My journey at Continental AG

As I wrap up my marketing internship at Continental and the 2024 year I feel gratitude and a sense of accomplishment. This journey has been nothing short of transformative. I’d love to share some of the highlights and memorable experiences that made this internship so special for me.

 🌟 Strategies for Diverse Audiences 

I learned so much about tailoring marketing strategies for different audiences. As a global company Continental had to follow a certain language, style guides and cultural tone, especially with our headquarters in Germany, this aspect allowed me to gain a global business perspective and was an exciting layer of complexity to my projects. From a high-level view within ContiTech, the focus of marketing strategies for our CES audience was on detailed specs and facts. In contrast, our distributors and end-users were also drawn to eye-catching visuals and real-life product applications. When it was time to craft email campaigns and social posts these factors were crucial to understand and my finished work then had to be sent for approval and translation into Portuguese and Spanish. 

🤝 Cross-Functional Collaboration 

I quickly learned that marketing doesn’t happen without whole lot of collaboration. Whether it was coordinating with external agencies like VML or Barolin & Spencer, working alongside product managers, providing material for sales reps or meeting with our internal communications team, collaboration was at the core of every project. I had the chance to have one-on-one conversations with leadership personnel from various departments including heads of production, operations, HR, finance, our CEO and more—gaining insights into how marketing fits into the larger picture of the company and learning lessons about leadership, interpersonal relationships, networking and general life lessons I will always carry with me. Our monthly MarCom meetings were a great way to keep everyone aligned, share ideas, and develop new strategies together, other departments were often invited to voice their concerns and ideas and this feedback was used in our team meetings, prioritized, and made into actionable steps to improve overall marketing efforts. 

Continental's global nature also allowed for many different aspects of learning despite the time zone challenges, for example I attended a virtual AI seminar out of Germany that provided me with a deeper understanding of AI advancements in manufacturing.