Today, data science is evolving into a new discipline that I like to call “marketing science.” The modern marketing scientist possesses multidisciplinary skills that include mathematics, technology and business expertise. There are quite a few venn diagrams circulating that take a stab at explaining data or marketing science teams–starting with Drew Conway in 2010 and followed by Ulrich Matter, Harlan Harris, Shelly Palmer and even Gartner. Here is my own take on it.

Domain Expertise – The knowledge needed to identify the what, who, where and how of marketing science. In other words, the expertise required to identify business problems as well as value creation opportunities. This knowledge includes but is not limited to:

1) Understanding of relevant industry laws and regulations (pharma and healthcare, wine and spirits, etc);

2) Data privacy regulations and best practices (GDPR, PII, etc);

3) Enterprise operations (supply chain from production to sale);

4) Competitive landscape;

5) Basic principles of accounting and finance (required for true ROI modeling);

6) Principles of branding and marketing (from brand positioning to audience development).

Mathematics and Statistics – These skills go beyond obvious traditional research, modeling and statistics skills to also include:

1) Linguistics or the ability to extra insights from text and/or voice data (social, search, call centers, etc);

2) Visualization and reporting (how to tell a story with data);

3) Machine learning and artificial intelligence (from simple models to deep neural networks)

Technology and Programming Skills – These skills are becoming increasingly important as marketing science is as much about technology as it is analytics. They include:

1) Coding and programming skills required to manipulate data and build models (R, SQL, Python, Java, etc);

2) Data storage, management and security (Hadoop, Spark, Data Encryption, etc);

3) Data management platforms, customer data platforms, dynamic content platforms (data on-boarding, segmentation, targeting, etc);

4) Advertising technology supply chain (trading desks, DSPs, SSPs, ad networks, programmatic, fraud detection, etc)

I am interested in your thoughts and feedback. What other critical skills are missing? So, as always, your comments and suggestions are welcomed.