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March 18, 2005

Job Descriptions as Marketing/Positioning

I have long thought that doing a good job of articulating your play, positioning and values is not just for external targets but for your own employees. Well here is recent case where working on the job description of a key role - VP of Marketing of course - helped the company drive their overall positioning and messaging to a clearer, stronger place.

The company is an Ignition portfolio company (surprise, surprise), with a truly inspired mission and vision:

It should be easy for anyone to live the dream of running their own business.

Mpire's job is to bring together all the right technologies, services and resourses to make this dream not just possible but practical.

They are extremely passionate about this. And their job description reflects/and sheds light on this passion:

Chief Marketing Officer of the American Dream Ready to join a revolution? It’s the chance to make a real difference in the lives of small-business owners. We’re obsessed with helping anyone live the dream of running their own business. What is it that we do? We’re creating seriously amazing small-business software. We’re not talking about recycled enterprise software. Our stuff is user-intuitive small-business software that’s been constructed from the ground up to leverage Web services and a bunch of other cool technologies such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python, Flash, XML, software-as-a-service….you get the picture.

Why do our customers love it? It empowers them to finally manage their finances, keep track of their customers, oversee their inventory, sell their goods over the Internet and take care of anything else on the typical entrepreneur’s to-do list. It allows them to get control of their business. Do our users have to buy a new computer or download software? Nope. Why clutter their computer with a half-dozen clunky, one-trick-pony software packages! Our software is available in one easy-to-use, fully integrated hosted environment.

Who are you, exactly? You’re the Chief Marketing Officer of the American dream. You get PC’s. You get the Internet. You get marketing. You take a $1M budget and beat the pants off a company with a $100M budget, because you never – ever – give up and because you truly are that good. You’re an A player and recruit A players who will, in turn, attract millions of customers. You get people. You know how to talk to a 64 year old grandma about the Internet, and a 22 year old metro sexual programmer about podcasting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting). You’re a charismatic leader. You’re a Jack Welch in the making who tells the CEO a thing or too about business and marketing. You’re also ambitious, smart, entrepreneurial, and focused.

What would you do for us? You’d create and drive our overall marketing and customer-experience strategy – and when we say “strategy,” we aren’t talking about a PowerPoint presentation. It’s all about taking the right action at the right time. You’ll be creating, identifying, and raising awareness of what we’re doing as both a social and a technological experience. You’ll increase our market share exponentially by implementing an aggressive customer-acquisition strategy – focused on viral growth and on positive testimonials from our existing customers. You forge partnerships with leading small-business service providers – office-supply chains, educational channels, companies that provide high-speed Internet services, and the like. You’re a firm believer in the power of PR, and you know how to drive the large-scale awareness campaigns that will build our brand while boosting our reputation as a thought-leader throughout the industry. You’re even something of a viral-marketing whiz who knows how to generate buzz and to maximize the impact of it.

We’re Mpire (www.mpire.com) – a Seattle-based startup. We may be small, but we’re a team of A-level players that has been funded by other A-level players. Our people brought you eBay, Windows, and MS Office, just to name a few. We know about great software and top-notch Internet businesses.

There’s a reason our customers started their own businesses. Maybe they wanted the freedom to control their own destiny. Maybe they finally wanted to turn that dream into a reality. Maybe hey wanted to spend more quality time with their families while also being truly proud of how they spend their working hours. Whatever their motivation, Mpire is here to help anyone live the dream of running their own business. That’s our vision. Come join our revolution.

Sound like you? Contact them here. I wish more job descriptions were like this - no matter what the job title.

Posted by johnza at March 18, 2005 02:07 PM

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