I am thankful to Prof. Wendy Greenwood for arranging an exciting guest lecture of Blair Roebuck. Blair is the Director of Marketing Science at Valtech.
Marketing science, a rather odd term, is about the unification of business and technology. It is the area where technology and business combine to find solutions to complex business problems. The role offered by the department is called Marketing analyst(Sounds fancy). Being a Marketing Analyst would expose you to a wide range of functions in the marketing sphere. It provides an opportunity to work across domains and allows you to work on complex problems.
Speaking about the role. There are four main expectations from the role:
- Data wrangling: Finding, cleaning & structuring data.
- Data Analysis: Setting hypotheses and testing them, finding meaning in data, and applying them to a specific business context.
- Subject Expertise: Knowledge of the business and crafting the strategy to achieve business outcomes.
- Communicator: Communicating and presenting data insights that close the gap between algorithms and executives.
As I stated earlier, the role provides one with an opportunity to work with multiple people for multiple functions such as :
- Solution architects: For crafting data strategies & integrations that can ensure that client’s business objectives are technically achieved.
- Developers: For building custom data visualizations that foster digital adoption.
- Product owners: For ensuring the crucial work doing discovery is translated in a manner that the team can build and create.
- UX/creative: For fostering alignment between the data & optimization roadmap crafted and the experience.
- Project managers: For encouraging cross-team collaboration, and elevating new opportunities within a project.
- Account managers: For continually pushing the client and engaging in new opportunities that will elevate their digital maturity.
To simplify it, Marketing Science takes complex data and converts it into business insights to achieve maximum ROI for the clients.
There are three pillars of Marketing Science:
- Analytics and data.
- Technology,
- Business
This career option looks quite appealing to me as it allows working on a complex business problem, finding solutions, and measuring results. Being able to test my skills and come up with creative solutions is quite appealing to me. I feel that most of the junior positions in marketing only provide an opportunity to work in silos, but this position is different.
When I first heard about the position, I had many questions popping into my mind. What I wanted to understand the most were the intricacies of the role, and how does it fit with the other roles of marketing. The best part was Blair addressed the question before I could get an opportunity to ask her about that. Her explanation was quite detailed. Learning about the function and fit of the role got me more excited. I would love to explore more about this new field.
The things that I learned from the speaker were to be open, ask for connections, and investing time and effort into building relationships. I believe these are the foundation of good networking. And networking is not only necessary for getting a job but also for a successful career.
It was a wonderful experience, and the lessons learned would help me throughout my working life.
