12


Winter 2016


GENERATIONAL


Are Marketing Grads Ready for Real-World Marketing?


Colleges and universities offering degrees in marketing want the answer to be an unqualified “yes.”


by Patrick Henry y


ou’re a college freshman. Your undergraduate degree in marketing is going to take about four years to complete.


Add another two for the pursuit of a master’s. While you study, the discipline will continue to change at an accelerating pace that even your professors will find challenging to keep up with. Not until after graduation will you get the full


answer to the question that your years in the classroom could only partially address: Have you actually gained the marketing knowledge and the skill set you will need for a fulfilling career in the field?


THE GOOD NEWS Those at the helm of degree programs at some of the country’s leading universities for marketing studies are working hard to make sure that no student lacks any of the capabilities that employment in marketing now demands. Conscious of how profoundly marketing has changed both in concept and in practice, they are retooling their curricula


to give every graduate a running start at job opportunities as they exist now, with new prerequisites for success.


MARKETPLACE REALITIES 101 Transforming marketing scholarship and teaching is the stark fact that, outside the walls of academia, the subject has taken on a vastly different character from what the schools used to teach in their traditional marketing studies programs. Ron Jacobs, cofounder of the Ron Jacobs and Bob Stone Multichannel Marketing Communications Certificate Program at DePaul University, says that marketing no longer is a top-down exercise in which brand owners and their “big ideas” control the relationship with consumers. Now the relationship is bottom-up in a marketplace where “brands live and die on what people say” via social media channels that effectively transfer ownership of the brands to the end users.


“Consumers have to be catered to” if brands


want to avoid negative reputations, agrees Jeannette Monaco, Clinical Assistant Professor, Division of Programs in Business, New York University School of Professional Studies (NYUSPS). Her colleague in the division, Clinical Assistant Professor Wendy Stahl, says that the brand-consumer relationship now is a “circle” of feedback and response instead of the “funnel” of one-way messaging it once was. As a result, says Robin Coulter, head of the


department of marketing in the School of Business, University of Connecticut, brand owners and marketers now engage with consumers in the “co-creation” of products and brands. Being able to exert market-moving influence is no longer just the prerogative of “the Ralph Nader’s of the world,” says Coulter, who also is the president of the American Marketing Association’s Academic Council.


ENGAGEMENT IS EVERYTHING At Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business, where he directs the Ph.D. program in marketing, Dr. V. Kumar advises his students that marketing now has a “mass-to-segment” trajectory in which marketers can use tools for personalization and customization to address customers as unique market segments unto themselves. Just having relationships, says Kumar, isn’t sufficient—marketing now demands continuous engagement with customers as well. Then there is the avalanche of data generated


by almost every contemporary marketing campaign. “Marketing is now a data-driven science,” says Lalin Anik, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Because “big data” can predict preferences and behaviors, she says, marketers must learn to use it in a “forward-looking” manner that reflects the norms of the digital world.


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