Finding jobs and salary information for MBA graduates worldwide

¶ … Professional Positions

The three jobs chosen for the analysis are all director-level in scope and responsibility, and all are part of marketing organizations. The first job is Marketing Director for a software company headquartered in the financial district of San Francisco, California. This job focuses on creating demand for business-to-business (B2B) software applications. The second job is in San Diego, California and it is a Director of Marketing position with a medical products manufacturer in La Jolla, California. The third is a Director of Marketing with a computer services company who creates private cloud computing systems for Fortune, 1000 customers, based in the Newport Beach, California area.

Analysis of the Jobs and Markets

All three jobs require lead generation, market planning, competitive analysis and strong analytical ability, with the marketing director job with the computer services company requiring intensive levels of expertise with Google Analytics and Google AdWords. All three require high levels of expertise with online and digital marketing. Only one requires previous sales expertise, and that is the director job in downtown San Francisco with the software company.

Each of these companies shares a strong entrepreneurial focus and believes in marketing's role being measured as part of the company's overall profitability and growth. Best practices in measuring marketing's affect an organization starts when accountability permeates all efforts to attract, capture and keep customers (Hill, McGinnis, Cromartie, 652). All share the common requirement of creating a dashboard of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the performance of strategies over time. The marketing director position with the medical products company says that there needs to be a dashboard and KPIs created showing upper and lower funnel performance over time by product area, which will require the person getting this position to thoroughly understand how to create marketing metrics and present them online via portal-based software. The other two positions are heavily into marketing analytics as well, with a focus on measuring how effective marketing is in lead generation and escalation, multichannel promotion and pricing, and presales support. In short, each of these positions indicates how broad marketing's role is in each of these companies.

The greatest difference between the three is the focus on how the software company expects the marketing director to also manage the specific brands of applications. Category management of brands in high technology continues to be one of the most rapidly expanding areas of product marketing (Christian, 61, 62). No other positions have this requirement, and it is significant in that the software company is selling into the B2B market alone, which makes the branding accuracy and clarity all the more important. The differences between San Francisco, La Jolla and Newport Beach are significant, yet all are great places to live and work. The salaries are highest in San Francisco yet so are the costs of living.

The types of compensation most important to me include the benefits of working in a smart, growing, entrepreneurial company in addition to the salary as well. I;'d be willing to take a smaller base salary range to have the opportunity to do the kind of marketing work I love. The San Francisco-based director position pays by far the most with a base salary of $128,000 yet does not have the specific freedom to create as much as the position with the computer services provider in Newport Beach, California. I would take also a smaller 401K matching level for the freedom to create entire marketing programs and execute them. The opportunity to have complete ownership over the marketing function is worth less initial salary and benefits for the experience of managing the entire department. In the long run, that experience will also be worth more as a marketable skill.

Analysis of Current Compensation Plan