I need a practical major to pair with marketing?

The ones with which I am most familiar are the following:

Finance: If you major in marketing and finance, consider yourself on either an executive or an entrepreneurial path. Finance will support your marketing basics with knowledge about how businesses operate, and will give you the math skills you need prior to pursuing an MBA.

Speech Communication: You will learn from this presentation skills, and details on how best you can communicate with people. This is ideal if you want to go into direct sales, as presentation skills are essential there, or if you'd like to become a corporate trainer or recruiter.

Psychology: Marketing and psychology can be paired in the academic world or the real world very well. Academics study how consumers respond to certain market trends, helping companies understand the changing needs and behaviors or consumers. Marketers can do the same working for a certain company, like Coca Cola, to survey or poll consumers to explore their feelings, and come up with tactics to influence their behavior. Note that marketing psychology applications may be limited to the largest of companies, so opportunities may be few and far between.

Real estate: A degree in marketing and real estate can give you a great basis for a career in real estate, which is essentially entrepreneurship, or law later on down the line.

Spanish: a degree in Spanish can be useful if you are fully bilingual and understand the nuances of the language. Marketing attempts to be subtle, and advertising needs to be witty, so Spanish alone without bilingual capabilities won't help much in a large ad firm. However, if you plan to work for a small company who advertises locally, and needs to translate ads, brochures and applications into Spanish, it can be invaluable and can increase your market value in that area.

Another one you haven't noted is English. I guess classics might be the closest to that. Many types of marketers are primarily responsible for creating the "voice" of the company through press releases, writing web copy, brochures and other written materials. A strong writing background is a a must for a marketer.

Also-- graphic design. Becoming a marketer who also has graphic design skills can add significant value to your resume in a pile of other resumes. Graphic designers are the artsy folks who create the concepts marketers have in mind to support the public image of their company. Many small companies and non-profits have a limited budget for marketing, so having both the marketing and graphic design skills is huge. This is not so terribly important when working for a large company, as they usually hire out graphic design and you focus on other core competencies, but it is always useful in this business to have graphic design/layout skills. You can also learn those aside from your major: just buy Adobe's Creative Suite and take a couple of classes.

Good luck!!

Business Administration, Accounting, or Economics are the most obvious matches. Otherwise, it depends on what is offered at your school. You could double major in another area of interest, such as Real Estate, Risk Management, International Business, Entrepreneurship, etc. Just think about where you'd like to apply your finance knowledge. For example, if you want to work for an accounting firm, Accounting would be an obvious good choice. If you want to work internationally, International Business would help bridge that gap.

Advertising goes well with marketing. It's a vital part, actually. It can determine success or failure of any market.

Cheers!