How to avoid producing ‘gormless’ marketing graduates with irrelevant skills
As the debate about the value of marketing degrees rages on, Swinburne industry fellow Christopher Riquier puts his stake in the ground.
Both Gary Vee and Mark Ritson are short sighted in their views about marketing education. But they are also half right.
Like Gary Vee, I have no doubt that there are many talented and capable people out there that successfully lead marketing in an inherited or start-up business without formal education.
But likewise, supporting Mark Ritson’s point of view, in the corporate environment there is a need for vast numbers of people to fill marketing positions and not all organisations have the capability to provide hands-on training in the strategic or tactical aspects of marketing.
He’s right.
Both Chuk and Ritson are right in their own way and for their own reasons.
The reasoning for either is based on their own individual – a sample of one – experiences.
Chuk says influencer marketing is over effective and underpriced. When I executed a campaign around the tactic in Malaysia, it was ineffective. In Dubai, it worked phenomenally. Chuk has a vested interest in Snapchat + Instagram and has a range of influencers signed on to the VaynerTalent. The tactic maybe effective but he has a lot vested into called influencer marketing effective.
Ritson is right for saying people should follow a 3-step process from research, strategy, to tactics for deployment. But he forgets that the market decides who is right and who is wrong. The market has decided that self-taught marketers will win. The market has proven that highly qualified marketers are not driving the commercial outcomes that their USD 100k degrees ought to help them produce.
An education is great. The ability to effectively apply it is even greater.
Meh… Working at WPP is still “consulting”.
Ritson and his clearly out of touch colleagues at Melbourne Business School just got ranked the third best business school IN THE WORLD for marketing by the Financial Times this morning. Above Wharton, Harvard, London Business School and every single school in Asia Pacific and Australia. Amazing considering how hopeless they are at industry application and how gormless their MBA students are.
Can’t quite see Swinburne’s business school anywhere to be seen on that Top100 list…
So sponsored rankings are the ultimate metric of success?
As much as I can see the benefit of this process I do worry that what will be produced is people already indoctrinated by Facebook (how long until Google puts it’s hand up), Technology providers (Adobe offering to write courses), a Supply Chain Partner (as really that’s all Aust Post is now via StarTrack) and agencies as to what platform, media, distributor and channel to use not what is best for the client and consumers.
I fail to see how any of these listed partners are going to bring anything but their own baggage to the table. If you are trained to see Social as Facebook only, Supply Chain (those of you with an MBA know this is a part of the requirement) as Aust Post and the Agency to be Dentsu or WPP (Isobar & JWT) then this is just a way for them to get a generation of people using them in the future.
It’s really not hard to teach people how different technologies and channels fit into the digital landscape, you don;t need courses written by these groups to do that. The main issue is it changes so fast that by the time many of these people have their degree Programmatic will be redundant and Social will have evolved again (as for many younger generations it already has from Facebook to private messaging and Snapchat).
This isn’t breaking the mould or taking the educational industry forward it’s just inviting the foxes into the henhouse…
well said