When students in Asst. Prof. Michael Obal鈥檚 marketing courses ask him for advice on navigating their future careers, he reminds them that getting to where they want to go is rarely a direct route.
鈥淵ou鈥檙e going to zigzag on your way there, and that鈥檚 OK,鈥� Obal tells students. 鈥淛ust make sure that you鈥檙e building up your personal skill set along the way.鈥�
Obal speaks from experience. After earning his bachelor鈥檚 degree in marketing from Syracuse University in 2005, the Milford, Mass., native鈥檚 first job was selling Samuel Adams for the Boston Beer Company. Realizing that 鈥渟ales wasn鈥檛 for me,鈥� Obal shifted to the emerging digital marketing field and joined iProspect in 2006.
鈥淎 lot of people were launching these interesting startups in this whole new e-commerce world, and they were figuring it out as they went,鈥� Obal says.
While he enjoyed being part of this new digital marketing frontier, Obal also felt a pull toward academia. As an undergraduate student, he was struck by how his professors could pursue their passions through their research and teaching.
鈥淚 saw myself in some of my professors,鈥� says Obal, who went back to school and earned his masters degree in business administration from UMass Boston in 2008 and his Ph.D. in marketing from Temple University in 2014. He鈥檚 been a member of the Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation department at the Manning School of Business ever since.
Obal鈥檚 current research is on the product development process.
鈥淗ow are people developing successful products?鈥� he asks. 鈥淎nd does it differ depending on whether it鈥檚 a radical or incremental change?鈥澛�
Obal has also researched the 鈥渄iffusion of disruptive innovations,鈥� which looks at how new technology like smartphones, cloud computing and self-driving cars make the previous generations of technology obsolete 鈥� and how businesses and consumers respond to this disruption.
Keeping up with constantly evolving technology can be a challenge, even for students in Obal鈥檚 marketing analytics or marketing research courses.
鈥淒on鈥檛 be scared off by technology. Don鈥檛 be scared off by big data sets in analytics,鈥� Obal tells students. 鈥淲e鈥檙e just trying to introduce you to topics and help build your vocabulary and curiosity so as you progress in your career, you get better and better.
鈥淓mployers don鈥檛 expect a college graduate to know everything,鈥� he adds. 鈥淭hey want to know you鈥檙e ready to learn and ready to take on new challenges.鈥�