Around one month ago I moved from the research team here at Xtract to marketing. This change is an interesting one, since often people consider research and marketing to be opposites: marketing deals with presenting concepts to customers in a concrete fashion as quickly as possible, while researchers work on abstract concepts which might take years to develop into something useful.
What is surprising is that marketing and research are in many ways quite similar and even many of the skills required are the same: in both jobs, one needs to be able to innovate, present ideas effectively and communicate by writing. Also, in both jobs one has to have a vision on where the business is moving and how we can help our customers with our tools and skills.
Now I just need to get some grasp of the marketing speak, which is quite different from the technical jargon I am more familiar with. Instead of “mixture models”, “bayesian inference” and “functional programming”, I now need to be able to talk fluently about “permission marketing”, “value propositions” and “behavior targeting”. In a way, this is like learning a new languge.
