It has been 6 months since I discovered the office life. I am not sure I understood everything about how it is (or should be) working in a company. But I had great talks with the other freelancers (doing different jobs for different clients) that helped me a lot to plunge deeply into the subject. They gave me a huge panorama of the corporate world.

So I decided to gave you a little glimpse of what I did understand from the role of the various kind people that wander around in an office. Yeah, there are plenty of professions working together in the same place ( engineers, RH, management, accounting, ...) and I feel like trying to explain to everyone what all these people are doing all the day.

Have you ever noticed how it is sometimes difficult to explain what you do, I mean what you really do, to other people who don't belong to the same branch ? Well, that's my purpose : help everyone to understand the role and aim of each main job you can find in a normal and healthy firm.

Let's start with the marketing guys.

Please, before I begin, I must provide you with a quick warning : If you are working in the marketing field, don't be offended by what follows. It's just my perception of your job. I would be glad if you can correct me or give me more details.

And don't worry every kind of job will have its turn on the list. So, if you feel a bit spotted for now, don't forget you will have your revenge.

Ok.

The marketing professional has one of the most difficult job. His aim is to understand who the customer really is, what he really wants and then to build up something that will fit his desires.

In the first year he takes his functions, he generally realise it's simply impossible. There is no such thing as the "customer", the "target" nor the traditionnal housewife. You just have a bunch of people that buy your company's products. All are different, motivated by specific reasons (most of them absolutely incongruous) and trying to understand them as a group from some statistics some other guy gave you is a pure insanity. You'd better eat screwdivers than try to understand the customers.

As marketing men and women feel pretty conscious about their appearance and don't want to get bald before age, they quickly evacuate this question from their daily concern.

All the more quick that they fully grasp the real customer doesn't know what he wants. The guy has no particular desire.

So, the job of the marketing professional consists in convincing the head of the company that he got what is in the customers' mind and that red is the best color for the packaging.

The marketing guy provides figures and bogus psychological studies to establish their credibility, he spends time on making bombastic powerpoints with photos and animations, he works hard to appear to be persuasive.

It's an hard job for him to renew regularly his analysis and recommendations while the customer is not changing that much through years. You have to possess a wide wide imagination.

But the marketing professional has to do so. Because he desperately needs a budget.

Otherwise, he will have noting to do, and everyone will start asking themselves what his job really means to the company.

Once he has his budget, he could rest a bit. He could dream for a while on how he will spend all this money. Apart from his expensive personnal expenses accounts of course.

But not for long, because an harder job comes to him. He has to convince everyone to follow his vision, to do what he planned to do with his budget.

He has to convince reluctants engineers to build the irrealistic product he imagined. He has to convince the salesmen to sell it. He has to convince the people from the advertising agency to say something clever about it.

If he manages to do so, then he could be proud of him, turn his brand strategy into a "business case" and go show off in some kind of international marketing convention filled with young and desirable blonde marketing students.

Because, he knows he had done the hard part. The customer will be no big issue. He will buy the product. He has seen it four times on TV and that's all what counts.