E3 Icebreaker
I just gave this speech in class as an assignment to demonstrate our speaking abilities and to get feedback on ways we can improve. This one class was more helpful, I think, than the entire semester of Speech class that we were forced to take freshman year. My class told me that the speech was powerful, so I decided to share it with you:
Hello, everyone. My name is Christine Peterson and I am a senior Marketing Major here at Emerson. In order to give you a better idea of who I am, I decided to tell you all the story of how I chose marketing as a profession and the intellectual journey that got me where I am today.
Believe it or not, I first got the idea of becoming a marketing professional from a made-for-tv movie that I have since forgotten the name of. The main character was a woman who worked for a public relations firm and all she seemed to do was organize parties and then go to those parties. It seemed like fun and it didn’t involve math or science in any way, so I decided to major in marketing.
Coming to Emerson was a decision I made for what I now think were equally silly reasons. While the college seemed to have a great program and it was in a town that I loved, one of the main reasons I chose to come here was because I had always been involved in theater in high school and I loved being around theater kids. I’m not particularly good at acting, but I love the creative atmosphere and I hoped that somehow coming here, through osmosis, I would be pushed in creative directions and toward inspiring friends.
As fate would have it, a surprising about of Emersonians have theater backgrounds and I did become friends with most of the theater kids in my year because so many of them happened to go to the Castle when I went. I was also able to work with a local nonprofit theater as a client through class and I interned with Broadway Across America this past summer. But as it turns out, there is no glamour in marketing for a theater, it is not particularly lucrative, and it is HARD.
So, very recently, I lost all desire to be a part of the entertainment industry in any way. But at the same time, I joined this class and began working on several other projects that forced me to examine the role of marketing and the future of the profession. It took me a long time to reach this revelation and gain an appreciation for marketing in and of itself, but I blame that on the fact that marketing classes tend to be very repetitive and I never really had any desire to be a part of the marketing organizations on campus…
But what I realized was that: Marketing controls the fate of companies. PR determines how the public views the world around them. Through their manipulation of perception, marketers actually have the power to change the world for good or for evil. And that sounds really corny, but I truly believe that through an understanding of marketing communications, big change can happen. Just look at the Obama campaign.
And all of that is inspiring to me, but that’s not why I am excited about being a marketing professional today. Today, I am excited because media consumption is changing in a way that I believe I understand better than any CEO. I also believe that the public wants to see change not only in its politics but also in the hearts, minds, and policies of the companies it endorses. Companies are becoming progressively more transparent, so PR is becoming increasingly indispensable and understanding how to do it well is essential. Today, I am empowered and I am ready - if not to start my own agency, at least to bring my passion into the marketing workforce.
So, while I have always been this optimistic and idealistic about everything and I have always wanted to somehow be a part of making the world a better place, which is not necessarily apparent from the first half of my story, for the first time I am genuinely excited about my professional future.
And that’s my professional journey in a nutshell… so far.
