As a marketing student you might think that life is all about building relationships and networking. But that is not the case. You need to be prepared for a life that is full of numbers. You need to be as good at statistics as anybody else because you will be spending a lot of your life working with numbers.

There is a lot of statistical analysis in marketing. There are many researchers and surveyors whose sole job it is to gather data, compile them and find patterns in them. Major multinational brands have markets that consist of millions of people of all genders, all age groups and with different kinds of wants and needs. There is no way that a marketing manager can possibly go to each and every individual, find out what they want and design products to cater to them. They need data that splits the vast population into various divisions and slots them into convenient categories.

For this task to be accomplished, the marketing manager would need employees who are skilled with numbers. He would be asking them on a regular basis to make excel spreadsheets full of vast quantities of data, build a database that has massive volumes of information, create graphs and charts and tables, make PowerPoint presentations that explain these vast volumes of data, and prepare reports for the higher management.

Marketers themselves need to be good at reading numbers and understanding the nature of all the numbers. So, along with their networking skills, it is vital for marketing students to become good at numbers as well. In fact, when they are working on their dissertation or post-graduate reports marketing students will be called upon to justify their project with large volumes of data and extensive surveys.