A Capstone at the Intersection of Marketing and Psychology

Leeza Gillies, Class of 2018, completed a double major in Business Marketing and Psychology. 

I changed my mind on what I wanted to do my Capstone project on several times over the my college career. I wanted it to really reflect my education and compile the things I’ve learned into one component. While doing research for my project and collecting ideas I wanted to include I realized I wasn’t going to be able to do that. It’s very difficult to reflect 4 years of education into one presentation. So I decided to focus on one thing I learned that really stuck with me.

I started college as a Psychology major because I wanted to eventually go into therapy. A few semesters in, when it came time to declare a major, I took a different route and ended up a business major with a concentration in Marketing. I kept Psychology as a minor, and with each marketing class I took, I noticed just how much the two topics tied in together. They go hand and hand, so by my senior year I decided to double major. 

Leeza presenting at the Undergraduate Research Conference

Apart from noticing how marketing and psychology tie together, what I’ve learned has also shown me how marketing ties into everyday life. I started to notice just how big of an impact marketing has on our perception of everyday occurrences. The most subtle, unnoticeable things impact our decisions and the way we perceive things, and we may not be aware of them but marketers are. 

Reflecting on the work I produced from my research, I thought I was going to have to condense a lot of information. But after organizing it I realized I had to cut a lot of information out. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no way to reflect 4 years of education in one project. So many concepts are relevant and can significantly contribute to the message I was trying to send, but in the end all I could compile was a summary. A summary on how marketing effects every individual’s life every single day. Hopefully after viewing my project people will be able to detect the subtle exposure they have to marketing strategies every single day.