This article originally appeared in its entirety on clearadmit.com
The “four Ps” (product, price, place and promotion) and the “three Cs” (customers, competition and company) may not have become completely passé, but there’s some serious shifting taking place in the world of marketing. Companies must reach global audiences of consumers, confront and master the ever-evolving intricacies of social media, command the growing frontier of video marketing and get a handle on terabytes of data representing critical market intelligence waiting to be mined.
As always, MBA students who study marketing can go on to a range of careers—brand or product management, market research, sales, advertising, marketing consulting and marketing in retail, pharmaceuticals and high-technology. Adding further to the complexity is the fact that companies identify and structure their marketing positions in many different ways. Some companies have large marketing departments in which individual marketers are assigned to roles specializing in market research, strategy or advertising. Other firms expect their marketers to have a hand in—and mastery of—each of these roles, as well as responsibility for P&L, collaboration with supply chain and operations and more.
So, drumroll please, which MBA programs are keeping pace with the changing marketing industry? Who’s doing it best—and how? Is it through changes to curriculum, strategic faculty hires, launches of new centers and institutes of expertise, unique extracurricular offerings? Finally, which schools are helping more of their graduates land the most desirable jobs, whether at consumer product goods (CPG) giants like Nike, Unilever and PepsiCo; market research titans like Neilsen or Forrester or ever-increasing data analytics shops like Cloudera, Sumo Logic or Google? Read on for some of our picks.
Kellogg: King of the Marketers
Kellogg marketing MBA students rate ads in the annual Super Bowl Ad Review
For almost two decades, Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management has placed among the very top programs in U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking of best business schools for marketing. Of course, all rankings have their flaws, but when the same program tops the list year after year after year, it certainly suggests that Kellogg is getting something right.
So just what does Kellogg do so well when it comes to marketing? For starters, Kellogg’s marketing faculty is among the best in the world. Professor Angela Y. Lee chairs a department made up of almost 50 tenure, clinical, affiliated and emeritus faculty members who approach the teaching of marketing from diverse perspectives and backgrounds—ranging from psychology and cultural anthropology to neuroscience and data analytics.
Professor Derek Rucker, for example, regularly publishes in the world’s leading psychology journals, delving into what makes for effective advertising and what motives underlies consumer consumption. Professor Florian Zettelmeyer, meanwhile, who heads the Program on Data Analytics at Kellogg, focuses on evaluating the effects of information technology and big data on firms. Kellogg’s belief has always been that the best marketing education results from the deepest possible understanding of customer behavior, which it feels is best delivered through a wide array of lenses—precisely those offered by its diverse faculty.
Traditional Texts Meet Cutting-Edge Course Offerings
Even amid seismic shifts in the field of marketing, Kellogg Professor Philip Kotler’s 1967 textbook, Marketing Management, has remained a standard text at many American business schools, and Kellogg also likes to point out that many of the marketing professors leading rival business school marketing departments in fact hold Kellogg PhDs. But Kellogg is also always evolving to keep pace with the discipline’s shifting landscape. As an example, a Kellogg MBA student who chooses to major in marketing can also choose the Data Analytics pathway, which offers opportunities for deeper dives through courses such as “Digital Marketing Analytics” and “Customer Analytics.”
Every MBA who graduates from Kellogg will have a foundational understanding of marketing since one of the school’s nine core curriculum courses is “Marketing Management.” Beyond that, students targeting careers in the field can choose from one of two majors: Marketing, which provides an in-depth understanding of marketing concepts suitable for careers in management consulting, general management, or other functions or Marketing Management, which is geared toward students set on post-MBA careers in which marketing plays a central role, such as brand/product management or market research.
Students can also choose from more than 30 related electives, which again is how Kellogg can stay current with shifts in the industry and encourage its students to view the field of study through multiple lenses. Some recent additions to the course options include “Thought Partnerships: Man Plus Machine Is Greater Than Man or Machine,” designed to teach students to harness data to understand consumer behavior, and “Kraft CPG Boot Camp,” a one-day program offered last May that brought students face-to-face with Krat company leaders to talk channel relationships, storytelling, Nielsen research and more.
Strategic Markets & Customers Initiative Takes Marketing Beyond the Classroom
In addition to its marketing majors and related pathways, Kellogg has also launched four “strategic initiatives” designed to focus on key issues confronting today’s senior business leaders. Again, believing in an interdisciplinary approach, Kellogg developed these strategic initiatives to equip graduates across each of its majors with skillsets that will allow them to make meaningful change whatever industry they enter. One of the four strategic initiatives is the Kellogg Markets & Customers Initiative (KMCI). The KMCI serves as a repository for research and insight designed and curated “to help business leaders create and reinvent markets through greater customer insight and focus,” according to the Kellogg website.
Beyond the classroom, there are any number of ways for future marketers to get their brand on at Kellogg, including a range of centers that fall under the KMCI umbrella. Since 2008, Kellogg has been home to the Center for Market Leadership, which focuses on helping leading organizations learn how to become more customer-oriented in order to drive innovation and growth. Each fall, the center hosts an annual Marketing Leadership Summit, which lures marketing gurus from leading companies to pool mindshare while tackling key issues like digital disruption, the future of marketing or—as at this past fall’s conference—how to build culture in the digital era. Speakers this past October included Jim Stengel, the former global marketing officer for Procter & Gamble, talking about intelligent risk taking, and Kathy Button Bell, chief marketing officer for St. Louis-based Emerson, who shared how the engineering firm partnered with Hank Green, a popular musician and blogger with a strong presence on YouTube, to tell its story to consumers.
Kellogg Marketing Students Take Charge
Since it’s Kellogg we’re talking about, you have to know the students are involved in a big way. The Kellogg Marketing Club is one of Kellogg’s largest and most active student organizations, putting on a range of events made possible by the sponsorship of numerous companies interested in recruiting Kellogg students. Like marketing clubs at other schools, Kellogg’s student-run group brings first- and second-year students together to let them help one another through interview prep groups that cover interview etiquette, case questions and ad critiques. The second-years also share their summer internship experiences with first-years to help them know what to expect and how to prepare.
The club also regularly brings chief marketing officers, brand managers and other senior marketing executives to campus for speaker series and hosts an informal Lunch & Learn program where students gather to discuss marketing trends. The club also organizes marketing industry treks—two- or three-day trips to leading brand and retail firms on the East and West Coasts—and “Company Shadow Days” at the proliferation of CPG firms in the Kellogg area, letting students get a first-hand feel for what a career in marketing would really look like day to day.
Source: Kellogg 2015 Employment Report
Finally, the club also lets students test their marketing mettle through an annual Kellogg Marketing Competition held each winter. Student teams of five are challenged to market a randomly assigned real product to the Kellogg community, first presenting a marketing plan to a panel of marketing execs, students and judges and then executing on the plan through marketing campaigns on campus and in the Evanston community. A fair is held at the conclusion of the competition, where the teams sell their products from booths. A winning team is crowned based on feedback from a panel of judges as well as the target customers themselves.
Show Me the Jobs
Okay—so Kellogg does a bang-up job of preparing its MBA students to be marketers. Is that enough to land them the jobs they seek at the end of their two years? Employment statistics say yes. In 2015, 20 percent of Kellogg graduates took functional roles in marketing, earning a median salary of $105,000 with a median signing bonus of $25,000.
To help make this happen, the Kellogg Marketing Club joins forces with the school’s Career Management Center (CMC) to provide networking events, recruiting advice and opportunities to meet with top recruiters in the field. Last year, firms like General Mills, Kraft, Nike, Unilever and PepsiCo were among the top hirers of Kellogg grads.
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.
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.