If you pursue a marketing major, then you’ll be preparing yourself for a wide array of possible careers. Marketing exists all throughout the world around us, and has many roles in business. Studying a marketing major will lead you prepared to pursue any or all of these roles.
Should I pursue a marketing major?
Are you creative? Do you enjoy thinking about ways to communicate with other people? Do you like working with new media forms? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then it’s already looking like you might be a good fit for a marketing major.
Marketing, put in a very simplistic way, is about trying to get people to buy things. Business employ marketing materials in the hopes that those materials will convince people to purchase their products, particularly over competitors. That alone may not sound appealing. But if you enjoy thinking about how people think, and how to convince them of certain things, then you’ll likely enjoy marketing.
Marketing is also a sometimes decent forum for being creative and potentially artistic in a corporate atmosphere. Obviously, the point of marketing is never the same as that of art, but some of the same principles and practices that are appleid in art can be of relevance in the marketing world. If you’re someone interested in being creative and artistic, but not interested in all of the difficulties and hurdles that can come with trying to be an artist, then marketing might be a good choice for you.
What will I study in pursuit of a degree in marketing?
If you decide to pursue a marketing major, you’ll be studying a wide array of different activities and subjects that all fall under the general umbrella of “marketing”. These include identification of different audiences, ways of reaching those audiences through different media, the effects of different pricings on products, the best methods of promoting goods, and so on. Pursuing a degree in marketing will likely leave you with some experience and understanding of the best ways for a company to interact with its customers, as well.
You will likely be assisted in your studies and pursuit of a marketing major if you also study business to some extent, so that you have a better idea of how marketing fits into the overall picture of a business. Studying communications will be helpful for the better understanding you may get of communicating across different media, and anthropology can be a useful subject to study due to experience anthropology can give you with conducting studies of large groups of people and finding useful information.
What will I do after I finish my marketing major?
After you’ve graduated with a degree in marketing, there are a number of opportunities and paths open to you. One of the most obvious, of course, is to continue your studies. You can move into the graduate school sphere in order to get a more advanced degree in marketing that will allow you to pursue even higher positions. It’s also possible that earning an MBA can help you to advance in the field of marketing, though it’s likely that in this case, you might be better served by working in marketing for some time, before pursuing your MBA.
If you want to go straight into the professional world, you can find a job as a marketing consultant, who might provide input to a business as to its marketing campaigns, or you might be able to find work as a researcher, conducting studies on behalf of a company in order to determine the best course of action to market its products. You might also be able to find a position in advertising, designing and creating the ads for a given product.
Some sources suggest that a new holder of a degree in marketing should actually pursue sales straight away, however, because this will give you an intimate knowledge of the products you are selling, and how best to sell them to your customers. Sales is, in some ways, a “hit the ground running” real world education in marketing, and it can be a good path to some of the higher level marketing positions out there.
