University of San Francisco Professor Ryan Langan, Ph.D. Discusses the Ways the Medium Impacts the Message

What if subject matter changes faster than you can finish teaching the established knowledge? That is the current challenge for several fields of study, perhaps none more so than marketing.

On today’s podcast we were joined by Ryan Langan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Management at the University of San Francisco.

Dr. Langan discussed the ways in which rapidly changing technology impacts the importance of maintaining a grasp of the fundamentals of marketing, the natural collaboration that should exist between traditional marketing and digital marketing, the challenges that the new digital landscape presents when attempting to create targeted marketing, and the importance of properly determining the actual customer for a given campaign.

“Even as fast as digital marketing is evolving, if they understand, kind of, the boundary conditions, and the theories, and again the frameworks that guide some of these principles and practices, that allows them to make informed decisions even as the technology evolves,” Dr. Langan said.

Unfortunately, universities aren’t evolving anywhere near as fast. Dr. Langan discovered that, though there have been improvements in the last five years, “27 percent of universities do not offer any digital marketing classes.”

While marketing itself “is a concept and a process,” the digital aspect of modern marketing is strictly “the manner or the media in which you use to communicate,” Dr. Langan said.

Yet, while the physical principles of the steam engine and the internal combustion engine are fundamentally the same, you wouldn’t want to go to an automotive school that “only taught you how to work on steam-powered engines.”

Through this dialogue, Dr. Langan covers the areas of analytics (including Google analytics), big data, AI, virtual and augmented reality, and social media—and the use of weather data to sell the right sandwiches at the right time. Listen and discover how, in digital as in traditional marketing, the medium is still the message.

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