Marketing - Good for your wallet, bad for your career - Marketing Analyst Southern California Edison Employee Review

If marketing is what you do for a living, and you take pride in doing it well, proceed with extreme caution. Here are 7 things they won't tell you during your job interview: 1. SCE is a monopoly; the only thing that the company markets is its own programs, offerings and rate increases. The marketing department is really a marcom department with no ownership, oversight or say-so in the company website, social media or any digital channels. Your "big campaign" might be a boring, legalese-filled letter to customers that their rates are going up. 2. You won't actually do any marketing. Your job is to be the go-between. Management will tell you what to do; you will tell the agency what to do; you will shuffle content from the agency to dozens of internal stakeholders; you will make sure the agency gets paid on time. You will literally become a "project manager," instead of a marketer. True story: the Marketing team was in a training class and had to guess what an acronym stood for. A roomful of marketers got stumped on C for creativity. Because Creativity is the first skillset that gets rusty when you walk through Edison's doors. 3. You will probably be brought in as an analyst, a title that has an almost secretarial connotation at SCE. You will do the exact same work as longtime employees who have a "marketing project manager 1" or "marketing project manager 2" title, you'll just get paid less and have almost no chance of achieving parity with your peers. 4. 90% of the work of the entire 20-person marketing department is carried on the shoulders of about 5 mid-career women who are never promoted or recognized. Nearly all of the group's scant promotions have gone to young men under age 35 - most of whom left the company shortly after their promotions. It is a career dead end of the most depressing order, especially if you work hard and were born with ladyparts. (While everyone else goes home at 4:59, the 5 workhorses of the Edison apocalypse stay late and grind away at the same old letters, emails, flyers and brochures.) 5. Get out that "I love the 90s" t-shirt, because you are now stuck in a world where direct mail rules, CAN-SPAM is a strange new law, and the Internet is an afterthought. Through no fault of your own, you will no longer be able to do BASIC digital marketing or follow BASIC best practices. SCE's IT infrastructure is in shambles, and no one has the vision, the knowledge or the desire to improve it. 6. Marketing sits in the Customer Programs and Service (CP&S) organization, which is part of the Customer Service organization. CP&S is about to go through a layoff/reorg, and has been in a perpetual state of turmoil for the last 3 years or more. The company had a disastrous reorg in 2013, where employees were demoted and shuffled around willy-nilly. In 2014, the head of CP&S was terminated for an "ethics violation." And the fun continues into 2015 and 2016, with a new management team that was clearly brought in to clean house. 7. CP&S in general and Marketing in particular are treated as executive internships. They don't hire people who are great at Marketing to lead Marketing; SCE has so little respect for the function that they use it as a training ground for executives on their way up. And that's before you talk about the brain-numbing bureaucracy, the insipid "safety moments," the lackluster middle managers, and a culture of kissing butt and backstabbing your peers. In short, if you are bright, creative, ambitious, hardworking and passionate about marketing, SCE will feel like a death sentence. If all you want is a paycheck, you may be genuinely happy here.