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MBA INSIDER: BEST SCHOOLS FOR MARKETING By Mica Schneider Beyond Sales and Advertising - Part 1 MBAs who specialize in marketing quickly find out how much more is involved -- and how central the discipline is to business everywhere 
INTRODUCTION Professors who ask new classes of aspiring MBAs to define the term "marketing" are likely to hear answers that include words such as sales and advertising. It's little wonder that students respond that way: They're consumers, after all, and think of marketing the way a lot of shoppers do: In terms of canny ads or nonstop telemarketing. Teachers who pose the question laugh knowingly as they hand out a syllabus loaded with such topics as conjoint analysis, innovative product design, consumer behavior research, brand management, business-to-business marketing, and channels of distribution. "The biggest battle we fight [as marketing professors] is that students think marketing is advertising and sales," says Randolph Bucklin, marketing faculty chair at the Anderson School of Business at the University of California-Los Angeles. "That's part of it. But marketing is really about the boundary between a firm and its customers. It's deciding what a [new] product will be and the price. It's about the market's ability to consume what the firm can produce." The MBAs are in class to learn what goes on before products reach shopping baskets. And if they take the full range of marketing courses at most B-schools, they're likely to end up as pros who are able to make good decisions about which products to develop, how best to promote them, and how much to charge for them. To reach that point, they'll learn to dice reams of data and then build models of customer behavior and formulas to determine pricing. Perhaps some students will have heard of such familiar concepts of marketing as the four Ps -- product, pricing, promotion, and place. But mostly, MBAs who expect marketing courses to be fluff compared with quant-heavy finance and accounting courses will be surprised to see that the discipline is much more demanding than it appears. It incorporates the quantitative (complete with economic theory and statistics) along with the behavioral, approaching marketing questions through the lens of such disciplines as psychology and anthropology. ---------------------------------- The Top Marketing Programs The following B-schools win acclaim from students and researchers alike for being at the vanguard of marketing education (in alphabetical order): Chicago: Probably the only B-school where a Nobel Prize-winner in economics teaches a marketing course. Professors are breaking new ground in research, too. Columbia: Columbia's marketing department covers all the angles and wraps in real-world lessons from New York City ad and marketing execs for good measure. Duke: MBAs take lessons from a growing roster of marketing professors, who are making the program more rigorous than ever. MIT: Students gain from studying under some marquee names in the field -- plus a just-updated curriculum. Northwestern: Of the leading marketing schools, Kellogg has the largest faculty -- and continues to break new ground in marketing theory. UC Berkeley: Its cadre of professors is small but strong in brand equity and high tech marketing. UCLA: Its MBAs who load up on marketing courses satisfy industry's demands for managers who can interpret reams of consumer data. Pennsylvania: Wharton's marketing department offers the most electives among leading schools, and student demand for its courses is at an all-time high Data: BusinessWeek Online ------------------------------------ How Recruiters Rate the Schools The following MBA programs got the best marks for teaching marketing: 1. Northwestern 2. Harvard 3. Michigan 4. Duke 5. Pennsylvania 6. Indiana 7. Virginia 8. Columbia 9. Chicago 10. Stanford Data: BusinessWeek 2002 MBA Recruiters' Survey -------------------------------------- That may help explain why marketing courses in 2003 are probably far less boring than ever before. If a school's faculty is up to snuff, the material will be fresh, the thinking intriguing, and the coursework challenging. "The classes teach you how to communicate in today's business environment," says Michael Moyer, 31, a first-year MBA in the Chicago Graduate School of Business' part-time program. So instead of assigning reading in textbooks or marketing journals, as Kevin Keller, now a professor of marketing at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, recalls his professors doing during his MBA days in 1978, B-schools are placing the focus on readying students to hit the ground running at graduation. "Now, rigor and relevance are the name of the game," Keller says. "We provide students with tools, concepts, and ways of thinking, so that they get a deep understanding of why things are happening and how to make the company move forward." That's not to say that marketing is all blood, sweat, and tears. "For a lot of students, it's a chance to be especially creative," says Keller. "If you're in finance, you're talking about money all the time. But if you're a people person, and you're interested in culture, then marketing is a good place to be." The courses are also benefiting from a burst of activity in the field over the past decade. With data from retail scanners and online transactions at their disposal, trend-setting professors have come up with new ways to analyze how consumers make shopping decisions. "Now we can talk not in the abstract, but come up with concrete tools" for measuring the value of different customer segments, or a product's potential, says Stephen Hoch, marketing department chairperson at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. And yet, marketing's most exciting days may lie ahead, says Peter Rossi, professor of marketing and statistics at the University of Chicago and editor of the journal Quantitative Marketing and Economics. "Marketing is very underdeveloped," he says. "It's somewhat like finance was 25 or 30 years ago, when it wasn't considered a rigorous academic field. We're seeing a ramping up of the quality of work done in marketing." Continue to Part 2  Schneider covers management education for BusinessWeek Online in London
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