Beyond the Ivory Tower

A Hot Market for Social Scientists in Market Research

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By Robin Wagner

Research training in the social sciences leaves graduate students armed with particularly marketable skills for careers outside academe. A major call for these skills comes from the field of marketing and market research, the art of analyzing consumer trends and behavior.

Since marketing is such a fundamental element of enterprise, job opportunities in market research can be found across the business spectrum: in large corporations selling everything from automobiles to instant soup as well as in consulting firms, advertising agencies, and trade organizations.

Some market research involves quantitative methods common to sociology, psychology, and some aspects of economics and political science. The information revolution has allowed corporations to gather data about our consumer habits, and the corporations have turned to highly skilled analysts to mine this information and predict our reactions to, and interest in, their products.

Another aspect of market research, known as "user experience" or "product design," employs ethnographers and scholars skilled in qualitative-research tools like textual and visual analysis. User-experience analysts conduct consumer interviews and field observations to understand at a very specific level what consumers need and how they use a product. Their insights are employed in product design and development, as well as in the creation of marketing campaigns.

Roughly 10 to 15 percent of social scientists leave academe for the for-profit environment right out of graduate school. Ph.D.'s who have entered market-research jobs typically encounter starting salaries somewhat higher than they would earn in academe: perhaps $40,000 to $50,000 compared with $35,000 to $45,000 for a new assistant professor.

Graduate students also point out a significant difference between conducting their research in an academic setting versus a business arena.

"A project that would have taken a year for me to do in graduate school, I have maybe a month to work on it now," says Kristian May Floyd, who works in the strategic planning and research division of DDB Worldwide Communications Group, a major advertising and communications agency in Chicago. "Also, we don't do research for the sake of research. Our work is used immediately."

Ms. Floyd earned her doctorate in sociology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998, but discovered during her first year in graduate school that she did not want an academic career. Nevertheless, she valued and enjoyed her graduate training in sociology, and early on began exploring career options for Ph.D.'s.

Since she had majored in advertising as an undergraduate, Ms. Floyd first turned her search efforts to that field. She took advantage of the campus career center and attended advertising presentations aimed at business majors on the campus. She researched the industry thoroughly, learned about the various avenues within advertising, and identified summer internship opportunities sponsored by the American Association of Advertising Agencies and by other major agencies.

Her research and some 50 job letters culminated in her landing an internship at Leo Burnett in Chicago during the summer before she began her dissertation research. Ms. Floyd's summer experience was so successful, "they wanted to hire me and were encouraging me to leave academics." It was tempting, but she says she wanted the "personal growth experience and the real challenge" of earning a Ph.D., so she turned down the Burnett offer. However, she stayed in close contact with her supervisor from the agency, and continued working for them on a part-time basis as she carried out her dissertation research. That not only paid some bills, it kept her in the industry.

Finally, when she was close to finishing her doctoral work, she conducted another job search and landed her present position at DDB. Ms. Floyd describes herself as an "advocate for the consumer." She makes use of proprietary information like data sets and focus-group interviews to gain insights into the consumers of her clients' products. "I have enough time to make sure the data is accurate," she says, "but I also depend a lot on what I have already come to know about consumer behavior."

Like Ms. Floyd, Frank Romagosa also discovered in graduate school that he did not want an academic career. Working on an anthropology degree at the University of Chicago, Mr. Romagosa knew several former students in the department who had already joined a local market-research company founded by another alumnus of the university. With his dissertation in its early stages, Mr. Romagosa decided to interview for a position with the company, known at the time as "elab." "I was surprised to discover that the work was very compelling," he remembers, "but in the end I decided to finish my Ph.D. after all."

Then in 1999, a seemingly plum academic opportunity ended up being the final impetus for Mr. Romagosa to leave academe. A postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford seemed too good to pass up, but when he went to investigate the position, he found the academic environment "conservative and stultifying." He called back elab and asked for his application to be reactivated.

"The first week commuting to my new job, I felt tremendously young," Romagosa recalls. "I was learning new things and felt young for a 30-year-old, rather than being a 30-something graduate student and feeling bedraggled." Mr. Romagosa, who defends his dissertation this month, is in his second year as an "experience modeler" at Sapient Inc., an e-business consulting firm that acquired elab shortly after he began work there.

"A certain order of skepticism" is the essential training from graduate school that he considers most important to his present occupation. He works on interdisciplinary teams at Sapient with technology experts, designers, business strategists, and Web content developers. Experience modelers are most often involved in the initial stages of the team's work for a client, setting up a research program to understand fully the customers' needs and expectations. The results of the research set the direction for the team to then create a business solution.

For instance, when he worked on a project concerning employee stock options, Mr. Romagosa acted much like an ethnographer, conducting a series of interviews in several cities to gain an understanding of how people regarded this kind of compensation benefit. The amount of time you have to work on such projects is the essential difference between academe and the business world, he agrees. "There's very little time in the business world," he explains. "You learn to step back and assess the problem quickly. I like the challenge of having to work so efficiently."