Can you help me understand the difference between certain jobs within marketing?

You have to first ask yourself: what are the things you like to do the best? Once you know that, then you can try to apply what you like to a marketing role. For example, digital marketing can deal with websites, email, social media, etc. Print marketing can deal with magazines, direct mail, etc.

I'd suggest expanding your marketing focus to include additional industries. In marketing there are differences in marketing to consumers vs. businesses, and in marketing to communicate a companies overall brand vs. a specific product. In regard to your interest to work in the airline industry all of these marketing avenues are likely available.

Hi Kevin
I am sure you realise that there are many different marketing disciplines in aviation and it certainly can be hard from the outside to figure out where to apply, but I would also counsel not to worry too much about your entry point. One thing that I have seen in my 20 years in Marketing is that it is easier to move around once you are inside - so if for instance you joined a digital marketing team, it would be possible in a year or so to go for a move to another discipline / area as part of your career plan.. So don't get too hung up on your entry point. To help decide where to start do as much research as you can and try t get experience in areas that interest you. as to specifically working for an airline try to find family friends or neighbours who work in that industry and ask them if they have any insights or have colleagues in Marketing there who would be prepared to chat to you over a coffee about their jobs. Also think about career fairs or open days - they might also help you get a better understanding of your options.

Whatever area you decide to go for good luck! -- Vee

Yes, adding to Anastassia's comments there are a lot of marketing specialties. My marketing role was not mentioned and that is Channel or Partner Marketing where you work with partners that sell your solution. They might add their services to your product to provide customers with a more distinctive offering or they might just sell it as-is. Partners are important because few companies will have enough resources to cover all consumer demographics and partners really extend reach to more consumers, globally. I really enjoy my role within Partner or Channel marketing because you can really get insight to how other companies run their business. Learn what is important to them and add value to their solutions with your products and create special value for customers. You also get to gain knowledge of many different areas of marketing as you often need to work within many areas of the partner (web, direct mail, events, sales enablement, etc.) You'd learn people and negotiation skills, project management and other life skills that you would use outside of your professional career. Working with partners transcends the workplace and I have found that many tips I learned on the job end up relating to my personal life with friends and family.

Withing a large organization such as airlines, there would typically be several areas of focus within the marketing team: branding (responsible for the company's branding campaign geared towards bringing awareness and positioning the airline company against competitors), acquisition (focusing on acquiring new customers through different channels including partnership, digital marketing such as search engine marketing) and retention focusing on making sure that people stay loyal to your airline. All of those are extremely fascinating and have a great deal of metrics involved you can use to measure the success of your marketing campaigns. Marketing is always a combination of creativity, analytics and working with different teams. Take your pick and go with it, and if you don't like it, I am sure every organization would help you try another role within the marketing team and benefit from your experience in other roles.

Think about what makes you happy! If you're really creative, then being in the brand or Marcomm team might be perfect. If you're organized and a "people person" then a role in event marketing could suit you well. If you love telling stories, then PR could be wonderful. So many options in Marketing, but think about what truly makes you happy and start there!

As Anastassia mentioned, there are a lot of roles within marketing and the roles she described are not specific to airlines but really any company. The question is how do you pick? Of course you want to do something you think is interesting and something you will be good at but you're not really going to get a sense of what that is until you jump in and try it. I recommend volunteering at non-profits and using that as your training ground to try and learn new things. You can also look for internships as you get further along in your studies. Bigger companies like Cisco often offer a rotation service for new graduate hires where your first year is split up into 4 quarters and you spend your time in a different role within marketing for the first year and then you get to pick what you want to do long term. When you are early in your career it is easy to do this and you can possibly even negotiate this if it's not something that is part of the organization you are joining.