How many people do you know who have built a 40-year career at one business based on what they studied in college?
Count one of them as Steve Johnson ’86, a Binghamton University School of Management graduate, now a managing partner at Riger Marketing in Binghamton. He joined Riger in 1986 as a copywriter intern while completing his degree in business management with a concentration in marketing.
What he’s learned through experience: Marketing is about identifying or creating a need and then filling it with a solution. From there, the key is finding buyers for your solution and moving them toward it with benefit-oriented communications. At Binghamton, he gained foundational skills in business management, deepened his understanding of finance, and honed his marketing prowess.
“Today’s students need to know what I call the ‘soft side of marketing’ — the psychology of selling an idea or product — and the ‘hard side,’ which is the data underpinning it and the analytics,” Johnson said. “Marketing students also need to know how to connect with people. Whether it’s in person or on Zoom, it’s a people business.”
That’s just one of the lessons Johnson is passing along to Santiago Perez, a current SOM finance and marketing student interning at Riger during the spring 2026 semester. Together, they’re exploring marketing strategies and creative problem-solving through tried-and-true approaches toward building client relationships alongside the benefits of emerging AI tools.
Perez has learned a lot from this internship, including how to balance creating content that meets the client’s needs with the marketing specialists’ preferred approach. It’s also helped him to see tangible results from the concepts he’s been learning about in his SOM classes, especially when it comes to finding the most effective ways to complement AI tools with his own skills.
“One of the most interesting things I’ve learned about marketing is that you get to tap a lot more into creative problem-solving, rather than just being purely analytical as you would with finance, but of course, you always want to make data-driven decisions,” Perez said. “SOM does such a good job setting us up with all the resources needed to succeed, but you also get out of it as much as you put in. That’s why it’s so important to see first-hand how the knowledge you’re gaining can be applied.”
Riger is a multi-service marketing communications agency that serves business-to-business, education, financial, healthcare, nonprofit/fundraising, retail, auto, tourism, and other consumer-oriented clients.
For Johnson, who cut his teeth on radio reels, manual typesetting, and pre-press paste-ups using an X-Acto knife, watching how the marketing profession has sped up into digital territory over the years and, more recently, the increasingly useful applications of artificial intelligence have been equally fascinating.
Mentoring Binghamton students like Santiago and teaching them how to best communicate with the client has been, for Johnson, more than a chance to give back. It’s been his way of ensuring students get the kind of practical experience that proved so pivotal to building his own love for marketing when he was in their shoes.
“No matter what you do with your SOM degree, or any degree, you’re going to have to learn to be good at dealing with people,” Johnson said. “What’s also remained consistent over the years as the media formats changed has been that it’s still about quality content. What’s going to hold someone’s attention? What will resonate with your target audience, whether it’s writing, design, or video editing, whether it takes the person 15 seconds to look through or a longer piece? That’s something we’re always thinking about in marketing.”
Apart from testing his skills, this internship has also helped Perez gain a stronger grasp of areas where he can continue to grow. It’s important not to let the key message get lost in translation, he said, especially when you’re dealing with complex subjects.
“Wrapping your head around an idea and everything that goes into it can be tricky, but there can be a real disconnect when your communication isn’t at its peak,” he said. “Never being afraid to ask some more questions beforehand is probably the biggest skill that I’ve been working on and could still improve on. I wouldn’t have realized it if I hadn’t taken this internship opportunity.”