Marketing

My name is Jan Ječmínek, and I’ve been working in marketing, sports, and media for 20 years. I’m a former judoka, and I studied physical education right here at FTVS. At HOPI Holding, I’m in charge of campaigns, videos and production, websites, events, and the studio; the group has 4,500 people and does business in logistics and food in eight countries of Central and Eastern Europe; HOPI Logistics alone has some 3,000 people, 16 distribution centers, and more than 500 vehicles. At the Czech Judo Federation, I head the Media Commission and handle the media: the content plan, photographers and production at events, and PR packages for journalists. At Judo Heroes Camp, I’m in charge of organization and promotion. I also work for USK Praha, and I’m building my own website, jecminek.co, and the velín (Czech for “control room”), an app that keeps an eye on websites, news, and judokas’ results for me.

One rule applies to these lessons: practice over theory. Wherever I can, I’ll show a model on an example from my own work: the marketing mix of a logistics company, a PR package for journalists after a medal, websites, a streaming studio. When something doesn’t work, I’ll say that too.

This digital garden is the study material for each of the 14 lessons: slides, text, figures with sources, From practice and AI in practice boxes, links for going deeper, and a quiz. The slides in class are in English; this garden is in English and Czech. The quiz at the end of each chapter shows you what you remember from the lesson.

In class, you write first: one sentence on what marketing is. The usual answers: “advertising,” “selling,” “manipulation.” Only then come three definitions side by side. AMA (American Marketing Association; the definition was last reviewed by a panel of five academics in 2017): marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. Philip Kotler: the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Peter Drucker (Management, 1973): the aim of marketing is to know the customer so well that the product sells itself and selling becomes superfluous. Notice the word value: none of the definitions says “advertising.”

The word itself gives you a hint: market + ing, working with the market. The market provides data and structure; marketing adds meaning and direction. Kotler and his colleagues describe how the field evolved from Marketing 1.0 (the product) to 5.0 (technology for humanity, in the book Marketing 5.0, Wiley 2021); the image below the text carries it. The goal stays the same: connecting supply with demand.

Why teach this at FTVS? Because everyone sells something: a coach sells their method, a club sells tickets and partnerships, an athlete sells their story, a graduate sells themselves at a job interview. And there’s a lot of money in it. According to WARC, global advertising spend reached $1.19 trillion in 2025; according to an estimate by AKA, the Czech association of communication agencies, the Czech advertising market saw CZK 150.2 billion in net investment in 2024, roughly CZK 13,800 for every resident of the Czech Republic per year. How much of that flows through marketing departments, and what agencies charge for their work, comes in the section on departments.

Now the uncomfortable part: marketing is not an exact science; it’s more like alchemy with measurement. The merchant John Wanamaker is credited with saying that half the money he spends on advertising is wasted; the trouble is he doesn’t know which half. The best we have are long data series: Les Binet and Peter Field went through almost a thousand campaigns from the IPA database and found that brands grow fastest when roughly 60% of the budget goes into brand building and 40% into sales activation (we’ll dig into this in the Brand lesson). It isn’t a law; it’s the best ratio we know. The same goes for the question of how many ads you see a day: the figure of 5,000 comes from J. Walker Smith of the Yankelovich agency (a book from 2005; the New York Times made it famous in 2007), and nobody has ever measured it; we’ll look at where it came from in the Advertising lesson. If it were true, that would be one ad roughly every 11 seconds you’re awake.

The marketing mix is the field’s oldest checklist. In 1960, E. Jerome McCarthy narrowed it down to four Ps: Product (what we offer), Price (for how much), Place (where and how it reaches the customer), and Promotion (how we let people know). With sports, you can explain it in a minute. The product of Slavia Prague isn’t football; it’s the match plus the experience around it: 90 minutes, chants, beer, friends. The price is the ticket, the season ticket, merch, and the TV rights. The place is the Eden stadium with a capacity of 19,370 spectators, plus the broadcast and the stream for those who don’t come. Promotion is everything from a billboard to an Instagram post. In the 2024/25 season, an average of 18,306 people came to league matches at Eden, roughly 95% of capacity (LFA statistics): product, price, and place were in tune.

Sports, logistics, and education are services, and for services, four Ps aren’t enough. In 1981, Bernard Booms and Mary Jo Bitner added People (the people who deliver the service: stewards, coaches, dispatchers), Process (how the service runs: getting into the stadium, registering for a camp, ordering transport), and Physical evidence (tangible proof: the stadium, the jersey, a clean warehouse, the website). When a parent loses their child in the registration line, that’s a failure in the P for process, and no advertising will fix it.

The fourth P, promotion, has its own mix of six tools. They aren’t planned one by one: integrated marketing communication (IMC) coordinates them together with all the customer’s touchpoints so that the customer gets one message, whether they meet an ad, a salesperson or the website (more in the Advertising lesson). Most of the tools get their own lesson in this course: Advertising, Media (PR), Events.

A market is the environment where goods and services are exchanged: everyone who could buy. An audience is the people we actually talk to. The difference is crucial: nobody has the budget for everyone, so you pick segments from the market and talk to them. The Czech Republic has 10.9 million inhabitants (ČSÚ, the Czech Statistical Office, as of January 1, 2026); 81% of people over 16 are online every day, and 68% bought something online at least once in the second quarter of 2025 (ČSÚ). That’s the market. The audience for a judo camp is parents of children who do judo: a fraction of the market.

Five types of players act in a market: buyers (consumers, companies, institutions), sellers (manufacturers, retailers, service providers), regulators (the state, the Czech Trade Inspection Authority, GDPR, the Czech Advertising Standards Council), opinion shapers (media, experts, influencers, communities), and intermediaries (platforms, distributors, agencies). A marketer has to know which of them they’re persuading at any given moment.

A useful trick: think about the market in layers: need › category › product. A protein bar (the product) belongs to sports nutrition (the category) and satisfies the need for performance and health. So the bar’s competition isn’t just another bar, but also quark, a banana, or sleep. If you define a market only by the product, you’ll miss where the disruptor comes from.

Segmentation divides a market into groups that behave similarly and can be addressed the same way. Five classic keys: geographic (region, city or countryside, climate), demographic (age, gender, income, education), psychographic (values, lifestyle, interests), behavioral (how often they buy, loyalty, price sensitivity), and, in B2B, firmographic (company size, industry, who decides). Demographics are easy to measure but explain little: two men, 45, Prague, university-educated; one goes to Slavia, the other to Sparta. Psychographics and behavior explain more.

Even better than a segment is a tribe: a group bound together by an interest, rituals, and its own language. Harley riders, ultras, runners, foodies, judokas. A tribe has its own media, its own events, and its own spokespeople, so you can reach it more cheaply than “men aged 25 to 45.” More in the Social Media chapter.

Two sample tables. The rows are the size of the customer; the columns are what they’re looking for: the lowest price (deal seekers), the best total cost of ownership (TCO), or service and experience.

Targeting is a choice: from the segments, you pick the ones worth aiming at. You weigh size, growth, profitability, the strength of the competition, and accessibility (can you reach them at all?). Three strategies: concentrated (a niche: one segment, everything tailor-made), differentiated (several segments, a different offer and message for each), and undifferentiated (mass: the same for everyone; rare today, it works for commodities).

HOPI Logistics aims in a focused way: the website groups clients into sectors: food and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), retail and e-commerce, drugstore, beverages, and gas stations (hopilogistics.eu). Slavia is differentiated: ultras in the North Stand, families with kids, corporate clients in the skyboxes, fans in front of the TV. Each gets a different ticket, different content, a different channel. Mass marketing makes sense for salt, gasoline, or public television. A badly chosen segment is the most expensive mistake in marketing: you can redo the creative in a week, but building an audience takes years.

In B2B, you target the people who make the decisions, not companies. According to Gartner (research on the B2B buying journey, 2019), a complex business purchase typically involves 6 to 10 people, and 77% of buyers described their last purchase as very complex or difficult. A newer Gartner survey from 2025 (632 buyers) counted 5 to 16 people from up to four departments: a different methodology, the same conclusion: a group decides (more in the Psychology lesson). The tool is LinkedIn: you can target by industry, company size, job title, and seniority. A retail chain’s logistics director doesn’t read the tabloids, but does read LinkedIn.

Positioning is the place a brand holds in the customer’s mind relative to the competition. Al Ries and Jack Trout summed it up simply in their book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (1981, originally a series of articles in Advertising Age from 1972): it’s not what you do to the product, it’s what you do to the customer’s mind. The mind is overcrowded and remembers one word per brand. Two building blocks: differentiation (how you differ) and competitive advantage (why you’re the better choice in what matters).

The textbook example is Volvo. In 1959, engineer Nils Bohlin designed the three-point seatbelt; on August 13, 1959, the first PV544 with the belt was sold, and Volvo made the patent available to all carmakers. Ever since, Volvo has meant “safety” in people’s minds, whatever it makes. Tesla chose a different word: technology (Autopilot, the Supercharger network, over-the-air updates, acceleration). Both make cars, but they don’t compete for the same place in the mind. Positioning then drives the entire mix: which features, what price, where it’s sold, what the advertising looks like. More in the Brand chapter.

A practical tool is the positioning statement, one sentence: For [target group], [brand] is the [category] that [key benefit], because [proof]. An example: for students who want to work in sports marketing, this course is the class where you see the models on real projects, because it’s taught by someone who has been working in marketing, sports, and media for 20 years. If you can’t write the sentence, you don’t have positioning; you just have a logo. You can see your competitors’ positioning for free: Meta Ad Library and the Google Ads Transparency Center show all the running ads of any brand.

Two frameworks to start any strategy. SWOT: strengths and weaknesses are inside, and you can change them; opportunities and threats are outside, and you can only react to them. Rules so that your SWOT isn’t a wish board: at most three items in each box, each with a number or evidence, and at the end, one sentence on what follows from it. “A strong brand” isn’t a strength; “95% occupancy at Eden” is.

PEST, extended to PESTLE, maps the macro environment: political (National Sports Agency grants, elections), economic (inflation, purchasing power, the koruna exchange rate), social (aging, time spent on social media), technological (AI, streaming, data), legal (GDPR, the regulation of gambling and gambling ads in sports), and environmental (the sustainability of events, fans’ travel). PEST doesn’t tell you what to do; it tells you what will happen to you if you do nothing.

Markets change because supply and demand, competition, regulation, and technology change. The engine of change is innovation. Clayton Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma, 1997) distinguished incremental innovation (a better phone camera, faster delivery) from disruptive innovation: a cheaper and seemingly worse solution that serves overlooked customers and then pushes the leader out from below. At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster had more than 9,000 video rental stores, and on September 23, 2010, it filed for bankruptcy protection (Wikipedia); Netflix, which started by sending DVDs by mail, had 301.6 million paying members at the end of 2024. The leader didn’t go under because it was stupid, but because it listened to its best customers. In marketing, today’s disruptor is AI: in 2025, a third of Czechs over 16 used AI tools to create content.

Marketing can be set up in an organization in several ways, and each one changes what you’ll be doing all day. The first axis is strategy vs. production: someone decides whom we talk to, what we say, and why (brand manager, strategist, head of marketing), and someone makes it (graphic designer, copywriter, camera operator, web administrator). In a large company, these are different people and departments; in a small one, it’s one person, a strategist in the morning and production in the afternoon.

The second axis is in-house vs. agency. According to the American advertisers’ association ANA, 82% of its members had their own in-house agency in 2023, up from 42% in 2008. At the same time, 92% of them still use outside agencies: in-house for fast, cheap, everyday content; agencies for big campaigns, specialization, and an outside view. An agency costs more per hour, but you only pay when you need it; your own team costs less per hour, but you pay for it all the time.

How much money is there for all this? Every year, Gartner asks the chief marketing officers of large companies; in 2025, that was 402 CMOs from North America, the UK, and Europe, mostly from companies with revenue of over a billion dollars. On average, 7.7% of revenue went into marketing, the same as a year earlier, and paid media swallowed 30.6% of the budget. Mind the scale: this is an average for corporations, not for a Czech club or online store. What it means for you: learn to do more with less, because budgets aren’t growing.

And what does it cost in Czech crowns? Every year, the Association of Communication Agencies (AKA) publishes the average hourly rates of Czech agencies for regular client service. For 2026: account executive CZK 1,686, graphic designer CZK 2,091, copywriter CZK 2,526, account manager CZK 2,588, creative director CZK 4,934 per hour. A day of a graphic designer’s work at an agency thus comes to roughly CZK 17,000. An in-house person costs less per hour, but you pay them even in a week when nothing gets made. The in-house vs. agency decision is therefore a matter of arithmetic: how many hours of that work do you really have each month?

“I do marketing” means dozens of different crafts today. The most common roles, what they do all day, and for each one a tool you’ll run into in your very first job:

The ideal is a T-shaped profile: one craft in depth (the vertical bar) and enough about all the others to brief the work and recognize when it’s wrong (the horizontal bar). In sports and in small companies, the T is more like a comb: three things done decently. A copywriter who can deploy a website and a designer who can handle video editing will always have work.

Where should you choose? Follow the money. The Czech online advertising market grew from CZK 15 billion in 2015 to CZK 70.7 billion in 2025 (SPIR, the Czech Association for Internet Development), 4.7× in ten years. Display advertising makes up 72%, search 26%. That’s where the jobs are: performance, data, video, content.

How much do people in marketing earn? The most reliable figures come from the Ministry of Labor’s Average Earnings Information System (ISPV). The 2025 figures cover the wage sphere, meaning businesses; the state and municipalities pay a salary under different rules and are reported separately. Advertising and marketing specialists there have a median gross monthly wage of CZK 69,982. The median is the pay of the person in the middle: half earn more, half earn less, and unlike the average, a few high salaries can’t pull it up. The median for all employees in the wage sphere was CZK 43,241. Public relations specialists, that is PR, have CZK 67,298, graphic and multimedia designers CZK 58,355, and marketing managers CZK 108,246. The spread is wide: a tenth of marketing specialists earn less than CZK 42,642 and a tenth more than CZK 131,981; statisticians call these cutoffs the first and ninth deciles. Location matters too. Of the 14,300 marketing specialists, 8,500 work in Prague, where the median is CZK 76,461, compared with CZK 48,535 in the South Moravian Region.

Recruitment agencies’ salary surveys show how pay differs by role and experience. The Hays Salary Guide for 2025 lists typical gross wages without bonuses by the employer’s industry. At consumer goods companies (FMCG), a junior marketing specialist gets CZK 41,000, a brand manager CZK 62,000, and a senior brand manager CZK 83,000; in media, a PPC specialist and a graphic designer both get CZK 67,000 and a PR specialist CZK 57,000. The same job pays differently in different industries, though: a marketing manager typically gets CZK 80,000 in media, CZK 145,000 in FMCG, and CZK 168,000 in IT. On top of that, companies give brand and marketing managers a bonus, usually 10 to 15% of their annual pay. At startups and innovative companies, mid-level marketers earn about CZK 41,000 on average and senior marketers CZK 62,410, according to a StartupJobs survey of 1,759 people. Among freelancers, marketing is the most common field. In the 2024 Na volné noze survey, a quarter of 2,237 freelancers named marketing, sales, and PR as their field, and the most common rate across all fields was between 600 and 999 Czech crowns an hour; 23% charged between 1,000 and 1,999 Czech crowns.

And what does the job market look like? It’s harder for beginners than it used to be. According to Hays, marketing pay mostly stagnated in 2024: 43% of candidates in the field said their pay had stagnated, and another 9% saw it fall. Positions for complete juniors have slightly declined because automation can handle many smaller tasks, and companies were most eager to hire people with at least four years of experience in brand management and creative work. At startups and tech companies, each job opening drew 25.5 applicants on average in the first quarter of 2026, up from 16 a year earlier. Data from abroad show where AI is taking work first. On a large global freelancing platform, within eight months of ChatGPT’s launch, the number of writing and coding jobs fell by 21% relative to jobs requiring manual skills, and after image generators arrived, the number of image creation jobs fell by 17%. The remaining jobs were more complex and better paid, a study in the journal Management Science found. In the World Economic Forum survey, employers for the first time placed graphic designers just outside the top 10 fastest-declining jobs through 2030, while user interface and user experience designers, so-called UI and UX designers, are among the 10 fastest-growing.

The models are the same; the weights are different. Three industries for comparison. Consumer goods (FMCG) need reach: television, social media, influencers, impulse at the shelf; you don’t buy a yogurt after reading a study, but because you know it and it’s right by the checkout. B2B logistics runs on relationships: expert content, references, personal selling, targeting the few people who decide the tender; a Facebook campaign would be money thrown away. We cover the differences between B2B and B2C advertising in the Advertising chapter.

Sports is a case of its own. The product is uncertain: nobody can guarantee the result, and that’s exactly the draw. Loyalty is irrational: people stick with a club their whole lives, even when it loses. You’re selling an experience, a story, and a community, not a thing. Winning isn’t the same as commercial success: Parma won the UEFA Cup twice in the 1990s, and yet in March 2015 a court sent the club into bankruptcy with debts of €218 million; the new club started out in the fourth tier (Wikipedia). Conversely, clubs without trophies often have a full stadium and a strong brand. And an athlete is both the performance and the product: their behavior can change the value of a brand overnight. The whole Sports lesson is about this.

And one more layer: the country. The global textbook assumes Google and Facebook; in the Czech Republic, Seznam, a Czech search engine and web portal, has 15% of search (StatCounter, September 2026), its own ad system, Sklik, and its own maps. Czechs spend 143 minutes a day on social media, most of it on YouTube and Facebook; TikTok is used by 37% and LinkedIn by 24% of internet users (AMI Digital Index 2025). When you’re targeting logistics directors, 24% is plenty; when you’re targeting teenagers, Facebook is the wrong address.

AIDA is the oldest model of the customer journey: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. It’s traditionally attributed to the American advertising pioneer E. St. Elmo Lewis (1898), although historians dispute the authorship. The modern version adds an S for Satisfaction: a satisfied customer buys again and recommends you, which is the cheapest marketing there is.

Each stage has its own tool. Attention is won by creative and placement (a billboard, a reel, a headline). Interest is held by relevant content (an article, a video, a demo). Desire is sparked by social proof and emotion (reviews, photos from an event, a story). Action is triggered by a clear call to action and a frictionless finish (a three-field form, card payment). Satisfaction comes from the product and after-sales care. The metric changes with the stage too: reach, time on page, saves and shares, conversion, repeat purchase.

The funnel leaks. Of 1,000 people who see an ad, 100 click, 10 fill in the form, and 1 pays; the numbers are illustrative, but the orders of magnitude hold. That’s why fixing the bottom pays off most: one extra field in a form costs you more customers than a weaker headline. And a critique to finish with: people don’t move in a straight line. They come back, skip stages, decide with emotion, and justify it with reason. AIDA is a map, not a path; why that is gets covered in the Advertising (the ELM model) and Psychology (Kahneman) lessons.

What we covered today: marketing is about value, not advertising; the 4Ps and 7Ps as a checklist; a market is not an audience; segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP) as three decisions in that order; SWOT and PEST as a map; innovation as the reason the map changes; AIDA(S) as the customer journey; the professions that do all this, and the industries where it’s done differently.

Five sentences for the wall: Know the field in which you play. Understand your audience, not just the market. Align with the organization’s goals; marketing isn’t art for art’s sake. Digital is critical, but the old channels haven’t disappeared: television and the internet hold up the Czech advertising market together. Measure, or you won’t know which half was wasted.

Homework for next time: pick one brand you like and write its 4Ps and a positioning statement. Ten minutes. Next lesson, we’ll start with sports, and I’ll ask you why you support the team you support.