If you like thinking about marketing strategies but you don’t like getting involved in sales, you might be interested in a market research career. As a market research person, you won’t be designing marketing strategies, but you’ll be gathering the data and information that will inform the marketing strategies that your company uses. You’ll be exploring many different markets and finding out how other companies price and market their products successfully. With a market research career, you will also be exploring demographics and community economics. You’ll be able to be in dialogue with the folks who design the marketing strategies, and give them useful feedback about what has worked and not worked for other businesses. You are the reality check that grounds brainstormed ideas by checking them against the facts at hand. You will also have to like the process of research and presentation. In a sense, there is some sales involved because you may be asked to frame the data you collect to look favorable to potential investors.
Usually, a company that is hiring you to do market research will be selling their business plan to investors or just members of the team. You may be asked to make the data turn out to look like what was hoped for, but your job is ultimately to present accurate data. Every business needs certain personality types to function properly. They need brain-stormers, strategists, routine and detail people, due-diligence enthusiasts, and even nay-sayers who specialize in seeing quickly whether an idea is viable or not and why. These are the people who can see around the corner and predict what will happen. To others, this may seem like a kind of 6th sense, but it is actually just about having a lot of experience and background data that they easily match up in their minds with the proposal at hand. Which type are you? If you are always pushing for more research, or you enjoy evaluating the viability of a project, a market research career may be for you.
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