The marketing discipline is one filled with options. There are hundreds of colleges with great business programs that offer marketing degrees. Within marketing, there are a whole variety of roads you can take, specialties you can pursue, and careers you can choose.
While some careers prepare you for specific, tailored positions, marketing gives you the tools to find a niche that suits your specialties in a wide array of positions. While you might be directly involved in the marketing department of a business as anything from the director of marketing to the marketing coordinator, there are also a lot of other careers suited to marketing majors as well.
Sales
Every business needs marketing majors, whether they’re best suited for a position with the word “market” in them, or whether their talents enable them to turn their hand to other aspects of the company. Some marketing majors may find themselves being drawn toward sales. This might include meeting and working with prospective buyers or clients, supervising a team of salespeople, or using statistics to best create and utilize sales plans. Sales manager, district sales manager, and sales representative are three of many prospective titles involving sales.
Production
Before there’s something to sell, there has to be a product. Marketing majors are essential to this part of the company, too. You might help come up with actual products or commodities for the business to sell, or you might do research to figure out what the public likes and dislikes to improve existing products. Product managers, for example, examine the potential products for a company, then chooses the most appropriate and/or lucrative option, before ensuring that item (a term used loosely, as not all companies sell tangible things) is properly created.
Advertising
While advertising can be a whole different ballgame, there are aspects of advertising that marketing majors thrive in. The creative aspects of advertising, like designing campaigns that drive a product, are certainly open to marketers, but there’s also another side to the specialty. Account managers and advertising managers work in the more business-oriented aspect of advertising, tending to accounts and making plans. Like many of these positions, including such specialties in your education will be a great benefit once you enter the working world - for example, getting a double major in advertising and marketing can make you tailor fit for some of these extremely lucrative positions.
Alternatives
Marketing, sales, production, and advertising is a far from exhaustive list of options. You might go into internet marketing, nonprofit opportunities, work for a newspaper, be an international business person, or work for a manufacturing company. You might also choose to teach at some point, and create more marketing majors for the business world. Positions in research are also great options, in which you study the consumer, find better ways to approach them, or figure out what isn’t working and why.
