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Marketing & growth

Business & Economics

Getting people to find, understand and choose a product.

This suits you if…

You like running experiments and reading the honest result, you write a great deal without minding it, and you can stay relentlessly consistent about one specific customer for years rather than reaching for the next clever idea.

Look elsewhere if…

You want your results to reflect your effort. A platform changes its rules overnight and the numbers move without you having done anything wrong. This is also usually the first function cut when a company tightens, which is a structural fact rather than bad luck.

What the work actually is

What the work is actually like

Running experiments and reading the results. You write the message, choose where it appears, set a budget, and then look at what actually happened, which is usually less than you hoped. Performance work is very numerical; brand work is much more about judgement, research and consistency over years. Both involve a lot of writing.

The catch

You are measured constantly and publicly, and the numbers are often outside your control. A market shifts, a platform changes its rules overnight, and the results move without you doing anything wrong. It's also the function that gets cut first when a company tightens, and the channels you specialise in keep being replaced.

What people get wrong about it

That it is about being creative and clever. The largest part of doing it well is unglamorous: understanding a specific customer properly, then being relentlessly consistent. Most campaigns fail on a wrong audience, not on a weak idea.

The jobs inside this area

  • Brand manager
  • Digital-marketing specialist
  • Growth / performance marketer
  • Market researcher
  • PR specialist

A list, not a recommendation. You narrow it, we don’t.

What this kind of work usually offers

Making things · Working with people · IndependenceA generalisation about the sphere, not a promise about a salary. Pay and security vary enormously by country and employer.

How you get there

The one-line version

Marketing, business or communications, or a portfolio of things you actually grew. Running a real page, shop or campaign counts.

Stage by stage

  1. While you are still at school

    Run something real with an audience: a page, a small shop, an event, a school campaign. Pay attention to what made the numbers move. That record is the portfolio.

  2. What you study

    Marketing, business or communications; also fine from psychology, design or journalism. Employers here weigh demonstrable results and a portfolio unusually heavily against the transcript.

  3. How the first years actually go

    Executing rather than deciding: scheduling, copy, reports, campaign admin. The judgement about strategy arrives once you've watched enough campaigns succeed and fail to have an instinct worth paying for.

Where this work lives, and how you reach it

What you would study for it

Each says what the first year is really made of, and who should study something else instead.

17 countries · 29 cities · 33 institutions named for this field. Each one states its catch as well as its appeal.

Without leaving home

2 of the routes that need no visa and no move lead into this field.

Test it this month

Free, and finishable in a few evenings

Take something you want people to do, whether that is attend, buy or sign up. Write two different messages for it, show each to a different group, and count. That's the whole discipline compressed into a week.