As we closed out 2004, we also marked another important milestone for Pragmatic Marketing: In December, our 30,000th student—Noriaki Ikeda, a Research Analyst for Marketing Strategy with SPSS Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts—attended our Practical Product Management seminar in Boston.

Reinforcing our belief that everyone in the Marketing organization will benefit from our courses, Nori’s primary responsibility is competitive research and analysis for this worldwide provider of predictive analytics software and solutions. Here’s what he had to say about why he attended the course and the impact it has made on his job:

"Several of my co-workers have attended the Pragmatic Marketing courses and highly recommended the seminar to me. I was looking to strengthen my knowledge of best practices for conducting competitive research and win/loss analysis. I was also interested in getting more information about how to improve our positioning and better define our distinctive competencies.

I learned all that—and much more—from the seminar. As I am conducting competitive analysis, I am using the course materials to construct stronger competitive write-ups. Every day, I am using the templates provided in the seminar as a reference for my write-ups. For win/loss analysis, we continually work on improving our efforts and processes, and the knowledge I gained from the seminar and the templates will be a great reference in that area, as well.

The instructor for the seminar was a terrific lecturer. The course content is very interesting, and he provided very funny, real-world examples based on his own experience. He is very interesting, and he has a powerful command of the subject.

The fact that 30,000 students have taken these courses is proof of its value. Based on my own experience, I would tell other marketing professionals, 'Just go! You will learn meaningful information that you will definitely use in your day-to-day work. Even after the course, you will refer to the course materials and the framework and the templates to continue to improve your skills.'”

Pragmatic Marketing instructor Steve Johnson congratulated our 30,000th student, Noriaki Ikeda, a Research Analyst for Marketing Strategy with SPSS Inc., and presented him with an iPod and a certificate for 101 songs.