What Can You Do With a Marketing Degree?

By Lindsey Murphy

The marketing major is a broad centralization of business that can go into a few different career directions. Here are 10 different careers you can have with a marketing degree, including an average median salary and a brief description of duties in the career.

1. Marketing Manager

Salary: $127,130

Job Description: Working with advertising or promotion managers to create a

marketing strategy based on market characteristics and financial aspects of product development.

2. Sales Representative

Salary: $55,020

Job Description: Developing a relationship with current and prospective clients and informing them about products, prices, availability, etc.

3. Marketing Specialist

Salary: $61,290

Job Description: Gathering information on competitors’ prices and collecting and analyzing customer demographics to gain a better knowledge of consumers’ preferences.

4. Sales Manager

Salary: $110,660

Job Description: Overseeing sales, resolving customer complaints, and determining profitability.

5. Public Relations Specialist

Salary: $55,680

Job Description: Communicating for information from the media and directing communication plans to maintain a favorable image to the public.

6. Account Manager

Salary: $101,510

Job Description: Writing press releases, creating and maintaining relationships with clients, and representing company’s image.

7. Human Resources Specialist

Salary: $57,420

Job Description: Includes employment duties including hiring, terminations, promotions, and assisting employee relations issues.

8. Assistant Store Manager

Salary: $37,860

Job Description: Assisting customers and providing quality service and goods.

9. Business Intelligence Manager

Salary: $83,410

Job Description: Networking in order to stay ahead of business trends and collecting business intelligence data from reports or public information.

10. Operations Manager

Salary: $97,270

Job Description: Overseeing suppliers to ensure they are providing necessary goods and services and directing departments in charge of production, pricing, sales, or distribution of products.

Pfeffer, Jennifer. "Rasmussen College." Rasmussen College - Regionally Accredited College Online and on Campus. N.p., 29 Feb. 2016. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

Clarity in the Marketplace

By: Jen Mylett

In the marketplace, you need to define your message to your customers. Ask yourself. . . is your message clear?

When it comes to marketing, it is essential to maintain clarity!  Your marketing messages need to clearly state what you’re trying to promote, the message you are trying to get across, what the pros of what you offer are, and why potential clients should do business with you.


Some are more apt to lacking clarity than others. For instance, most small or independent businesses have difficulty with getting their point across efficiently. If there is nothing that’s motivating a customer to engage with a company be it on their website or even in the store, odds are those customers will be uninterested and leave! Because of this, potential sales and enquiries are diminished.

When lesser known companies create websites for their goods or services, most times (not all) the wording on the homepage rarely gives you the main information you want to see. Instead, you will most times just read a nice welcome message and a long, boring mission statement saying what the what to accomplish. Some websites don’t understand how to keep it simple. So when there is nothing for the visitor to interact with, there’s nothing to motivate them to further inform themselves.

To build your marketing message, you need to be able to be flexible and willing to change. Take your existing marketing strategies, your website, your flyers, emails, etc. and edit them to more clearly explain what your business does, how it will benefit the customer or reader, and why they need to buy the good or service off of you as soon as possible.

Prompt 3: Exploring Communication

By Allison Zwarka

            I currently hold a sales and marketing internship with MSU Athletics. This past week I was in the office and had the chance to talk to one of my bosses, Jim Donetelli, the director of digital marketing and fan engagement. He said being in sports marketing, a lot of their communication is done over phone, in person, or via email in order to make sure everything is running smoothly as well as getting done the proper way.

           Emails are an essential communication medium in business. On a daily basis Donetelli writes about 20-30 emails, has 2 meetings, and talks to 10 different people. “Things can get hectic and in order to keep track of everything we have planned and get in contact with our sponsors we must communicate clearly, email is usually the best way to do so,” Donetelli told me. Without writing a clear email though, things can get confusing and out of hand. Verbal and written communication skills are so important in this field because the bulk of what you do is working with others to get your message out about a product or event.

          There are a lot of misconceptions in the marketing field, mainly based on ingenuity and manipulation. Jim says in order to address these thoughts marketers must work hard to talk with and show people, through their hard work, that those claims are far from true. “Marketing is not just manipulating people into buying something, it is getting a product out there, promoting it, and making connections to create happy customers,” Donetelli then said, “Marketing is an interactive industry where you must have the skills to be able to communicate well with others, if you can’t do that you're probably not in marketing.” He said marketers deal with these misconceptions a lot, and you just have to work around them to do your job.

Donetelli, Jim. Personal Interview. 9 February. 2017.

Food Industry Marketing

By: Shannon Crilley

      In today's day in age it seems that everyone is trying to eat healthier. The more people learn about how bad fast food and other fat filled foods are for you, a new trend seems to be arising. More people are trying to eat organic and low calorie meals and the food companies are on to this new trend. In order to increase sales in healthy food options and keep their customers happy, companies need to market their products as "healthy", "low calorie, and "high in protein" wether those claims be true or not. Nate Morrow from The Huffington Post claims that companies are not trying to make you healthy, but simply trying to sell a product. He writes 4 tricks that marketing teams can pull on customers in order to make the sale. Dishonest or genius? You decide.

1) Nutrition labels are not always 100% accurate- In 2011, the U.S. Government warned the public with a "serious oversight dilemma" regarding the FDA's ability to monitor false nutrition labels. The FDA allows nutrition facts to be off up to 20%. Marketing teams see this and use it to their advantage in order to make the healthy sale.
2) Food companies can mislead you by manipulating serving sizes- Companies rely on the fact that not all shoppers diligently read the nutrition labels and may mistake a "400 Calorie" item to really only be for half of one serving.
3) Zero grams of trans fat might not really be zero- In the U.S. according to the FDA, any amount of fat or sugar under 0.5 grams can be labeled as 0 grams of fats or sugars. People want to eat food with very little fats and sugars so marketing teams can use this to their advantage and promote 0 grams of fat, weather that be completely true or not.
4) "Fat Free" and "Sugar Free" products still may not be healthy at all- Companies often replace the fats and sugars in their products with artificial chemicals in order to still make their food or drink taste good and still remain "healthy". The soft drink industry is a big user of this method.

      Now after reading all those tricks it's easy to see that not all foods are as healthy as they claim to be. However, in the business world the producer has to know what the consumer wants. In this case, if the consumer wants healthier food, the producer is going to find a way to sell them healthier food. Marketing teams have to be ahead of the current trends and realize what people want and figure out how to give them that without necessarily completely changing the products they are selling. Some might think this is slightly dishonest or shady but the job of a marketer is to connect with the consumers and sell products. Despite the previous facts regarding FDA health regulations, the world is becoming healthier. Marketers in the food industry have to be ready for lots of new vegan and vegetarian trends and have to figure out a way to keep those costumers happy and healthy.



Morrow, Nate. "4 Shocking Facts About Food Industry Marketing You Should Know." The   Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, n.p. Web. 07 Feb. 2017.

The Holistic Marketing in the 21st Century

By Shuting Qi and Allison Zwarka

When people talk about marketing, they tend to only think about marketing one product in order to increase its sales. Marketing goes beyond the superficial understanding though. In the 21^st century, marketing is progressing to a more complete system. The term holistic marketing was proposed by Philip Kotler, a renowned author and professor in the marketing field. Holistic marketing is a concept of considering a business as a whole including its position in the economy and in social value to promote a business’ interaction with a broader pool of customers. Holistic marketing has four major parts: relationship marketing, internal marketing, societal marketing and integrated marketing.

Relationship marketing

Relationship marketing indicates that one business should keep a long-term, double-bottom-line relationship to its customers, suppliers, distributors, retailers and other important partners. A strong marketing network can provide more profits to business.

Integrated marketing

Integrated marketing is a concept that uses the target customers’ needs to manage a business' strategies as a whole. Another important idea of integrated marketing is operating different marketing activities in order to create synergy.

Internal marketing

Internal marketing refers to when all of the employees in one business understand and master the correct marketing philosophy of the company. Employees as the internal customers should combine their efforts for one purpose, this will lead to other departments fully supporting the marketing department.

Societal marketing

The Societal marketing is a method to test whether their marketing methods are useful or not for customers. One business would study their products performance in the market and reflect on the feedback from buyers. The bottom line of societal marketing is looking into what the customer wants and considering long term interests in order to create a better product.

Kotler, Philip, Kevin Lane Keller, and Taihong Lu. Marketing Management in China. Singapore: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009. Print.
Agarwal, Ankita. Holistic Marketing. Digital image. Concept of Holistic Marketing. Project Guru, n.d. Web. <https://i0.wp.com/www.projectguru.in/publications/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/pic.png?ssl=1>.