Quant marketing...growing field?

[Zeuge]

Currently I'm doing FT recruiting with hedge funds/trading firms and a lot of people I'm talking to are telling me that finance is a dying field and now is a bad time to enter it.
I've been told that quant marketing is something I should seriously consider -- it's growing quickly and uses many of the same skills.

My question is, what kinds of firms recruit "quant marketers"?

 

[Jose T]

I haven't heard the term you use, 'quant marketing' before. I believe you are referring to data mining of customer data or other large data sources for marketing purposes. I usually hear this referred to as 'corporate analytics' or just a certain area of marketing.

Here is a link to a statistical consulting group that works in this area and a list of their customers:

http://www.mu-sigma.com/analytics/clients/our-customers.html

Using advanced statistical and computer science methods for marketing is still in it's early phases. Because of the newness of the field, be careful while looking for jobs ; a company may say they want a data miner but in actuality be just looking for an excel jockey (they will say they want a 'data miner' or 'data scientist' because it is sexy). It is also ideal to be certain part of the country to do this sort of work (Seattle, SF).

However, I do think data mining is an interesting field myself and have done some graduate work in this too. There are certainly challenging problems and interesting quantitative methods.

 

[Zeuge]

^
Quantitative marketing research makes up much of non-psych-based academic research on marketing in business schools (example). Thanks for the info about opportunities in the field, I'll look into Seattle and SF listings

 

[Jose T]

Gotcha. This is the first time I'm hearing this referred to as 'quantitative marketing'. In my experience, the labels 'data mining' or 'corporate analytics' are more common.

 

[Polter]

One more keyword (I've noticed Jose mentioned it) you can also look for is data scientist.