14


Winter 2016


GENERATIONAL Michael Brady, chair of the Department


of Marketing in Florida State University’s School of Business, says marketing is still the same in that “great companies with great products will succeed” by bringing what they have to offer to the attention of people who want to buy it. Such companies, he says, get a straightforward


message from the marketing conversations they have with consumers: “Tell me where it is, and price it at a point that I can afford.”


NEVER-ENDING RACE TO KEEP UP Keeping marketing study programs grounded in the basics and current with new developments requires flexibility and ingenuity in curriculum design. Martin Maloney, president of the marketing communications firm of Broadford & Maloney, says that the Managing the Media Mix graduate course he teaches as an adjunct professor at NYUSPS has changed as often as he has presented it (about 30 times in the last 10 years). Maloney constantly scours the 20 marketing newsletters he subscribes to for up-to-date course material. “You can’t teach it out of a textbook,” he says. Charlotte H. Mason has added courses in digital


marketing, social media strategy, and data analysis to the Master of Marketing Research program she directs at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. Her students also take part in “strategic simulations,” which present them with business scenarios that they must articulate through all stages of the marketing process. Students compete in teams, receiving continuous feedback on the results they achieve. Mason notes that, because the discipline has


become so broad, “it is entirely possible to graduate with a degree in marketing and not be prepared to do anything specific.” To guard against overgeneralization, she has introduced cohesive sets of courses that let students drill down into selected areas of emphasis— for instance, marketing analytics.


RIGOR AND RELEVANCE Kumar believes that marketing studies programs should always have the kind of “rigor and relevance” that will enable what is learned in the classroom to become the foundation of careers. To provide relevance, he asks C-suite executives to brief his students on the marketing dilemmas that keep them awake at night. It is then up to the students to devise and present practical solutions. There is plenty of rigor, Kumar says, in the


FROM STUDYING TO ROLE MODELING


For Shauna Jennings, having a career in marketing isn’t just about holding down a job—it’s about advancing the interests of the entire profession. She’s a recent (2011) graduate of


the marketing studies program at Georgia College and State University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing Management. She’s also an activist for marketing education in her role as co- chair of Collegiate Outreach for the American Marketing Association’s Atlanta chapter, which she also serves as a member of the board directors. When Jennings


isn’t working as an e-commerce SEO specialist for Home Depot in Atlanta, her outreach assignment connects her with marketing students at 14 different


“hands-on computation” of marketing metrics that his students must perform with increasing levels of difficulty in their homework assignments, in-class exercises, and final exams. As committed to business cases and data mining


as they have become, today’s marketing educators haven’t lost sight of the human element in the profession they are grooming their students to enter. “Our curriculum is customer-centric, where we try to understand our existing and potential customers, their desires, wants, and needs,” Anik says. “At the end, all business problems are human problems.” Scott Stimpfel, Associate Dean of the Division


of Programs in Business, NYUSPS, thinks that none are better qualified to teach business problem solving than those who solve business problems for a living. He says that this is why students in the division’s M.S. in Integrated Marketing program “engage with industry professionals both in the classroom and in real-world business settings, where they acquire


Georgia colleges. Many of them, she says, are “shocked” when they discover how much they don’t yet know about the real world of marketing employment, for instance, the differences between marketing on the corporate side versus practicing it in an agency setting. Jennings


thinks colleges do a good job of preparing students academically, but she’d like to see the schools equip them for “life after college” with more concentration in three areas: data analytics (“Teach it early, and get them excited about it”); writing and communication


(“People should know how to write a proper e-mail”); and business culture (“Your boss isn’t someone you friend on Facebook”).


the knowledge necessary to be highly-skilled, ethical, and socially-minded marketing professionals who will contribute to business and society.” In a similar spirit of humanism, Coulter


encourages her students to minor in non-marketing subjects that inspire them as individuals: psychology, journalism, foreign languages, or whatever else feeds their love of learning. “Students who are successful are passionate about things besides marketing,” she says, adding that employers notice and respond to this kind of intellectual passion in job seekers.


MASTERY OF “MULTIPLICITIES” Students entering programs like these will be expected to graduate from them with a well-rounded portfolio of marketing qualifications —some of them academically grounded, others more rooted in interpersonal abilities, which are just as essential to success in the field.


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