Chicago Booth MBA Marketing Trek: Marketing in Technology
Many MBA candidates explore different career options before choosing one. While a majority of MBA graduates (especially Indian students) go for jobs in Consulting and Financial Services, MBA programs also provide interesting resources for other industries like Technology & Marketing.
Today, we will explore the intersection of two subject matters i.e. MBA Marketing & Technology at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. This was made possible due to the efforts of the Booth Marketing Club through its recent MBA Marketing Trek centered on the theme Marketing in Technology.
What is an MBA Career Trek?
Coming from an Indian background, when I first heard the term ‘career trek’, I wondered if this was a team-building exercise wherein some trekking was involved. I thought of it as a leadership retreat of some sort. It was only when I participated in an MBA career trek myself that I understood what a career trek entailed.
A career trek is a group of MBA students coming together to visit three or more firms, based on a common industry of interest. A career trek could be a day-long activity. For instance, Wharton MBA students organize and participate in several day-long career treks to New York City. Or, a career trek could last a couple of days or even a week. MBA students also embark on cross-country or cross-continent career treks. For instance, students organize PE / VC treks to India or students from business schools around the U.S. and even from Europe have been known to organize Tech treks to San Francisco and the West Coast in general.
Goal of the Chicago Booth MBA Marketing Trek
With that background, let’s get into the specifics of Chicago Booth’s Marketing Trek that was recently held in October 2019. Speaking about the trek, second-year student and trek lead Vanessa Prachak said, “I’m in my second year at Booth, and this was already my third Marketing trek. I’ve never given up on the chance to be on a Marketing trek since I joined! What better way to complement classroom learning, than with real time interaction with senior leaders at leading firms in Chicago.”
With help from Kilts Center for Marketing, Chicago Booth’s center for advancing marketing at Booth, the trek narrowed down their selection of companies to visit down to three firms, namely, IRI, Pinterest and DocuSign. Students targeted firms that did not specifically come on-campus to recruit, which provided students access to employers they may otherwise not have had access to.
With the theme of the marketing trek centered around Marketing in Technology, the trek aimed to accomplish the following three goals:
- Understand corporate culture at the firm visited
- Understand MBA entry-level roles and responsibilities at the firm visited
- Gain a sense of marketing and business strategy at each firm visited
The trek also gave students a chance to assess the firms as prospective employers and understand where they stood when it came to potential employment opportunities.
Visiting Three Tech Firms in Chicago
The first stop for the students on the trek was IRI, a market research company that deals with consumer, shopper, and retail market intelligence and analysis focused on the consumer packaged goods industry. The meeting touched upon concepts such as the distinction between a shopper and a consumer and how the distinction is important, interactions between retailers, manufacturers, media and shoppers and how this relationship keeps changing constantly, among other things. The students were also given a live demo of IRI Liquid Data, the data cloud and visualization platform that IRI clients use to draw insights from their data.
The second meeting saw the students make a stop at Pinterest, where they were greeted by Carrie Sweeny (MBA 2011). The meeting at Pinterest brought topics such as Product Management, Product Marketing, Engineering, Sales, Measurement, and Creative Strategy to the fore, while also discussing the difference between Pinterest in Chicago and San Francisco, as well as the existing work culture at the company.
The final stop was at DocuSign, a company that allows organizations to manage electronic agreements. The students at the meeting were addressed directly by the COO, Jeff Piper, who discussed the company’s positioning and strategy, their acquisition of cloud platform SpringCM and how that acquisition impacted DocuSign. The students also touched upon concepts such as market segmentation, roles and responsibilities, a day in the life of a marketing manager, and touched upon the solutions offered, and much more. A panel style Q&A session at the meeting also allowed the students to interact with recent hires and marketing managers to get more clarity and depth of the organization.
Kellogg vs Booth: Who is the Market Leader for MBA Marketing?
Kellogg School of Management’s Marketing Department has been known as the leader in the discipline for a long time now. The business school also has the distinguished Philip Kotler as a faculty for International Marketing. Kotler was responsible for coining the definition of the term ‘marketing mix’, and is popularly referred to as the ‘Father of Modern Marketing’. Other faculties at the Kellogg’s Marketing Department have written books on the most important marketing concepts such as marketing management, channels of distribution and sales promotions.
Kellogg has since continued churning out graduates who are emerging leaders in the field of marketing, with doctoral students in the discipline having won more American Marketing Association awards than any other schools. Some notable Kellogg alumni in the field of Marketing include Douglas R. Conant (former President & CEO of Campbell Soup Company) and Betsy Holden (former CEO of Kraft Foods).
However, Chicago Booth’s efforts in the discipline aren’t going unnoticed through its work with the Kilts Center for Marketing. By designing programs that benefit the careers of students, facilitating research opportunities for faculty that support Booth’s marketing curriculum, and funding scholarships for MBA and PhD students, the Kilts Center for Marketing is dedicated towards the advancement of marketing as a discipline at Chicago Booth. Notable Boothies in Marketing include Dave MacLennan (President & CEO of Cargill) and John S. Watson (Chairman and CEO of Chevron).
