If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, you may want to know how to give yourself an advantage in your profession. One way is to get a college degree, and marketing is a good major to choose if you want to learn how to promote your business and communicate with your customers. Marketing is a business major, so you’ll take general business courses along with specialized lessons in consumer behavior and product promotion.
Applying Your Skills from a Marketing Degree
A marketing degree gives you insight into the thinking of a consumer and helps you to understand what makes products and services attractive to people. It’s not necessary to have a degree in order to become an entrepreneur, but it can help you get funding for your business in some cases. A marketing degree may even help you sell your business to investors when you’re in the startup phase of development. The general business knowledge you’ll get from your degree will help you manage your company, but the real purpose of a marketing degree is to prepare students to become advertisers in various forms of media.
Many of the skills you’ll learn as a marketing major won’t directly translate to your business startup, so you may want to consider other majors before enrolling in any courses. In general, as an entrepreneur, it’s best to get a degree in business or in a subject related to your business. For example, if you’re going to be developing nutritional supplements, you may want to major or minor in business, biology or nutrition. If you’re going to design airplane wings, you should major in business or engineering. However, if you’re going to open an advertising agency or an online or mobile marketing company, a marketing degree would definitely be appropriate.
Staying Competitive in a Challenging Environment
One reason it’s such a good idea to get a four-year degree before setting out to accomplish your goals as an aspiring entrepreneur is that college gives you the fundamental critical thinking skills you need to compete with other businesses and people in your industry. If you’re planning to open a small business such as a restaurant, car wash or retail store, you don’t need any formal education as long as you have the money to invest in capital and rent for your business. If you’re thinking of founding a national business such as a smartphone service or media outlet, a marketing degree can help you visualize a national advertising campaign to drum up publicity for your launch.
Unless you already have quite a bit of executive experience, you’ll need the college-level skills you acquire through a business degree to manage your employees and lead your company through the challenging first years of operation. While a focus on marketing could prepare you for these tasks, it’s meant to be more of an introduction to the world of consumer research and product promotion. You may find yourself enrolling in a two-year master of business administration program after graduation. If this is the case, it would perhaps be better simply to major in business as an undergraduate.
The United States is arguably the best country in the world to start a company because of the strong consumer demand and favorable rules for business. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur thinking of ways to position yourself for a company launch, a business degree with at least a few marketing courses should be a strong consideration.
