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Marketing: the department that makes a difference

The Department of Marketing at Otago understands your needs – whether you're a student, a researcher or an industry professional wanting to collaborate with us. Marketing is about knowing your audience, striving to meet their needs, and packaging and promoting your products effectively.

Marketing at Otago has:

  • Researched the education market
  • Developed courses that meet market needs and are of a high academic standard
  • Packaged these courses to form a coherent educational programme, and
  • Promoted these courses, our staff and research through various forms of media – including online

That – in a nutshell – is marketing!

Marketing at Otago: top quality teachers and world-class researchers

The Department of Marketing teaches all the mainstream marketing concepts and practice you would expect – but we also teach so much more. Students enjoy our courses because they are practical, broad-based, and current.

Strong communication skills. The ability to self-manage, work as part of a team – and manage others. Creativity and initiative. Confident decision-making abilities. All these qualities make our graduates more attractive to employers.

We are a large department, with a rich tradition of topical and diverse research. Our undergraduate and postgraduate courses all benefit from a research-led approach. Our staff bring a wide range of academic and practical industry-based experience to the Department of Marketing, both from New Zealand and overseas.

Why Marketing?

Marketing looks at the world from the point of view of business and consumption. Therefore, it is important to understand how business can work to satisfy consumer needs and wants, in a world full of an ever-increasing variety of goods and services. At the same time, Marketing needs to recognise that consumption contributes to the depletion of resources and an increase in social inequalities. Its role, therefore, is to help consumers and producers work together for the common good of society.

Career opportunities


Who uses Marketing? Everyone does. Marketing influences just about every industry and organisation you can think of, including professions such as accounting, law, medicine, engineering and the sciences, providing them with an essential commercial perspective and an understanding of the importance of building honest and mutually beneficial relationships.

Marketing is people-oriented and it offers careers that are exciting, challenging and rewarding. As Otago's courses are broad-based, our graduates are well equipped to work in a large variety of roles in organisations large and small, ranging across private, public and not-for-profit sectors.

You can combine Marketing with a wide range of other subjects by incorporating a second major subject into your Bachelor of Commerce degree (double major), or by completing a double degree. Here are a few examples of how to plan for your future by including other subjects:


• Marketers may choose finance, accounting, information science or economics
• International marketers may consider a foreign language
• Behavioural marketers could consider psychology, sociology or anthropology
• Food marketers often include food science and nutrition
• Quantitative market researchers might add statistics
• Creative marketers will benefit from papers in media, communications or English
• Qualitative researchers might add anthropology or sociology
• Marketers may choose to study law

Join us for 'the Department of Marketing experience'. Let us prepare you for a career in marketing!

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