An MBA in Marketing is fast becoming one of the most sought after degrees by both students and employers in recent years, especially in a time where every choice along the graduate school path matters. With attention shifting to digital and online marketing as well as data proliferation and analysis, most businesses now have dedicated in-house marketing teams that specialize in driving traffic to the company website and increasing brand awareness in many new ways. While there are a number of specific areas of marketing, an MBA in marketing doesn’t limit the degree holder to pursuing a marketing career alone. The diverse set of skills taught at the MBA level can be put towards dozens of other career options spanning a massive spectrum, from consulting to entrepreneurial management.
GLOBALIZATION AND BIG DATA HAVE MADE A SCIENCE OF MARKETING
With ever-increasing touch points at their disposal, marketers can collect, analyze, segment, and connect more data — and react faster to market forces — than ever before. But these changes have also required marketers to change their approach (and operational structure) in order to adapt with the times, which has in turn made choosing the right business school even more integral.
“The traditional way of organizing functions is too slow to respond to customers and too expensive,” explains Marketing professor Greg Carpenter. “So organizations are taking a customer perspective and infusing it throughout the organization.” He goes on to explain that “marketing has gone from being a core function to a core function plus that requires a general management perspective.”
This shift in marketing perspective is threefold. First, Carpenter tells us, marketing has become more and more a global endeavour, requiring greater planning and awareness. Second, marketers (even while they are still students) are evolving from functional experts to drivers of change, whose areas of expertise are growing into general management functions like profit-and-loss. Finally, the massive proliferation of data in recent years has turned marketing into an actual, quantifiable science. “We can use this data not only to understand customers and what they are doing but also to make predictions,” according to Carpenter. “It has transformed the field from looking in the rearview mirror to being more predictive and analytical.”
THE RIGHT BUSINESS SCHOOL IS PARAMOUNT
An MBA in Marketing is designed to teach students a wide variety of marketing-specific skills that can then be applied to a plethora of positions across any industry. . While a certain degree of specificity is required, no two companies are going to need the exact same requirements from marketing managers, and so it’s important to find the right balance of marketing course content. A business school like the Lazaridis School at Wilfrid Laurier University offers a number of marketing courses designed to prepare students for the rigours of the global economy.
COURSES TO CONSIDER WHEN TAKING AN MBA IN MARKETING
- Introduction to Marketing Management
- Building and Managing Products, Services and Brands
- Financial Management
- Intermediate Accounting
- Entrepreneurial Finance
- Strategic Human Resources Planning
- Understanding the Business Environment
A Marketing MBA at Wilfrid Laurier will introduce students to a streamlined, holistic approach to education with clear year-to-year benchmarks, with the same competitive edge real-world companies employ. In the first year, studentsparticipate in a New Venture Competition, and in the third year, students must put their business and marketing skills to the test during a week-long case study project, where they’ll analyze a real problem facing a real company.
The Lazaridis School of Business &Economics at Laurier has been accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business – the highest standard of achievement for business schools — since 2004 and offers the largest business degree co-op program in Canada, which gives students the chance to explore different career options and develop a solid range of skills for the future. As a Laurier MBA student, you’ll be uniquely positioned to graduate with a bevy of skills sought after by the world’s top businesses, putting you in the driver’s seat of your own education.
