Elevating his peers and his career
John Duffy built a community at Quinlan that would lead him to his future career in marketing.
John Duffy (BBA ’20) started his Loyola journey as a pre-med student with aspirations of becoming an orthopedic surgeon, but he soon realized it wasn’t the path he wanted to take.
Instead, marketing was where he discovered his passion, leading to a career at Salesforce and a drive to make connections for himself and his peers.
Discovering marketing
While he still considering healthcare as a career, Duffy took a consumer behavior course with Linda Tuncay Zayer, the John F. Smith, Jr. Chair of Business Administration and Professor of Marketing. The course opened his eyes to everything that marketing encompasses.
“I had never known the depth of marketing,” Duffy said.
Prior to the class, he had thought marketing was just social media and advertisements.
“It’s so much more than that, whether it’s the data, the campaigns behind things, the social listening,” Duffy said.
Creating connections
After he joined the marketing program as a sophomore, Duffy got to work building and expanding his network, and helping others do the same.
He and other students, with the help of Senior Lecturer of Marketing Stacy Neier Beran, formed the Loyola Salesforce Student Group, which connected Quinlan alumni at Salesforce to students.
“As Chicago grew as a tech hub, we wanted Loyola to be a part of that growth,” Duffy said. “Our goal was to get people introduced to the tech space, to what’s in Chicago, to alumni they could work with, and propel it from there.”
His efforts to create connections extended to all Quinlan students when he joined the Quinlan Ambassadors, a student group fostering community in Quinlan through events, programs, and leadership.
“Given that I was once new to Quinlan and marketing, I wanted to find a way to get involved,” Duffy said. “But I also wanted to work with other people and provide some of the same guidance to other students who might also be figuring out what their path might look like.”
Duffy immersed himself in the Quinlan community. From creating roundtables with professors to finals preparation to the Quinlan Ramble, Duffy relished in being a part of making the Quinlan experience special.
“This is a great example of how you can help a student who is figuring out what they want to do,” Duffy said. “You never know how much people will gain unless you try.”
Understanding consumers
After graduating, Duffy used connections he gained at Quinlan to land a job at Salesforce as an associate success manager. There, he worked with Salesforce customers in the retail and tech industries to better use Salesforce products for their business needs.
Duffy followed a mentor from the Salesforce Student Group to tech startup Qualified, a sales and marketing platform for business websites. There he worked as a customer success architect, where he learned about their customers’ marketing strategies, including how they went to market, and bio personas.
Those experiences led him back to Salesforce where now he works in product positioning as a product marketing manager for Commerce Cloud. There, he works with the sales team to learn how customers use Commerce Cloud and how to celebrate customers who do well with the product. Duffy feels that Quinlan directly prepared him to be successful.
“All of this was bolstered by what I learned in Quinlan, and gave me a solid foundation to propel conversations,” Duffy said. “The working world is a lot different than a classroom setting, but topics like consumer behavior led me to the product marketing path I went down. It really is all about understanding your audience and why they do what they do and buy what they buy.”
As he and Salesforce begin to explore emerging technologies like AI to leverage customer insights and improve their products, Duffy is brought back to fundamentals he learned at Quinlan.
“From those initial classes, all of that is coming together now to understand the world of e-commerce, understanding buying patterns across the world, and leveraging AI to make everybody’s job a little easier,” Duffy said.