Marketing Major
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About the Major
Whether students want to develop core skills in selling and sales management (by following a professional sales track) or learn how to gather and analyze customer intelligence using market research and consumer analytics (by following a digital marketing track), Elon’s marketing department offers an engaging curriculum with hands-on learning.
Jobs in Marketing
- Marketing associate/researcher
- Purchasing agent
- Sales consultant
- Account representative
- Brand manager
- Product developer
Past Elon Marketing Internships
- AT&T
- Bank of America
- Cleveland Clinic
- PepsiCo
- Wayfair
Related Majors
College connections paved the way for a meaningful marketing career
Making connections — and the art of relationship building — is a core practice at Elon and one of the reasons Joe Byrd chose the university to pursue his career in marketing.
The small class sizes coupled with an environment that encourages students and faculty to engage with one another — including through the weekly College Coffee tradition — was something that Byrd found appealing.
In fact, growing up, he saw for himself how special those relationships were because his father is an Elon professor.
“I had seen the way students connected with my dad and the way he interacted with students,” said Byrd, a 2023 graduate with a marketing and finance double major, “and I thought, ‘Well, if this is the Elon way, I would love to be here.’ ”
The ability to connect with people at Elon — a skill that was honed by regularly chatting with his professors and participating in sales competitions in his junior and senior years— has helped Byrd in the real world at his job as a cloud security consultant at Zscaler. Not only is he able to establish fast relationships with clients, but he knows the people around him in the office will only make him stronger, and he makes sure to engage with his co-workers on a daily basis.
What the marketing major allowed me to do is understand business really broadly but then also just cultivate the skill of crafting a really compelling message.
“Marketing as a major, as a field, it really comes down to connection,” he said. “It’s not so much in the business world about being a super strong solo cowboy, like the Lone Ranger. It’s about having a great team with you.”
Marketing is also about crafting compelling messages, which Byrd learned all about while participating as a member of the Elon Sales Team — a group that competes at sales competitions across the state and country. At these competitions, team members learn about a particular product and then try to sell it to someone posing as a buyer.
“You’re being an actual salesperson in that moment, so it’s all the research you’ve done before, it’s knowing how to tell a compelling story,” he said. “What the marketing major allowed me to do is understand business really broadly but then also just cultivate the skill of crafting a really compelling message.”
In his job at Zscaler, he makes sure he tailors each message to the specific company and the specific person to whom he’s talking. “That way when I’m reaching out and talking to them, I’m not just presenting a general solution, I’m showing an understanding.”
Byrd encourages new marketing students to take advantage of all the opportunities Elon offers, not only by joining groups like the Elon Sales Team but seeking out advice from their professors. Another opportunity: joining Pi Sigma Epsilon, a fraternal organization in sales, marketing and management that had been dormant for a few years but was rechartered by a group of students, including Byrd, during his senior year.
“What got me excited about rechartering Pi Sigma Epsilon was that we were going to be a business fraternity that was focused on soft skills — giving a quick pitch about yourself or learning how to introduce yourself or learning how to speak in public or tell a compelling pitch for a product,” Byrd said. “As a business fraternity, we wanted to essentially give people confidence.”
At sales team competitions, he saw that students at universities with Pi Sigma Epsilon chapters had developed certain critical soft skills as freshmen and sophomores so that by the time they were juniors and seniors, they were entering competitions with a confidence that can’t be taught in a classroom.
“Especially in this year of work, I would say probably the most important thing I’ve done is getting to know people, networking with people,” Byrd said. “That was a skill I really picked up at Elon, and it’s been serving me well so far.”
Did You Know?
- Elon’s Accelerated 3+1 program gives marketing majors the opportunity to earn a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration as well as a Master of Science in Business Analytics in just four years. The majority of undergraduate coursework is completed in the first three years, with graduate coursework in the fourth year.
- The marketing major’s digital marketing track teaches students how to integrate marketing communications within a broad realm of avenues and how to digitize that information and analyze the results based on data.
- The professional sales track gives students access to specialized training that focuses on sales concepts combined with real-world sales techniques. The courses allow students to improve communication and selling/persuasion skills, which today’s employers across all professions seek in their new hires.
- There are plenty of opportunities for marketing majors to get hands-on experience. They can engage in sales role-play simulations using technology in the Chandler Family Professional Sales Center; participate in national sales competitions or market research projects for local organizations; and join the Elon chapter of the American Marketing Association; Women in Sales; and/or the marketing/sales fraternity Pi Sigma Epsilon. Students are also required to complete at least one internship for academic credit.