I hear marketing has some psychology/socialogy aspects to it. Suchs as
1.how best to promote a product, and what features a product is lacking that would help it to sell
2.How to gain new customers and keep customers
3.Identifying the audiences and what will make those audiences want the product.
I read these random facts online and was wondering if it was true?
What is the pros and cons of this major?(I generally hate asking this but I’ll say it anyways)
Honestly theres a lot I don’t know about marketing but from what I read so far It seems something I would like.
Also, what Job titles are there for someone going into marketing?
I’d do some research/reading up on the field on the internet. There is even a wikipedia article on Marketing.
What about Economics?
@happy1 I did do some research on marketing but I wanted to see other perspectives on marketing lol
@JustOneDad I didn’t look into economics yet but my counselor told me to stay away from it because it would be hard to find a job. At least in my area it would be heard to find a job.
Absolutely! I graduated with an undergrad in management and finance but I was interested in studying how consumer behavior influences business strategy which lead me to a career in marketing. I have 3 friends who were all psychology majors who are also currently in marketing in various roles and psychology is one of the most popular feeders into the marketing industry particularly from a research perspective.
I can’t really touch on pros and cons of the psychology major since I wasn’t one, but I can try to elaborate on marketing as a career and the background of my colleagues and how we complement one another.
Marketing is very broad but can be typically divided into Business to Consumer (b2c) or Business to Business (b2b). Every brand has a stakeholder, for Unilever, Nike, Chase Bank, or Coca-Cola it’s the general public, these are examples of companies with primarily b2c marketing groups. Companies with stakeholders that are other businesses include Snapchat, Instagram, hedge funds, etc. are examples of companies with b2b marketing groups (also b2c for consumer platforms like Snapchat & Instagram.
The b2b vs b2c dichotomy roughly splits the general functions and goals that you would focus on. In terms of where you might work, it can roughly be split into 4 options agency, vendor, brand, platform.
My team at a platform provider (think Facebook, Google, Buzzfeed, Pinterest etc.) is primarily comprised of people with MBAs, statistics grads, data scientists, and psych & marketing majors.
We have two marketing groups, a consumer marketing group and sales marketing group. The consumer marketing group primarily focuses leveraging user behavior data, a/b testing of product features, and analyzing audiences to grow and improve the platform. This doesn’t directly bring in any revenue for the company however.
The sales marketing group, which I am on works with a lot of the same data but instead leverage it to convince brands that are looking to advertise online, to basically choose us. To this point, we use a lot of the consumer data to help pitch advertising deals in the early stages. As brands spend on our platform we need to prove that their ads performed well and actually drove revenue for them, so we incorporate a lot of ad effectiveness research to look at how different pieces of online content change the behaviors of internet users and how we can help the brands improve on their campaigns.
The majority of the psychology majors I have worked with had a background working at market research vendors (Millward Brown Digital, Nielsen, etc.) where they do a lot of ad effectiveness research, so mostly tackling number 3 on your list. As a part of a platform or brand you are able to branch out more with access to more internal data and a dedicated goal versus working for multiple clients in an agency (Mindshare, Edelman, Grey Group, etc.) or vendor environment. This typically leads to more projects in primary & behavioral research, audience analysis, and basically tackles 1, 2, and 3.
I could go on but wanted to give a general layout and would be happy to answer any specific questions you might have.
Marketing ( and psychology) are very popular majors, especially with females. If you want to major in one of these subjects, I would surest minoring in something more marketable such as Finance, IT or MIS.
@AoDay Thanks for the in depth reply! Do you have to be a sales person in order to get to the marketing side? I heard you do BUT my counselor said its two different things. BTW can I pm you for more questions?
I guess it depends on how you define sales person, if you mean the actual function of being a sales person, then no. However, everyone within marketing is essentially creating a story or persuasive argument which is part of the art of a sale. You can perform an extremely different function from a traditional sales person but your goal is to drive revenue and increase your brand’s awareness which is typically aligned with a company’s sales org. Feel free to pm.