Study Areas

What can I study at the School of Marketing?

In the School of Marketing, students have the opportunity to study Marketing, Public Relations or Advertising.  Students can study one area or a combination to supplement their knowledge. 

Before students decide on what area they wish to focus on, it is important to understand the basic fundamentals of each study area.

What is Marketing?

Marketing is everything you do to place your product or service in the hands of consumers. It acts as the guiding hand within an organisation that helps to formulate its business strategy. 

It uses a diverse range of tools in order to attract and build long term relationships with customers. This involves establishing the needs and wants of consumers and responding with desirable products and services,  setting an appropriate price, promoting it in a way that is attractive to consumers and offering it in a place convenient for purchase.

Marketing careers include marketing consultants, market researchers, brand managers and product developers.  Graduates from the marketing major may oversee entire marketing campaigns for brands, products and services. You could be analysing consumer trends, dealing with advertising and public relations agencies and designing promotional strategies both for the profit and non-profit industries.

What is Public Relations?

Public Relations is best described as the facilitation of positive communications between an organisation and its stakeholders.

It is an important management function that aims for mutual and beneficial relationships through a two–way communications process, often using press releases, press kits, websites, newsletters, blogs and other communications tools, in order to achieve this objective. As a result public relations practitioners often find they spend a lot of time writing for a range of different media.

Public Relations operates strategically, with a plan of action developed in order to achieve measurable objectives.

Public relations practitioners can work as public relations practitioners, communications coordinators, media advisors and event coordinators.

What is Advertising?

Advertising is an external form of communication that seeks to inform, persuade and remind target audiences about an organisation's offerings. Through an understanding of their clients' objectives, advertisers are able to generate awareness, create knowledge, impact brand perceptions and strengthen brand images with the intent of moving an audience towards a desired behaviour.

This advertising process includes strategic planning, creative strategy development, execution through a range of media and monitoring of results. 

Jobs in advertising include both internal agency roles such as account executive, creative and strategic planner positions, together with external roles such as media planners, brand strategists and researchers.

View our advertising, public relations and marketing units here.