Marketing: the good, the boring and the ugly

As promised in my introductory post, here are some thoughts on my time as a marketer.

I don't want to identify the company I worked for by name on this blog (and please don't try to guess - all attempts will be deleted from the comments), so all I'll say is that "my" products comprised various ranges of kits that we sold to research labs. Marketing pharmaceuticals to doctors and their patients is a different kettle of fish entirely, and not something I'm qualified to comment on in any way other than rants about advertising prescription drugs on TV. (WTF? I couldn't believe it when I moved to Canada from the UK and saw my first Viagra ad).

My job was to handle all aspects of my products' launch and promotion. At its best, the job was fun and tapped into my creative abilities in a way I've not experienced (at work) before or since. At its worst, it combined the stress of tight deadlines with the boredom of repetitive brainless tasks. The latter scenario became increasingly dominant throughout my time in the job, as we launched more and more products and became bogged down in "maintenance marketing" (the tasks described as Boring below).

The Good

• The people. I interacted with people in most departments within the company, and most people were great, but the team of product managers was especially helpful and supportive. Good colleagues are very important to me, and these guys were awesome. I'm still friends with lots of people from across the company - my new job is only a few blocks away so there are frequent beer, coffee and lunch dates.
• Big meaty creative projects. My favourite was the video we made to promote our lead product, for which I wrote the storyboard and script, worked closely with the producer, assisted at the shoot, helped with post-production, and even saw my pencil scribbles converted into animation by someone much more artistically talented than me. My gloved hands also made it into a couple of scenes after our main "actor" left for the day. I also had fun with puns - we were often asked for slogans for ads, t-shirts etc, most of which never made it into the public eye, which is a shame. I also came up with some promotional item ideas (e.g. playing cards with our logo on them) and got to work closely with the resident graphic artists on ads, emails etc.
• Big meaty writing projects. This was where they needed a scientist, as my projects included literature reviews, summaries of published papers that used our products etc. The promise of this type of work was why I took the job, but there wasn't nearly as much of it as I would have liked.
  
• Conferences. Yes, I was one of those people who stands at a booth, trying to get your contact details in return for the playing cards and pens you're taking. I loved meeting researchers and discussing how our products might help them with their work.

The Boring

• Endless paperwork.
• Initiating, proofing and signing off on endless product labels.
• Product inserts. Dear god, the product inserts. Each one unique, but having to conform to a standard template. The 5 different R&D scientists who developed the products, each with their own interpretation of the standard template. The struggle to ensure accuracy and consistency at all times. The endless revisions. And, the straw that broke the camel's back, the major change to the standard template that entailed making detailed revisions to dozens and dozens of inserts. I just finished this project before I left. I almost went nuts.
• Product manuals. Possibly the only thing worse than the product inserts.
  
• The endless meetings, other than those that discussed the fun projects in the first category.

The Ugly

• Management speak - constantly shifting, never comprehensible (be sure to have your ducks in line so they can sing from the same hymn sheet).
• Decision making by committee, and/or multiple edits and sign-offs required on every single label and document, each successive signatory tending to reverse the changes made by the person before them.
• Lack of a sense of humour (I was made to remove all "fun" scenes and dialogue from my video script because scientists are supposed to be serious and will not respond to cheesiness. Yeah, right, tell that to BioRad - their PCR video went viral and is now a cult favourite that I've even heard scientists sing in the pub (Who's your Daddy?)).
• Continual changes to paperwork processes and other SOPs.
• The few bad apples among my colleagues.
• Metrics.
• The endemic email diarrhea (most of it designed to cover the sender's back by copying the entire company on every message).
• Constant minor niggly urgent tasks that took me away from my cool projects, e.g. individually editing each of 60 web pages because we decided to change our nomenclature and our website editing interface sucked.

Yeah, OK, so the last list could refer to almost any job, and might have more to do with my own poor fit with the job and the company than with marketing in general. Every job has its ups and downs and repetitive tasks - during my postdoc I would have put DNA minipreps and pH-ing solutions under Boring and the low pay under Ugly, and in my current job I'd definitely class updating PIs' CVs as Boring. But in my case, the primary motivation for getting out of my marketing job was that the sheer volume of items on the Boring and Ugly lists was preventing me from undertaking anything on the Good list.

Marketing has some very fun and creative aspects, but it's not for everyone. If you're thinking of taking this route, choose your company wisely; the tasks performed by product managers (and marketing departments in general) vary between companies, and from what I've heard, my company wasn't exactly typical. Try to find out - preferably from people with the same job description - what their day-to-day life is like, how much of their time is taken up with maintenance marketing, and how much time they get to spend on the creative stuff. As with requests to meet students and postdocs from a potential new lab, any reluctance by your interviewers to let you talk to existing staff should be a red flag, especially if you're new to the field. (Disclaimer: I actually did talk to several other product managers before taking the job and got some very mixed messages - politics being what they are and all).

Despite some of the negative comments I've made, I learned a hell of a lot during my time in industry. The experience helped me to get my current job and will continue to be useful to me throughout my career. Ultimately, if things go to plan, the primary benefit will probably be that the job diversified my network of contacts. But that's a post for another day.

Another helpful site

Maddox22's question about disclosing salary reminds me of another useful site I wanted to recommend: Science's career forum. It's part of a much larger collection of resources (browse upwards and outwards) that I mostly haven't waded through, although Tooling Up also looks useful.

The forum does have a somewhat weird vibe, but it's an excellent place to ask questions when, say, you need to know what to wear to an interview. The big picture discussions can also be helpful.

Resume, cover letter, and salary requirements

So, as I've been applying to various and sundry jobs, I have occasionally come across requests for salary requirements. (One employer even wanted to know my salary for every single job on my resume.)

I'm curious about others' thoughts on the salary requirement. I think this may not be something that arises in academia. It might be something that business-school graduates learn about, but I certainly have never had any "instruction" in the matter.

So, if you've ever had to put down a salary requirement, what have you done? Do you play it honest and truly give the minimum amount you need to live (which would be the literal definition of "requirement")? Do you research the matter and put down a number that seems reasonable given your qualifications and the position? Do you put down your current salary, or what you'd like to make?

Thoughts?

Hi Y'all!

I thought I would take a break from my lab and come over to chat for a while. First of all, thanks to Mad Hatter and Bean Mom for starting the Alternative Scientist blog and for the invite to post. As someone who had no real guidance in her career decisions, I was happy to read that someone was trying to get information out on the subject of alternative careers for scientists.

Well, I guess I should start with a proper introduction. My name is Mad Chemist Chick and I am an organic chemist (Hmmm, sounds like the beginning of a support group, huh? ;-).

So how did I get to where I am now you may ask? I attended a small liberal arts college and majored in chemistry and minored in biology. During that time, I fell in love with organic research and went on to attend grad school at a large public university where I performed research in both organic methodology and natural product synthesis.

During grad school, I found I enjoyed teaching labs and tutoring students, however, I never seriously considered obtaining an academic tenure-track position. I did repeatedly question my sanity for putting up with the conditions in my lab though. I thought that maybe I should come up with a plan B. What if I could not work in chemistry in the way I had planned? I ended up ordering a book called Careers for Chemists: A World Outside the Lab. It gave me a lot of ideas but none of them were quite as appealing to me as drug discovery (For those interested in pharma, you might want to check out the book Jobs in the Drug Industry).

I moved to the Midwest to take a postdoc at a large research university where I performed a mix of organic and organometallic research. After I finished my postdoc, I had the choice of applying for industrial jobs or taking a job at a small liberal arts school teaching as an adjunct and doing some research in the lab of a tenured professor there. In a fit of what I can only describe as madness, I chose the latter. I thought I really couldn’t reach an honest decision regarding industry versus academia without having tried to teach a lecture course and dealing with all the crap that comes with it. I was also worried that if I chose industry and then later changed my mind, it would be much harder to go back and try to get into teaching.

Long story short: While I really enjoyed interacting with the students, I decided I wanted to stick with my plan A. After postdoc #2, I took some time off and started looking for an industrial job. I ended up being unemployed for about 14 months and started doing some science/technical writing to help make ends meet (and have continued it as an extra source of income).

At the onset of my job search, I had to take an honest look at what I wanted from my career. During some early interviews at large pharma, I saw some things that I did not like and that really concerned me. So I widened my search to include some more non-traditional jobs. Chemists are really lucky in that there is a broad array of companies needing our skills. I interviewed at all sorts companies including biotechs, small pharma, start-ups, law firms, medical supplies, energy and contract research organizations (CROs). I ended up taking a position at a CRO and so far love it.

In terms of this blog, I don’t have firm ideas as to what I will write quite yet. I was thinking about possible avenues for increasing one’s marketability, my experiences while job hunting and hiring (including some outrageous examples of blatant prejudice), and debunking (or confirming) some of the myths of jobs in industry. If anyone has any questions (or ideas), just post them here or over in my lab and I will answer them ASAP.

Joining in

Thanks to Mad Hatter for getting this forum rolling! I'm not a blogger, but when she posted the original list of participants here there didn't seem to be anyone from the Big Pharma side, so I thought I'd chime in.

I did my PhD in a model system molecular biology lab. By the time I finished, I'd already decided I wanted to pursue a career in biotech or pharma. I looked into those options then, and found that PhD positions basically required a postdoc. I thought about industry postdocs, but was advised that the same track to get a faculty position was the recommended one here as well: go to the hottest lab you can get into and get high-profile publications. (More on these topics in future posts.)

So I went to the hottest megalab I could get into, which was -- let's just say it had its good points and its drawbacks. After a too-long postdoc, and a too-long job search covering pharmas, biotechs and national labs, I landed a position in one of the large pharmaceutical companies, and have been there for several years. By and large, it's easily been the most pleasant stretch of my career in research.

Why industry? The biggest reason is that I wanted to do something that provided tangible benefit to people. Not to belittle basic research at all, but I personally was tired of producing incremental bits of knowledge that might have some non-zero chance to (as the R01 applications always put it) "lead to a potential treatment for cancer", and wanted to get a lot closer to really doing it. Secondarily, after spending years feeling shackled to my and my wife's PI's, I just couldn't see spending the rest of my career on the opposite side of that relationship.

When I got there, I spent the first few months trying to decipher the blizzard of abbreviations and jargon that describe a research and development process I barely understood. The second or third day, I decided to hit Google and find something that might get me oriented. That's how I found In The Pipeline, and I can't begin to say how helpful Derek's posts (and attached comments) were. Despite its slant towards chemistry, the biggest recommendation I'd have for anyone interested in learning about pharma work and culture is to read through his archives. Seriously -- pick topics from the sidebar and read through them.

In general, until recently the chemistry blogs were the only science-related blogs I read, as their focus on their work and workplaces was of much more interest to me than the various obsessions of the life sciences people. It's only recently that nuts-and-bolts discussions (like the ones here) have started catching on on the biomed side, and it's a welcome development.

So, what would you like me to talk about? Things I'd had in mind included: explanations of the drug development process, the various jobs involved, the hiring process, myths about industry work. (Pablo Achard scooped me on the analysis of the FASEB study I'd planned to do next!) But I'd very much welcome any suggested topics.