A view on the Professional Certified Marketer certification by Tony Green

I have been reading various takes on the American Marketing Association’s Professional Certified Marketer’s examination. Here is mine.

I agree with the questioning of the value of paying for the examination and the benefits of the certification. I made my own Google search when I was debating of whether I should take the examination and was unable to find much information. It is the only marketing certification that I have heard of that only requires taking a test to get the certification. The prerequisites to take the exam are either a bachelor’s degree with four years of relevant experience or an M.B.A. and two years. The P.C.M. folks assess whether you have enough relevant experience to take the exam once they review your application.

With that said, whether it is in someone’s interest to take the exam depends on your perspective.

Currently, I am the Vice President of workshops in the Silicon Valley’s chapter of the American Marketing Association (SVAMA) and most of my fellow board members either have degrees in marketing or at least 10 years of marketing experience. In their view getting the P.C.M. certification would seem like overkill and would not provide any additional value.

In my case, I have an engineering background and decided I wanted to get into technical sales and marketing after completing an M.B.A. With no direct experience to market I thought that completing the certification would prove to any prospective employer that I was serious about entering the profession due to the fact that I would make the effort to become certified. In preparing for the exam, which I passed earlier this year, I was able to learn a lot which I am sure will help me in the future. While becoming a P.C.M. does not provide benefit to everyone, I feel that in my case it will be worth it down the road.

Marketing Thought by Tony Green

A few weeks ago, I attended the SVAMA’s first annual Marketing Thought Conference. The conference was created to promote the ground breaking thought in the field of marketing. The keynote speakers were Guy Kawasaki (Art of the Start) and Andy Sernovitz (Word of mouth).
During a break in my duties as a volunteer I spoke to a gentleman who worked the semiconductor industry who remarked that the Chinese in high-tech based in China did not understand marketing.

It caused me to begin to think how that could marketing not be understood because in my opinion provided the backdrop for the large upswings in high tech. Did the technology provide the fuel for that growth? No, it was the benefits that the technology could provide the parties who were using the technology. In short, the adoption of these benefits is made by consumers like you and I. Furthermore, technology that is not available to provide a benefit will have no growth. Or revenue.

Marketing in its simplest form is providing a demand for a product or a service. High tech defined by innovative products and services being sold with rapid product life cycles. Since adoption of the benefits provides the growth how can one function without the other?

After the conference one of the attendees contacted our president and requested a workshop on this topic. I debated whether to go forward, however, I thought about the SVAMA’s motto “Stay Connected, Stay Informed”. How else could we better advance our motto by promoting and conducting a workshop on this topic?