5 Questions with Faculty: Ron Ladouceur

Ladouceur is an Adjunct Professor of Marketing and the Principal and Founder of POSTMKTG

ALBANY, N.Y. (July 18, 2018) – Six years ago, Ron Ladouceur decided to launch his own company after a 30-year career in corporate advertising. The principal and founder of POSTMKTG, a boutique strategic branding firm in Schenectady, N.Y., Ladouceur also teaches branding and marketing in the University’s School of Business.

With your busy schedule, why do you teach?

Marketing is really one of the key disciplines, the key skills one needs in order to get a job, start a career or start a business. Being able to teach that, to students who are about to engage in those things, is a privilege.

I do it very much with an eye toward helping my students understand that they actually can be enabled, they can be empowered, they can actually do the thing that they’ve just been learning about, through terms and memorization, for the last 16-and-a-half years.

Can you share a recent success story?

One of our public relations efforts on behalf of a San Francisco-based consultancy, that is involved in private equity and getting private equity, we managed in one week to get them a featured story in a trade journal, to get them as a featured story on NPR’s Marketplace and to get them as the lead story on NBC News.

What’s one of the biggest challenges your company has had to overcome?

It’s a little hard to answer the question about what the challenges have been, because all of the challenges have been at the same time super exciting and fun. We’ve gone through a couple of phases. I started the business; I was self-employed (and the sole employee) and I was doing it out of the house.

Then I moved pretty quickly into freelance, then I moved into an office and started employing people in a more traditional sense. Then we started getting very large clients. It was a real surprise to me that a small firm, based on my previous experience in a large advertising agency, would get larger accounts and more critical work than the agency that I worked at previously would get.

If you had more times, what else would you teach?

My interest really is in cultural studies — American studies specifically. My class in advertising tends to be a broad class in American studies, history. The class that I teach starts in the 19th century talking about P.T. Barnum, a circus promoter, and from there I am able to take students through history, as well as through marketing, as well as through cultural studies.

What’s your creative outlet?

I always take on these creative challenges thinking that it’ll be a nice diversion from the main thing that I do, which is to run my business or teach here at UAlbany, but it always kind of folds right in; it folds right back. So yeah, I’m on the board of directors of something called the Society for Commercial Archeology, which is a group of cultural historians, geographers and preservationists that look at the commercial landscape through the 20th century and see, reflected in it, design, art and culture, and talk about that as a kind of advocacy.

That, of course, informs everything else that I do, especially teaching here.

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