Marketing postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On Tuesday evenings the cinema where I supervise shifts sells discounted tickets, and for most of last year almost nobody noticed. The offer was printed on a poster beside the lifts, below the screening times, where people waiting to go up looked at their phones instead. When the manager agreed to let me move the message onto the till screens and the receipts given out at weekends, Tuesday sales rose noticeably over the following months. I cannot claim that change alone caused the increase, since the films showing also mattered, but it made me curious about why a good offer can stay invisible, and that curiosity is the main reason I want to study marketing at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree in psychology gave me a grounding in research methods and in how people make decisions with limited attention. My dissertation looked at unit-price labels in supermarkets. I photographed shelf-edge labels for three product categories in four local stores, recording how the price per kilogram or per hundred grams was displayed, then ran a short online task in which 112 participants chose the better-value item from mocked-up shelves. Inconsistent units, such as one pack priced per hundred grams and another per item, made comparisons slower and less accurate, and participants rarely said they had noticed the difference. The study was small and the shelves were simulated, so I was careful in my write-up about how far the results could stretch. Still, the project showed me that a retailer's presentation choices shape behaviour in ways shoppers may not report, which raises both commercial and ethical questions I would like to examine properly.

Reading beyond my course has pushed me towards questions of scale. Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow helped me describe the quick, effortless judgements I saw in my dissertation data. Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow then challenged me, because it argues that brands grow mainly by reaching more buyers and by being easy to notice and buy, rather than by deepening loyalty among existing customers. Coming from psychology, where I studied individuals closely, I found this uncomfortable at first. I now think the two perspectives are useful together, and I want a course that will teach me the quantitative methods, such as survey design at scale and analysis of sales data, needed to test which applies in a given market.

My work has given me practical experience. As a shift supervisor I manage a team of five to eight people, handle complaints and reconcile tills. I also track which snacks sell during which films, partly because the manager asked and partly because I enjoy it; family films sell far more pick-and-mix, and late horror screenings sell more large drinks. Small observations like these have taught me to check a pattern against the numbers before acting on it.

Outside work, I bake sourdough and sell around twenty loaves at a village market each month. Pricing them taught me more about costs and willingness to pay than any lecture: I raised the price slightly after a winter of rising flour costs, kept a smaller cheaper loaf, and found that most regular customers simply switched sizes rather than leaving. I also coordinate the volunteer rota for my local parkrun, which mostly involves persuading busy people to give up a Saturday morning, and has made me better at writing clear, short requests.

I hope a master's degree will give me the theory and analytical training to move from noticing these patterns to understanding them rigorously. Longer term, I would like to work in consumer insight or retail research, where careful evidence about how people actually behave can improve decisions for businesses and customers alike.