Job titles rarely delineate what the job actually entails. When I worked at the 2nd largest hotel chain, they only had 8 guys in market research and about 12 i

Job titles rarely delineate what the job actually entails. When I worked at the 2nd largest hotel chain, they only had 8 guys in market research and about 12 in database marketing. These 20 people determined what hotel customers wanted, what franchise owners wanted, how much cash to keep liquid for priority club reward points, which customers to contact during direct mail campaigns, and wielded technology & math like you wouldn't believe. I never thought these marketing guys did anything productive either until I worked side by side with them. These guys eat & sleep statistics and dream of k-means clustering and p-values all day long. My boss coauthored a paper about lifetime value of an average hotel customer with a university professor. Sometimes it's hard to judge a marketing job title until you've actually experienced the real thing. I was hired to automate their data scrubbing and SAS models. They had 3 full-time programmers to help marketing research with the 30 terabytes of customer data they had collected over the last 10 years or so.