The forms are not the subject

Plenty of people who studied marketing came away disliking it, and I do not think they were wrong to.

What they were handed was a pile of forms. Lists of four of this and five of that, memorised for an exam. The difference between reach and frequency. The right boxes on a brief. Definitions that shifted from one course to the next. It felt like filling in paperwork for a subject nobody had actually shown them.

All of that can be looked up. Most of it fits on a single page you could keep in a drawer.

The subject itself is something else entirely. Why does a woman in a supermarket aisle reach past the cheaper pack for the one her mother used to buy? Why does a new snack catch on in one city and quietly die in the next? Why will people queue for something they could have had without queuing?

These are questions about people, and they do not run out. Once someone is hooked on them, they go looking for the tools unprompted, because they need those tools to get an answer. Nobody has to persuade a curious person to learn the vocabulary of the thing they are already chasing.

Start with the forms and you produce people who can complete them without knowing why. Many of them drift out of the field, convinced it was dull.

Start with the questions and the forms stop being a chore. They become what they always should have been: the small, useful grammar of something worth understanding.