As a marketer of 20 years, will I find studying and a career in psychology difficult or vastly different?
I’m thinking of changing careers completely from marketing to psychology. I’ve worked in marketing for 15 years and studied it at university level for 6. I’ve reached the top, mastered it, and I’m ready for a career switch up.
But I’m worried I won’t have what it takes.
To me, studying and applying marketing strategy has always been about working in the ‘grey space’. There is no right or wrong answer - just a best justified and executed one. Like if you want to sell shoes to 15 years olds there are 100 ways to do it.
Will studying psychology be vastly different? I assume it will be more scientifically ‘black and white. Like if a 15 year old presents with symptoms of anxiety, there’s 1 exact way to diagnose her problem and 1 answer I must know to solve it (like math).
I have a very ‘grey space’ brain and way of learning and executing. This is what has made me a brilliant marketer. But will I struggle with a hard science discipline like psychology? Is it even a hard science at all?
I guess in essence I’m asking, can someone who’s been conditioned to think and learn and work in marketing for almost 20 years easily adapt to learning and working in psychology? Or is this apples and oranges?
Will my marketing career compliment psychology or present a learning barrier to it?
I’m finishing up a PhD in psychology and it is definitely not black and white as you present. Psychology is first and foremost an extremely broad category of specialties (ranging from more biological aspects such as neuropsych to more behavioral and social aspects). Based on your post, I assume something more in the clinical/behavioral realm is where you’re looking.
Again, very grey, even in a diagnosis as supposedly well understood as depression, we still have almost no understanding of etiology nor exact treatment for an individual. Depressive disorders as a group has a lot of diagnoses and subtypes that we can classify (and schools of thinking that believe this is important, ones that thing it doesn’t matter, and ones trying to push a more dimensional approach to thinking about it, among many others). Even with a single diagnosis of major depressive disorder we can have recurrent, single episode, severity specifiers, symptom modifiers, etc. and among those more “specific” diagnoses, individal symptom presentation may be completely different with minimal overlap. Due to this variability, we also don’t have a one diagnosis, one treatment look at things. In total, psychological treatments have about a ~60% efficacy (when I say this, I’m thinking mostly CBT/ADM, DeRubeis et al., 2005). There’s a lot of research looking into personalization of treatment and its mostly come out with no significant solutions.
I realize I went off on a complete tangent but I absolutely love this field and can talk all day. Overall, I think marketing and psychology as very similar fields. At their cores, its about understanding human behavior, just differences in how to apply that understanding.
Shit, my guy or gal.
That’s put my mind massively at ease. Thank you for putting the time in.
And yes, behavioural/clinical is exactly the path I’d go down.
Side question.
As a marketing expert, do you happen to have any takes on what makes Kremlin propaganda so effective?
Well, in essence, propaganda is advertising. And advertising leans on satisfying perceived need.
So if I’m selling you shoes it’s to satisfy your physiological, social, or self-fulfilment order need. Shoes are functional, make you cool, or make a statement.
Propaganda is fulfilling some need to be effective - probably fear based in the social, safety, or belongingness orders, and carried via viral channels like word of mouth or social (viral).
I haven’t really thought about it too much but it’s just a communication or a reinforced message; it’s just advertising. Think about it that way.
And with regard to Russia, they are all ‘fear the West’ and ‘national pride’ driven, compounded over 3-4 generations. It would be such an easy spin.
That does slot rather well into increasing senses of isolation in the modern world.
I mean, there are definitely wrong answers in psychology, but it's an incredibly very gray field....not a lot of black and white stuff happening there. Good luck with whatever you end up doing!