Marketing Market Research to Marketing Students
Posted by Vovici Blog on Mon, Feb 21, 2011
Last week, Brian Koma and I were guest lecturers at the University of Virginia, presenting to a marketing-research class of third-year Commerce students (business majors with a concentration in Marketing). I was curious about how likely these students were to consider a career in market research and asked them to complete a poll on their mobile phones: only 4 of the 71 students (5%) were “very likely” or “completely likely” to take a job in market research upon leaving the University of Virginia.
Which is a shame. Brian and I did our best to “de-geekify” market research and make a case for its importance and for the opportunities it presents. At the last minute, I added a concluding slide summarizing Dado Van Peteghem’s recent blog post, “5 reasons why a job in market research can jump-start your career”; I gave it a personal spin, arguing that market research—at the least—makes a great first job that will pay dividends throughout a career.
Dado’s five reasons to consider MR, with my spin:
- Develop an understanding of consumer behavior – Learning how customers make decisions, how to research new products and how to price products and services are all useful skills for many different business roles.
- Learn from leading brands – The largest brands in the country are voracious consumers of research from thousands of research agencies, creating opportunities to do work with major brands right out of college. The very first survey I wrote was for Apple, and in my first few years out of school I worked with HP, Canon, IBM and many other leading firms.
- Develop strong consulting skills – A good market researcher has to not only master the fundamentals of research methodology but also needs to be a great communicator. Any student who can understand the numbers and tell a compelling story will stand out in market research.
- Learn about many different industries and many different countries – Especially early in a career, it is great to be exposed to many different types of businesses. Over time, I was exposed to many different industries, including manufacturing, telecoms, the music industry, personal computing, mobile computing, xerography, document image management, software and temporary staffing.
- Leverage the latest social and technological trends – While many market researchers are thinking about social media, less than 1% of research budgets are allocated towards such research, presenting new graduates with some tremendous opportunities to bring their own knowledge of social networking to bear as this research takes off.
At the end of our presentation, we asked the same question. This time, we had twice as many students, 8 of the 71 (11%), say that they were very or completely likely to take a job in market research upon leaving the University of Virginia. Winning hearts and minds one student at a time? The more students we all can convince to consider market research as a career, the stronger our profession will be.
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