Career Profile Part 7
| Name: Kurt Strand
Position/Title: Director of Marketing Company Name: Irwin/McGraw-Hill, a division of the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Company's web address: http://www.mcgraw-hill.com, http://www.mhhe.com/ Company Description: The McGraw-Hill Companies is a multi-media publishing and information corporation serving global markets in education, finance, business, government, industry and the professions. The corporation enjoys a worldwide reputation of excellence for its broad collection of leading brands and top-tier experts. Irwin/McGraw-Hill is one of the college publishing imprints of the McGraw-Hill Companies, specializing in business and economics. Irwin/McGraw-Hill is the largest publisher in business and economics and holds leading market positions in many of the college courses in which we publish. |
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Job Description:
In my current position as Director of Marketing, I am involved in a variety of aspects that affect the company. I directly manage the marketing and advertising departments for Irwin/McGraw-Hill. There are 24 people within these departments including marketing managers, designers, copywriters and administrative staff. The marketing department works very closely with the editorial department on development of our products. We also manage the information flow between our customers (faculty, students and our sales staff), our authors and editorial. Marketing helps bring information about customer needs to editorial and authors. We translate our product features into clear messages that motivate our salespeople to sell, and our customers to buy. Our in-house advertising group writes and designs the promotion pieces that are mailed to our market, used by our sales staff during their sales calls with faculty, and distributed at conventions. Other duties as director of marketing include budgeting (over $3,000,000 for the department in 1997) marketing planning, product development, research, promotion, pricing, and other typical marketing duties. I am also part of the Irwin/McGraw-Hill imprint team, which includes the Director of Sales, Director of Editorial and our Business Manager. The imprint team was developed to help run the company without placing a president in charge of each imprint. (Irwin/McGraw-Hill is one of four imprints that make up the McGraw-Hill Higher Education division.) The imprint team develops the strategic growth plan for Irwin/McGraw-Hill, approves the publishing proposals which are required to publish a new or revised text with the company, forecasts sales, accesses training needs and meets to make decisions on the direction of the company.
Career Path:
College publishing tends to have a variety of career paths but most of them start as a publisher representative. After graduating from the School of Management at the University of Minnesota, I was hired July1981 as a publisher representative based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I traveled through Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota and Iowa and visited with faculty members about our products and their courses. I became a regional manager after approximately two years as a publisher representative. The regional manager position included some sales (I retained a small territory) but also required management of six to eight publisher representatives in a region that was approximately of the United States. I continued as a regional manager until 1990 when I moved to Chicago (our home office) as a sponsoring editor of the management list. The job of sponsoring editor includes a variety of duties, mostly centered around the signing of new authors and the publishing of new and revised texts. After two years as a sponsoring editor, I was promoted to the positions of Senior Sponsoring Editor and Executive Editor before moving to the position of Director of Marketing in July of 1995.
Career Challenge:
I originally thought that I would be in college publishing for about three years, long enough to get some sales experience, and then move to another company and industry. But, there is something about college publishing that gets in your blood. Once I spent some time on campus visiting with faculty about their classes, what they looked for in textbooks, what changes were occurring in the business areas, I found out that this industry fascinated me. The combination of sales, managerial, marketing and editorial experience provides me the background necessary to eventually run a publishing company. I believe if you have the opportunity to work in an industry that interests you and challenges you, jump at it.
Educational Background:
I have a Bachelor's degree in Business with an emphasis in marketing and finance from the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, 1981.
Favorite Course: Believe it or not, I was a music major (I play the drums) and after my sophomore year, I decided that a career outside of playing in a rock band would probably be a good idea (I wanted to make sure I could eat). At that time, I wanted to change majors but was uncertain as to which major, so I took three courses that I thought would help me decide, an upper level sociology course, an upper level biology course, and principles of marketing. The principles of marketing course was the best course I had, the instructor was great, the book was interesting and fun to read. I found myself looking forward to the class. I changed my major to business with a marketing emphasis after that class.
Best Course for your Career: I think the marketing management class I took as a senior was the best course for my career. We worked very hard. We had to do a major case write up every week, read a set of journal articles, and we used a marketing computer simulation to tie the class together. I worked with a team of other students to discuss the cases and simulations. I found out that working on cases forced me to think about problems in a much different way. That class helped me understand that there are a lot of situations that may occur on the job with no clear right or wrong answer, and that, by working with a group of people, you can often come to a better solution than you can on your own.
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