Want to do marketing degree...MBA with conc. in marketing or MSc in Marketing?

[sanantone]

So is this coming from first hand experience or when you browsed through curriculum?
What would you suggest alternatively?
You don't think a degree like this would be useful at all?

I've never worked in marketing; I just know what marketing curriculum normally covers. I would often search for jobs looking for a generic social science degree or a degree related to psychology or sociology and marketing research often came up. If they're asking for people with bachelor's degrees in marketing, psychology, sociology, social science, other social science degrees, statistics, and business administration, my guess is that a masters degree in marketing is overkill. The marketing analytics program teaches research and statistical analysis skills that could be useful, but a generic masters in marketing is just fluff. However, you said you don't want to be a number cruncher. I don't know why one would get a marketing analytics degree if they don't want to do anything too quantitative.

I would assume that marketing research is just like any other research field. When you're a professor at a university, you can pay someone or partner with someone to do the quantitative stuff with your research. You'd be put at a huge disadvantage at a job if you went in saying that you want to design research questions and the results, but you don't want to do data collection through data science or analyze the results. You'll just give the impression that your skills in statistics aren't strong, and they'll wonder how you can interpret the results if you don't understand the statistics behind them. Plus, one of the common job requirements in technical jobs where results need to be given to management is that the employee have the ability to explain the results to laymen.

In my doctoral program, they beefed up the statistics requirements because they realized graduates will have a tough time finding jobs outside of academia without strong quantitative skills. They also learned that universities have a strong preference for abilities in quantitative research over qualitative research. People underestimate the quantitative skills a lot of people with graduate degrees in psychology have. A lot of statistics courses are taught by people with psychology degrees. If I were looking for someone who could do research, do statistical analysis, and understand the psychology behind the results, I would expect someone with a psychology degree to wipe the floor with someone with that marketing analytics degree.