences, case studies, lectures, and workshops. This program offers us the students a wonderful insight to real time experiences and examples by working with and hearing from large companies. Our official IM 4 partners are IBM, Nielsen, Universal McCann, and OTB. To date we have had the chance to hear from and workshop with most of them with more workshops scheduled!

Early in the semester IBM came in and delivered an insightful presentation on BI/Big Data and how this concept is constantly evolving. There is so MUCH data, what do we do with? We have to learn and be experts on the multiple tools that help us synthesize the data and we are working as Marketing Manager students to fine tune our intuition. For we have to be experts in the field to be able to make decisions based of the data and not let the data make all the decisions for us. It is very important in today’s data driven and evolving society to be able to understand the data and make decision not only on data but on our intuition and understanding of the market. There is a great TED talk by Sebastian Wernicke “How to use data to make a hit TV show”. Sebastian a Data Scientist used an example of Amazon and Netflix and how they used to data to make decisions.

Nielsen also came in and did an excellent workshop on Pricing. We had the opportunity to learn about price sensitivity and price elasticity and how pricing effects the market, competition, and how it can affect your brand image. We then got to work in teams using one of Nielsen’s pricing tools to have to create scenarios to work towards a desired outcome. This allowed us to change prices, product lines, etc to see how they affected overall pricing and sales. This was an excellent workshop and really brought together our lessons on pricing in the market and gave us that hands on experience you rarely find in other classrooms while getting to utilize and network with Nielsen representatives who are very well established and respected in their fields.

Recently we had the pleasure of welcoming Riccardo Belinni, Executive VP Diesel and Diesel Black Gold and Chief Marketing Officer at Diesel as well as the Global Head of Media Giada Gheno to give us an inspiring and bold presentation of Diesel Strategic Brand Strategy from where they started to where they are now with the #DieselReboot campaign as they look to continue being the market rebels with bold, exciting, and strong inspiring marketing campaigns. One of the areas that I thought was very cool was how they run all their digital strategy through one office in English to ensure that their message across platforms is consistent and strong! As a lover of Brand Management and Digital Strategy I really enjoyed hearing about their current campaign and what is to come next from Diesel!

The IM4 program has been an awesome experience over the last 5 months and looking forward to working with Universal McCann in the coming weeks. The class has really enjoyed these experiences and are making the most of every opportunity. It is partnerships like these and the constant variation in visiting professors from different areas of expertise and backgrounds that make this program rich with experiences and networking opportunities.