DRIVERS OF MARKETING CAREER SUCCESS

Abstract

What are the success factors for careers in marketing? This important question is lacking a definite answer so far. This paper presents an empirical study of the drivers of marketing career success. First, we interviewed renowned marketing executives about the characteristics that, in their view, make successful marketers. Next, we analyzed data from a career survey among the alumni of a major business school, with career success as the dependent variable. We identified three distinctive factors that are related with success in marketing: extraversion, independence, and breadth of experience. Furthermore, our findings suggest that a style of learning from concrete experiences (learning from “what happens”) serves a marketer better than a learning style of deep reflection. Different from many other professions, we did not find a relationship between conscientiousness and performance in marketing. Interestingly, having followed a major in marketing during business school education is not correlated with later success in a marketing career. Our findings support the notion that work-integrated elements with an emphasis on experiential learning in marketing curricula contribute to marketing career success. We discuss ways of implementing this is in marketing education programs. Specific suggestions for follow-up research are given at the end of the paper.