The Role of Marketing Operations Specialists in SaaS Businesses

 Competitiveness of a product and care of a brand value are mainly the work of product managers and brand managers who play a major role in creating a competitive advantage of their companies. The aim of the paper is to present partial results of an independent research and connect them with the knowledge base of knowledgable management and human factors in product management. The paper focuses on a set of requirements for qualifications, 

experience, knowledge and skills that are imposed on candidates for the position of “Brand Manager”. For the purposes of defining the research objectives, an assumption was made that a set of requirements for candidates will prove that brand managers and product managers are knowledgable workers. In order to meet this goal, the method of content analysis of job advertisements was used. Secondly, the research was focused on identifying 

and analysing the differences between the sets of requirements for product managers and brand managers. The analysis of the texts of job advertisements resulted in the requirements for knowledge and competency. It provided the information about what level of education, type and length of practical experience was preferred for the position of “Brand Manager”. The 

Unexpected result was that the 

groups of technical knowledge and work experience of brand managers and product managers had statistically significant differences. At the end of the article, there are a number of recommendations formulated for the implementation of recruitment strategy.With many of the undoubted social changes, marketing of business organizations is currently being confronted with a new reality which requires new knowledge and skills of the marketing staff. 

It is a challenge to discover whether and how the changes are reflected in the issue of human factors in product management and to focus on brand managers because these kinds of open positions permanently attract graduates and marketers with work experience. To create the concept of product management as an interdisciplinary function within the firm, the key role is played by the employee with the title of “Product Manager” or “Brand Manager”. It is 

important to determine whether product categories are being developed within the specific organization in the parts of plans of the portfolio products or brands. As an integrated system of planning, budgeting and implementation activities, brand management was mainly put throughby the manufacturers of products for consumer markets. On B2B markets, they pay attention to the brands primarily as a seal of quality and utility that allows the company to 

Protect its intellectual property

and promote itself on the market. The role of the chief brand officer has emerged in business and has been described, but the responsibility for making the brand decisions every day still rests on the shoulders of brand managers in most companies. The involvement of brand managers in internal company processes is rather complex and, in the hierarchy of the company, another worker or a group of workers is rarely subordinate to the brand manager. 

Thanks to the use of tools of marketing tactics, s/he should be able to build a strong position for the product brands s/he was entrusted with. The brand manager has to understand the tendencies in the development of products and services market, and by improving her/his personal performance, consistently strengthen the competitiveness of the organization and increase its chances of success in the future. In order to succeed, s/he must have knowledge 

and personal attributes. The researched issues are characterized by the lack of input data since brand managers do not do the jobs according to qualification standards. In a corporate practice, this job function can vary to some extent in its content and demands. This fact was taken into consideration in the selection of primary sources. A set of demands for educational, professional and general competencies, knowledge and skills, experience and expertise with 

Which the candidates for the

position of “Brand Manager” are confronted with at the beginning of the recruitment process, is also used to identify the shifts in demands. For this purpose, there has been used a unique set of data from 2007 prior to the outbreak of the financial crisis in the US, which influenced not only product and service markets, but also the labour force in the EU and the Czech market as an integral part of it. Moreover, the consistent application of the methods of 

content analysis, which was first published by Wroblowská (2011), allows us to compare the requirements imposed on brand and product managers.The goal of the paper is to present partial results of an independent research and to connect them with a knowledge base which relates to human factors in product management and an output in the form of recommendations for the strategy and implementation of the recruitment process and to 

provide inspiration to those who are responsible for professional training of future brand managers. While addressing the raised issues, an interdisciplinary approach was applied, as the knowledge of a theoretical background and the analysis of the current state of issues and the tendencies of its development required to conduct a research in several fields of study. The methods used in the research were partly empirical (primary research) and partly logical, 

Conclusion

particularly using deduction when working with secondary data, analysis and synthesis. The determination of research assumptions proceeded from a knowledge base. To verify the hypotheses, the method of comparison was also used, the results of which were examined by the test of independence of variablesThe primary goal of the research project was to examine the situation of “Brand Manager” positions offered on the researched labour market and to 

provide answers to the questions arising from the research assumptions. The research project has been drawn up to examine the assumption that a brand manager is an example of a knowledgable worker and is seen as such by the business practice. The secondary objective was to identify whether with the passing of the years, there has been a shift in demands imposed on candidates for the position of “Brand Manager”, and finally, to compare and 

identify differences in requirements for product managers and brand managers. For this purpose, the following assumptions have been made:The research project was designed in such a way that it would be possible to compare the outputs of the primary research with the results of partial stages of the research project by Wroblowská  Therefore, the validated content analysis method has been used according to the concept of Bernard 

Berelson who defined it as the research method for the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the content of the text. The information on the requirements for applicants for the position of a Brand Manager in the Czech Republic was taken from the publicly available recruitment advertising on the career portal Jobs.cz. The data collection took place in the odd weeks from February to April and from June to August 2015. Thus 86 adverts were gathered with the exclusion of ads supplemented with adjectives “senior