Marketing Management – an MBA course at Said Business School

A core course taken in the second term
8 lectures
Examined by 21 case studies (100%)

Post course thoughts
This class was 100% case study. The assessment,the teaching, pretty much everything was case study. And not your average nicely written Harvard case study either. Most of them were only a side of A4. A side of paper packed with such devious complexity you’d think the devil himself had taken up marketing. It’s fair to say a lot of people hated this course and felt it had nothing to do with marketing. It’s also fair to say that some people thought it was the best course they’d ever taken, on anything, anywhere. It was certainly an experience.

Much more than that is hard to say. Personally I thought it was about marketing, but on a level that goes way beyond designing brochures and gets straight to the guts of it. Marketing is competition right? It’s the discipline of using all the levers you have at your disposal to capture market and take it from your competitors, and let us remember that competition remember is all about winning.

Should you find yourself taking this course I have a couple of pieces of advice. The first is to realise that if there is another firm in the case they are their for a reason, and that reason is usually to provide a victim for your evil schemes. The second is that you can’t do anything until you understand the costs. The third is that just because the information isn’t in the case doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. Make a reasonable guess. The fourth is simple, whenever you have to make a choice ask yourself “what would Darth Vader do?”