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Career Description

This is an ideal career for a visionary thinker. The purpose of marketing is to anticipate consumer needs. It is both a creative and analytical role that uses market research to develop profitable products/services, which are appropriately priced, available where people can readily access them and promoted to maximise appeal.

Career Advice - Marketing Career

You will be responsible for everything from planning strategies to promoting a product or service to a target market by means of events, websites and advertising.

You can specialise in various industry sectors from fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) which are products that are sold quickly at relatively low cost usually at supermarkets, to consumer durables (e.g.household appliances), services marketing (e.g. banking and finance), retail (e.g. fashion brands) and business to business (e.g.. information technology (IT).

What you do every day

There is no such thing as a typical day for a Marketer. Rather over a given period, you will perform a wide variety of work tasks including writing marketing plans, analysing business performance, writing research briefs, developing advertising campaigns with creative agencies, negotiating with media providers, bouncing around ideas for consumer promotions, dealing with internal stakeholders such as Finance, Production, Sales, Research and Development, conducting product evaluations (yours and competitors) to ensure you remain ahead of the game and managing a large team of people.

Personality that best fit this career

Marketing requires a broad cross section of personality traits. You need to be creative, a visionary type thinker, be able to solve problems and have sound oral, written and formal communication skills combined with an analytical mind.

Optomistic people tend to be more successful, so too those with upbeat, energetic personalities with high levels of energy and passion. You need to be able to think strategically for the longer term and also tactically for the short term. If you can multi task all the better.

The more senior the marketing position, the more leadership of people and projects becomes important. You need to have strong interpersonal skills, high levels of persuasion and influence and the ability to attract supporters.

Best thing about this occupation

Variety of tasks, lack of repetitive work, creating and launching new products and services, or revitalising a tired product or business are all exciting. Understanding the end user using market research is also revealing. Marketing tends to be the ‘hub of the wheel’ in an organisation, with other departments supporting the marketing initiative. As such contact with internal and external stakeholders to knit together a plan or argue your case is always stimulating.

Worst thing about this career

There is a saying ‘success has many fathers, failure only has one – the marketing manager’, which is pretty true. Marketing people usually take the brunt of a launch failure and can derail their careers in doing so.