Graduate Pedro keen to 'bridge the message gap'
Published on 04 June, 2009
Pedro Ferraro has a confident and outgoing manner and an entrepreneurial spirit. He graduated in 2006 from CQUniversity's Sydney International Campus, where he successfully completed his MBA, specialising in marketing.
Story by Dr Chris Keane
Pedro is now director of his own consulting business, HYVE Integrated Marketing. He is also employed with APM Institute (Think Education), where he lectures in a range of business and marketing subjects.
Only a few years earlier he had departed his home town of Salvador, Brazil determined to plunge into the cut and thrust of the commercial world. He had intended to emigrate to the USA but decided that there were ‘more chances of success' in Australia.
"I knew Australia was a multicultural country and that it had a good lifestyle," he said.
In fact, Sydney's natural environment, reminded him of his home state of Bahia.
Pedro's energy and drive led him to quickly master the English language and communicate his business and marketing ideas with confidence.
He comments that there are ‘always opportunities to move forward in life' and that intending immigrants should build their knowledge base and have clear goals before applying for residency.
Pedro worked extremely long days, doing casual labouring in Sydney's building industry to help meet his living costs. In the evenings he attended lectures and squeezed in the remaining hours for study.
"There was not much time for sleep. I really worked flat out", he says.
Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and its cousin ‘neuromarketing' are his great love. He points to NLP's many practical applications for marketing, communication, business negotiations and customer behaviour.
NLP is based on the principle that the mind, body and language all interact to build an individual's perception of the world. How the message is received by the intended target differs according to their mix of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic signals.
If the agent sending the message knows more about how the perceiver responds to the incoming stimuli then the ‘gap' between the two can be better bridged.
Pedro believes NLP needs to be ‘...integrated into marketing studies' and would like to see the introduction of ‘neuromarketing' into Bachelor and MBA programs.
"It has wide industry application for teacher training, Internet advertising and human relations," he says.
Pedro is currently researching and writing a book on NLP and promoting its marketing benefits to educators and businesses.
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