Marketing Programs Revisited

As I've discussed before, I had not been able to completely eliminate all marketing PhD programs from consideration, and the more I think about it, the more compelling the arguments are to apply to at least a few. Of course, marketing PhD programs are a small, niche market, unlike psychology programs, and it's proven rather surprisingly difficult to glean any information about them online (whereas it's super easy to find web sites dedicated to helping you get into psychology programs in general, finding information about social psychology, and convincing you that you would be a fool to get a psychology PhD). It's like panning for gold to find any nuggets of real information among all the chatter about MBA programs. But I have been able to find out some things, much of it from psychology sources, amusingly enough.

I spend the entire day today researching specific marketing PhD programs and taking copious notes, particularly on the professors and the students. I still have a lot of this to do. It was kind of tedious, and my mouse hand got quite tired, but it's necessary work and ultimately was more acceptable to me today than demonstrating (or to be more accurate: attempting with abiding desperation to demonstrate) that the integral from 0 to infinity of sin x/x dx is convergent. It's good to remember what all this calculus-induced headache is for.

Some Advantages to Marketing PhD Programs:

(1) Comparing psych departments to marketing departments, I have found that there tend to be clusters of professors specializing in consumer behavior-oriented research in (some) marketing programs, where any given psych department is lucky to have one or maybe two professors in a compatible field of study, even when that field is defined broadly to include general topics such as attitude change. This means that in those marketing programs, my area of interest is not some sideline to the main work occurring in social cognition or the psychology of peace or whatnot, but is a primary, thriving research field with many professors and students working on the subject. This is appealing. It also sounds practical since I am not stuck hoping like hell that Professor X, the one person doing compatible work, is not an asshole and is taking on grad students right now and is not going to move to some other school right after I get accepted.

And I appear not to be totally alone in this perception. According to Psi Chi, the national honor society in psychology, "an undergraduate student with a degree in psychology and a genuine interest in consumer psychology would be wise to seek graduate training within a professional school or department" because so many of the psych PhDs in the field are now housed within business schools and are training their own students there rather than in the psych department.

A surprisingly large number of marketing professors are publishing in the psychology literature also, including top social and personality psychology publications. Many if not most members of the APA Division 23 - Society for Consumer Psychology are working out of business schools.

(2) Marketing programs are more likely than straight psych departments to have people doing the kind of interdisciplinary work in psychology/economics that interests me, since, duh, marketing is an obvious nexus between these two disciplines. So while the flexibility to go into a totally non-consumer related aspect of psychology is gone (so long emergent properties of complex social categories), I have more flexibility in pursuing behavioral decision-making, experimental economics, etc.

(3) Let's talk money and job security, now and in the future. Since marketing degrees are so, duh, marketable in the private sector, the business schools have to pay both students and professors more money. (See: supply and demand.) The stipend for marketing students is apparently often twice as high as stipends for psych students; I have not done any exhaustive comparison myself, but the marketing programs do seem to be paying more. It was not unusual for me to see figures in the range of $15,000 - $22,000 per year, with all tuition and fees paid. The programs themselves are also better funded, which can mean better and more accessible equipment, etc. And starting salaries for marketing professors is something in the range of $90,000 a year.

But the thing that really gets me is that everything I have read says that it is much easier to get an academic position as a marketing professor than as a psychology professor. This is so true that many people who get social psychology PhDs in consumer psychology end up getting hired by business schools, though sometimes after having to do post-docs (which is another couple of years of being paid squat to do research and is not something I saw on the CV of a single marketing professor who came directly from a marketing PhD program). Robert read that the number of openings in a given year for marketing professors is less than the number of marketing PhD graduates, hence they have to make up the difference with psychology students. This is very different from the psych world, where the supply of psych grads outstrips the available jobs in academia (esp in research-oriented universities) by a large margin.

But couldn't I just get my social psychology degree with a focus on consumer psychology and get hired by a business school and all is fine and dandy? Well, maybe I could. However, I will have spent the last several years teaching classes like Intro to Psychology and Intro to Social Psychology and not Intro to Marketing and Consumer Behavior. That seems like a kind of awkward transition. Why not do the marketing degree if I am going to be working in marketing?

Although I would not be happy spending the rest of my life researching and teaching boring aspects of marketing like professional selling, retailing, supply chain analysis, customer management, or entrepreurship, there are plenty of opportunities to focus on fun topics like persuasion, decision processes, emotional attachment, consumption of time, psychology of financial decision making, memory and judgment, consumer perceptions, social relations theory, motivation, self-regulation, affect and cognition in customer satisfaction, future oriented consumption behaviors, affect biases in processing, meta-cognition, non-conscious goal pursuit, preference construction, and food consumption (to name just a few of the research areas listed by professors I looked at today).

(4) Older students who have spent some time in the workplace are much more common among marketing PhD programs. (Psych programs tend to like to get their hands on kids when they're young and stupid and don't know any better.) I think I will be less of an anomaly as a 35 year old applicant who has spent 8 years doing market research management and might even get a little credit for having some real world experience. As a psych applicant, all my years in the workforce are basically a negative.

Disadvantages of Marketing PhD Programs:

(1) Unlike psychology, where masters degrees are usually treated as suspect for PhD applicants (because most people in the experimental psych disciplines get their masters en route to their PhD and masters degrees are often pursued as a remedial degree for those whose BAs were lousy and did not entail enough research to prepare them for "real" grad school), marketing programs often prefer them and some of them even require them. However, I have seen programs which claim to want students with masters degrees but then have several current students who do not, and there are certainly programs that specifically state that they do not care about masters degrees, particularly MBAs, which bear no relationship to a PhD program preparing one for academic research. I think I will be somewhat less competitive without a masters degree but not hugely so.

(2) More problematic is that the damn programs are so freaking small. They typically only admit 1 - 5 students per year, out of anywhere from 100 - 300 applicants. Yikes. Even if you assume that the majority of those applicants are totally unqualified, the numbers are still not favorable. Of course, the kind of top psych PhD programs that eventually graduate people into decent university appointments have among the lowest acceptance rates around, so I'm basically embarking on a risky enterprise no matter what I do. I am going to have to just look really, really good, period.

(3) They also like their applicants to have a strong quantitative background, more so than psychology. I am working on mine and will be able to meet/exceed the minimum requirements, but this is going to be a weak spot for me going up against the amazingly large number of mathematicians, engineers, statisticians, and econometricians who end up in marketing PhD programs. However, I hope that most of those guys (and yes, they are mostly men) will be entering "quantitative" rather than "behavioral" marketing tracks and hence I will not be competing with them quite as directly. The women (yep, it's the classic gender divide) in the behavioral programs, particularly the Americans, look more like me (or me as I will be when I apply) in their math background.

(4) Many programs also require general business coursework in accounting, finance, management, etc., as prerequisites. I am not thrilled at the prospect of doing this. Fortunately, programs that are serious about the business background also tend to be the ones that absolutely require an MBA as a qualification for the program, so I can just eliminate them from consideration. Some programs don't seem to give a flying fuck whether you have taken these classes or not and frankly state that a background in the social sciences and/or quantitative subjects is the preparation they prefer to see. Some, like UT, want a small enough number of these classes (which can sometimes be taken after you are admitted, if you are otherwise impressive enough) to be worth doing if it means getting to attend a top program.

(5) I will have to take the GMAT for a lot of these programs, which is another test prep, expense, and general source of stress and pain in the ass. But if I'm lucky, the GMAT will not be totally different from the GRE so it will not require a huge amount of extra study. And I recognize it's silly to be concerned about extra study, given what I'm willing to do to get into a good program in general. I just am iffy on standardized tests because I feel that I don't test very well. This perception is really arrogant, I grant, from someone who scored a 1540 or so on the GRE when I took it 10 years ago, but it feels true even if it's not and that perception is a little anxiety-inducing. I also don't know how well I will do now, since 10 years is a long time ago. Obviously, I plan to prep for the exams, but I would not be surprised to score somewhat lower than when all that geometry and stuff was fresh and I was more in the groove of taking tests. I would like to take the GRE earlier rather than later so I can see where I stand vis-a-vis average GRE scores for various programs.

(6) At the end of the day, I will get a job in a business school, teaching marketing and behavioral courses to undergraduate business majors, MBA students, and maybe eventually marketing PhD students. This seems less fun than teaching psychology students. I am really into this whole thing for the research, but teaching is a big part of the job and it needs to be relatively enjoyable (or at minimum endurable). I will have a better feel for this once I have actually taken intro to marketing this coming semester and consumer behavior next semester. A couple of years ago, I read an intro to marketing book and was surprised to find the material quite interesting, so perhaps there is some hope for me here. But this is still a primary downside to the marketing PhD path.

(7) If I decide that consumer psychology isn't for me, I'm basically screwed. In a psychology department, I can make the transition to another area of social psychology where I know I have an abundance of interests. It is my prediction that in a marketing program that is a good fit, where the professors are working on psychology-based behavioral research, I'll be happy, but that means that I have to be even pickier about marketing programs than I am psychology programs.