Marketing-Introduction

Marketing is not just a function of a few members of the Biomedical  Sciences Program. 

It is a consolidated view and effort of the entire Biomedical Sciences Program

                             Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation. 
                                                                    ~Milan Kundera 

A major requirement for sustained long-term success of any Biomedical Sciences Program is the presence of a systematized marketing plan.  Most people feel that marketing is just for a select few.  This is not the case.  The curriculum, the activities, or the classes are not the primary point of a self-sufficient, self-sustaining team.  True marketing is much larger than any of these things.  “True Marketing” calls for the ability of everyone in the program to realize and understand that the Entire Organization is in fact the product that is being marketed.  Marketing is not one small point.  It is the whole point and nothing but the point, because everything else of a self-sufficient program is dependent on it.  Marketing not only communicates your programs vision, beliefs, values, dreams, and goals but true marketing has also to do with how your program delivers it’s vision.

 

Your program needs to ask the question, “Why should a company give you money or time and not another organization?  What are your program, school, community, and state going to get out of it?  Most importantly, what is the business going to get out of it?   What makes you unique and different?  What is your promise to your school, community, and supporters?  Hopefully, as you can see the answers to these questions strikes at the very heart of any Biomedical Sciences Program  at everything it does, how it does it, everything it believes in, and how it lives up to these beliefs.  Marketing is not simply pictures, products, presentations, or phone calls… Marketing is an entire system through which your team makes a promise and delivers it.  In other words, a self-sufficient Biomedical Sciences Program does not do marketing, it is marketing.  This calls for a reorganization of a team so that it can offer a promise that can not be ignored and that can be delivered on every time.  This is the job of every member of the team.

 

In a self-sufficient program every aspect of the program is involved in marketing the program.  Everything a program does is a reflection of that program.  Does your program market a message of inspiration and excellence or does it market a message of apathy and mediocrity. A self-sufficient program should portray Excellence, Professionalism, and Quality in everything they do.  How they dress, the words they use, how the classroom looks, the quality of the program shirts, the quality of the instruction, the style in which they present the program to the public, how they behave in school, the grades of it’s program members, how the program supports their school and community, how they meet their deadlines, how they thank their supporters and sponsors, how they help other program, and much, much more.  In general, a self-sufficient program needs to show Excellence, Professionalism, and Quality in every way imaginable while they are  trying to deliver on their promise.  It is this promise that everyone in the program markets.

 

No program will be self-sufficient for very long if it does not believe that true marketing is not marketing of the class by the one or two people but true marketing is the marketing of the entire program (organization) by everyone associated with the program.