Marketing Degree

Sales are the heart of most businesses. Learning how to drive sales—to market products through promotion, packaging, advertising, and sheer salesmanship—could be your ticket to the upper reaches of the business world. And, a marketing degree is precisely what you need to get there.

A marketing degree covers a variety of topics. To get such a degree, you not only have to learn how to sell a product but how to analyze consumer trends, conceive products that people will want to buy (or, alternatively, persuade people that they want to buy the product that you’ve conceived), survey consumer opinions, design entire product lines, create effective advertisements, create appealing packages, determine pricing strategies, and manage the reputations of well-known brands (or take not-so-well-known brands and make them into well-known brands). You’ll learn all this and more while earning your marketing degree.

To get a marketing degree, you need first to find a school that offers one. Then, you’ll need to determine how advanced a degree you want to earn. The more advanced the degree, the more time and money you’ll need to invest in your studies. For quick entrance into the marketing field, you can obtain an associate’s marketing degree from a two-year community college or technical school, but this may limit the range of jobs that you will be offered, and your chances for career advancement may be limited. Alternatively, you can elect to work toward a bachelor’s degree at a four-year college. This marketing degree will open far more doors for you and could get you a job with a prestigious advertising firm or company with a marketing department. If you really want to launch your career in style, you can put an extra year or two into your education and earn a master’s-level marketing degree. This is an expensive alternative, and a graduate school may not be easy to get into unless your undergraduate grades are high, but it will almost guarantee that you’ll land a good job with a top firm and have the greatest opportunity for career advancement. A doctorate in marketing is also possible, but this is more important if you plan to teach marketing at the university level.

Whichever alternative you choose, a career in marketing will pay you back many times over for the time and money that you invest in obtaining your marketing degree.