Curriculum of MBA Programs From the Perspective of Brand Managers' Professional Needs

Evaluating and Designing the Brand Management Curriculum of MBA Programs from the Perspective of Brand Managers’ Professional Needs

Ram Herstein, Arie Totem & Lirit Ables Rivin
Marketing Education Review
Volume 18, Number 2
Summer 2008

Lynn Barnsback -CTCH 602

The article is dealing with the very old institution of Brand Management and the suggestion that many MBA graduates are not prepared to apply the material to the work. Also that companies, in their desire to have quarterly profit increases have lost site of the long term goals of Brand Management.

The authors put forth the following two main issues with Brand Managers:
Short term management of brands and timer “milking” in order to make a quick and liquid profit
The tendency among brand managers to view the consumer as a nuisance rather than as a principal factor in the companies marketing activity
The knowledge and skills needed by brand managers today to apply long term visions needs to be evaluated. A change from “classic brand management to brand leadership management” (Asker & Joachimsthaler 2000) must occur to address the future challenges. The rest of the study really does address the first issue and how to make an academic change and what it might be.
There is a disconnect in MBA students who learn finance, production, legal issues and life cycle analysis and the real world needs of Brand Managers who need to be creative, sensitive to market changes and have the ability to “ act in an independent, inner directed way to adopt product lines and come up with novel marketing trends”.

Their study has two main objectives: (1) Characterize the main skills required of a Brand Manager (2) Design better Brand Management curriculum for MBA’s. In order to do this they had 200 Brand Mangers from three different product categories complete a survey. They rated the importance of 23 managerial skills and reviewed a list of the 20 most common marketing course titles (undergraduate and graduate) and asked to rate these also. The most important skills according to the study were: innovativeness, decision-making skills; ability to identify consumer needs; project management skills; verbal expression & entrepreneurship. Only one of these factors is directly related to marketing, most deal with general management issues. The second part of the study, the course titles, reviewed what were perceived as most important are the core marketing courses of Strategy and Consumer Behavior. Creativity and advertising classes were next. These specialized courses had high standards of deviation so they were apparently very important to some and not to highly rated for others.

Academics train the brand managers of the future. They need to know and understand the skills needed advanced managerial skills are the most important this study showed. Communication and risk management skills are also prized. According to the authors “the brand manager’s role in the organization must be based on more general managerial skills and less on marketing skills.” This corroborated with other studies findings that they cited. They did not go any further in evaluating how education can achieve this.

The study of courses reveled the two most important are the Marketing Strategy and Consumer Behavioral. I find this as no surprise since they are the corner stone of all programs. The Brand Managers also ranked Creativity in Marketing very high. It is not a commonly found course some leading business schools do offer it. Apparently this should be made available to more students, especially since it can prepare them to be more innovative in a competitive and saturated market. New Product Development courses scored well, leading the authors to further summarize that education should move from the study of the Marketing Mix to one that includes creating different brands. These four courses should have more emphasis placed on them and be integrated into the classical marketing courses. Further study is suggested, including a Gap Analysis.

I felt the premise of this study was interesting; however I am not sure if the survey was the best possible tool. In-depth interviews, a more costly and time consuming approach for sure, might have provided more specific insight. The fact that two classical courses ranked high is not necessarily indicative of their importance, it could be that all brand managers take these courses, were impressed by them and everyone just marked them high as a result of knowledge of the course. The statistical analysis was very in-depth and I was unable to review it with a critical eye. The authors did a fine job making their argument for the disconnect between the study of marketing and the job functions of brand management. I felt their study did little to help or provide information for the changes they said were needed.