Best Business Schools for Marketing: Part I
What Makes Wharton Tops for Marketing?
So, Kellogg may most often rank number one when it comes to marketing, but the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School is reliably a close second. Like Kellogg, Wharton also boasts a deep bench of heavy-hitting marketing faculty members, who the school claims “are the most published and the most cited among all marketing departments in the world.” The faculty includes 25 standing faculty members, making up Wharton’s third-largest department. Another 12 secondary, affiliated and emeritus members round out the bunch.
Some of its stars include Peter Fader, who co-directs the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative and specializes in the lifetime value of the customer, and Eric T. Bradlow, the other co-director the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative and the vice-dean and director of Wharton Doctoral Programs. Bradlow is an applied statistician who uses high-powered statistical models to solve problems on everything from Internet search engines to product assortment issues. As at Kellogg, the Wharton marketing faculty also includes professors with expertise in a range a disciplines including psychology and neuroscience.
Wharton overhauled its core curriculum for first-year students in 2012 to include both fixed and flexible course options. The fixed core includes one required marketing course, “Marketing Management,” which gives every Wharton student an intro to foundational marketing concepts while helping whet their appetite for marketing-focused electives.
In terms of majors, Wharton students can choose a single major, a double major or design their own major. Students interested in marketing careers can choose a single major in Marketing, a joint major in Marketing and Operations Management, combine one of these with another major of interest in their target industry or create their own major related to the marketing field.
The Marketing major gives a strong foundation in the basic disciplines needs to implement effective marketing strategies—making it perfect for students pursuing management careers in fields such as consulting, entrepreneurial management or line management. Often, students will pair it with a second industry-focused major to develop a particular expertise. A Marketing major paired with the Entrepreneurial Management major, for instance, could make sense for someone hoping to start their own venture. A student looking to manage a nonprofit organization, meanwhile, might pair Wharton’s Marketing and Business & Public Policy majors.
Students set on post-MBA careers in in brand management, product management, consulting project management or other related positions are better suited by the joint Marketing and Operations major. In addition to the core marketing and operations management courses, this major also requires students to take “Marketing Research” and “Integrating Marketing and Operations.” A choice of electives round out the major, one of which must be from the marketing department and two from the Operations and Information Management Department (OPIM).
In terms of the electives marketing students at Wharton have to choose from, you’ll find everything from old standards like “Consumer Behavior” and “New Product Management” to deeper dives like “Consumer Neuroscience” and “Marketing in Emerging Economies: Understanding and Marketing to the Chinese Consumer.” To be sure, Wharton is also bulking up its elective offerings in terms of data analytics, digital marketing and global marketing, with multiple options on offer for the spring 2016 semester.
Finally, Wharton students can also take advantage of the optional Field Application Project (FAP), working in four- to six-person teams to research and analyze a problem faced by a sponsoring company. Supervised by a Wharton faculty member, the FAP lets students roll up their sleeves and put the marketing concepts they are learning in class into practice to solve real-world business challenges.
Marketing Centers, Special Programs and Extracurriculars
So you want to put your marketing ideas to the test while a student? Wharton offers a few different ways to do that. First, you can apply to work with the Wharton Small Business Development Center (WSBDC). Part of a network of Small Business Development Centers in the state of Pennsylvania, it provides free consulting services to entrepreneurs. If you’re selected as a WSBDC consultant, you’ll get to work with four to six clients each year tackling a range of business challenges, many of which center around market analysis and planning. Participation in the WSBDC has the added benefit of helping students have an impact on the local business community.
Wharton’s Marketing Department is also associated with a variety of research centers and programs to help students and faculty understand the latest trends in the field. The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, Global Consulting Practicum, SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management and the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center all offer initiatives in different marketing sub-fields. The Baker Retailing Center runs the FAP program mentioned above, and the other centers also run a number of programs for MBA students.
Students Helping Students
Wharton, too, is home to a dynamic student-run Wharton Marketing Club (WMC), which hosts regular events ranging from coffee chats to guest speaker series, conferences to industry treks. Recent WMC industry treks have taken marketing students to visit fashion and luxury companies in New York City, tech companies on the West Coast, and CPG firms in the Midwest.
The WMC taps Wharton’s extensive alumni network as well to organize “day-on-the-job” visits all over the United States, during which students get to shadow marketing employees and learn about their career paths, the company culture and the daily life of a marketing professional. Host companies for these special visits have included Colgate-Palmolive, Dell, Frito-Lay, General Mills and Kraft.
In terms of events, the WMC puts on a much-anticipated Battle of the Bands each year. Getting its start in 2008—with the tagline “Watch Wharton Students and Professors Rock Out”—the Battle of the Bands brings together amateur rock bands at Wharton for a night of entertainment that may contain more enthusiasm than talent. The marketing students, meanwhile, hone their marketing skills by promoting the event.
The WMC’s largest event, though, is the annual Wharton Marketing Conference, held in November. The theme of the 2015 conference was “The Evolution of the Path to Purchase,” which grappled with the question: “Has the path to purchase become too complicated to be tracked, or is data technology the light at the end of the tunnel, adding some clarity to consumer decision making?” In addition to keynote speakers renowned in the industry, it also features a career fair connecting students with industry reps, as well as a range of other more informal networking events.
Where Do Wharton Marketers Get Jobs?
The Wharton Marketing Club works with Wharton’s MBA Career Management Office to make sure that marketing students have solid support in the job search process. The WMC runs a buddy program, pairing first-year students with a second-year student who has been through the summer internship recruiting process and can offer mentorship, as well as help with résumé review and mock interviews. Wharton’s annual employment reports break things out a little differently than other schools, but students who went into product/brand marketing, product/development structuring and sales together made up approximately 10 percent of last year’s graduates. The median annual salary for those in product/brand marketing functions was $103,000, with a median signing bonus of $25,000. Wharton shares only that given employers employed two or more Wharton students, but among those firms for 2015 were Kraft, Johnson and Johnson, Unilever and General Mills.
Other Marketing Programs On the Rise
Today we’ve covered two of the longest established and most highly renowned business schools for marketing, but they are far from the only solid choices prospective MBA applicants have when it comes to marketing. In a post early next week, we’ll showcase a range of strong up-and-comers who are consistently placing more of their graduates into marketing roles than even these two giants. So stay tuned.
