Career Path of a Product Marketing Manager at Bosch

Sure. Thanks, Scott. My name is Courtney Wright. I'm currently a product marketing manager at Bosch Home Appliances.

I started my career in home building, but prior to that, I got my undergraduate degree in art history at the University of Southern California. Throughout college, I was very focused on growing my network. At USC, that's something that's very important and ingrained from the moment you start school.

I was involved in a sorority, alumni relations, and an on-campus group called Society 53. This group comprises student hosts for any alumni events hosted on campus. Through these organizations, I met a wide variety of alumni and began to understand potential career paths after college.

During my undergraduate years, I investigated a career in working for a museum with my art history degree. I studied abroad in Florence, Italy, and worked for the Museum of the Duomo, giving tours to American tourists. I also had an internship in marketing communications at LACMA, the LA County Museum of Art, my senior year. However, it wasn't clicking with me, and I wasn't passionate about it.

After college, I graduated a semester early in December and then took two years to be a ski instructor in Vail, Colorado. Being a ski instructor had always been a passion of mine. Graduating in 2011, on the upturn of a recession, there weren't many opportunities. I'm really happy I took that time to pursue my passion. I met so many amazing people and had fun experiences working at Vail Resorts.

I learned the power of a positive customer experience and how to build a client base. I had repeat customers, children and adults, who would come back because they liked me. This was a critical lesson in business: people like working with those they like and doing business with someone with whom they can develop a personal relationship.

Once I finished my tenure as a ski instructor, I started my career in home building at Standard Pacific Homes. The company has since been bought by Lennar, a large national home builder. I was based in Southern California as a sales and marketing coordinator, managing model home communities and the ongoing sale of new homes from Ventura down to San Diego. This included various products, from entry-level townhomes to multimillion-dollar luxury custom properties.

In that role, I got my feet wet in corporate America and learned that no job is too small when it's your first time in a company. I initially thought I would be a "hot shot" coming out of college, but I learned that getting people lunch and making copies would be part of my job. I accepted that and learned to work through it.

I gained hard marketing skills, understanding how to market to a customer, think like a customer, and create messaging and communication materials. This also included email marketing and website development – essential skills for starting a marketing career. I was there for about four years and then experienced a couple of mergers, layoffs, and restructuring.

At the time, this was common in the home building industry. Many builders were buying others, and I decided I didn't like the fear and stress that came with those reorganizations. I moved on to another company and stepped into a manager role at D.R. Horton, another public home builder in Los Angeles.

That was a different experience, working for a smaller satellite office of a major company doing infill projects in Los Angeles. I had a variety of real estate development projects under my belt. However, I went through another restructuring at that company and decided I wanted to go somewhere I could see myself long-term.

I ended up at Bosch Home Appliances. Home appliances were always part of the model home merchandising process in real estate development, so I had some relationships and experience with different luxury home appliances. Home appliance packages could range from $5,000 to $60,000, so we had a breadth of products involved in our model home merchandising.

I joined Bosch as a field marketing manager, responsible for working with retailers to implement marketing campaigns for our products in their local markets. I was in that role for about four years, traveling across the western United States. I worked with independent retailers, from small mom-and-pop locations to Home Depot, Lowe's, and Best Buy.

My focus was creating content, even before content creation became a buzzword in marketing, to promote our products. I implemented promotions and worked with salespeople on advertising dollars. I convinced retailers to give us prime placement on their webpages or to make our products the focus of their marketing campaigns for the month or during specific periods. This included high holidays and major promotional periods like President's Day, Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Black Friday.

I gained experience with e-commerce and the impact of digital marketing, especially for smaller retailers who had no experience running paid search campaigns, LinkedIn, social media, or Facebook. I really enjoyed that role, and that's where I decided to go to business school to hone my skills in marketing consulting.

I was also interested in entrepreneurship and technology and wanted to move into a more product-facing role within my company. My sales and marketing skillset often pigeonholed me into those roles. I wanted to speak business fluently, develop skills in forecasting, dive into the numbers, and improve my leadership skills.

I gained that at UCLA Anderson, working with diverse people from various backgrounds and industries. I learned so much from my colleagues. If you're considering business school, I highly recommend it. It's expensive, but it will pay off in the end, making it a great use of time.

I'm now a product marketing manager. I worked about four years in the sales and marketing role and then moved to the product team, managing refrigeration categories. I manage a portfolio of 172 SKUs across 11 different categories. It's a $500 million business for the company. Our parent company in Germany has a heavy investment to grow the industry and our market share in the U.S. over the next five years. We are growing, and it's an exciting time to be on the refrigeration team.