Marketing Majors going to MBB?
I want to start this off by saying I am not a marketing major or directly interested in consulting, just curious. I'm a finance major looking into IB/AM so I would not say I am looking for advice.
In my current marketing class at college(non target for any finance/business jobs) we are spending an entire week discussing BCG and consulting techniques through marketing. We are focusing heavily on the BCG Matrix(growth-share matrix) but we are also focusing on consulting in general.
My prof said that he "knows BCG and MBB in general love marketing majors". Is there any truth to this? I always viewed marketing majors as a sort of dead end major unless you are truly interested in a marketing firm or small start up. I would love to hear what you guys think about this as I have quite a few friends that are marketing majors and are interested in consulting.
Interested as well, but I think marketing is a great major to understand business as a whole
I am still a student so I wouldn't know how it helps in terms of like actual business experience, but in general I would have to disagree. In the 2 marketing classes I have taken, I have learned almost nothing about how a business actually works, only how to get a market to buy your product. I feel like accounting has actually been the best class in terms of understanding business and how a business works. I guess everyone has there own way of understanding though. Thanks for the comment! Hopefully someone will enlighten us!
From my MBB, pure marketing majors seem to be treated as semi-target compared with finance or management. They can still make it but are more likely to require better grades and previous experience/ internships with a strategic/ analytical component (e.g. management/ pricing consulting, general marketing at a leading firm).
Interesting, thanks for the reply!
Marketing is fine as long as you show an ability to handle quant work. Marketing is often perceived as fluffy, but if there’s any data analysis/market research involved then that’s in the right direction.
That's kind of what I figured. I know even among business majors marketing seems to be thought of as the more fluffy major. Nothing wrong with it though, especially if that is what someone wants to do!
Double reply
Marketing for MBB and business as a whole: necessary but not sufficient.
Right, that is probably why most business major programs require at least 1 or two marketing classes. At the very lest, you must be able to market yourself. I agree with the necessary but not sufficient comment. I feel like an entire degree of marketing may not give you the analytical base that you need to succeed in banking, consulting, or even business ownership. My family owns a medium sized printing and marketing consulting company and just from working there I know that a marketing degree would probably not give me the skills I would need to excel right out of undergrad if I were to take ownership of the company. You put my thoughts into words. Thanks for the input!
Some firms have specific Marketing practices: ex. McKinsey Marketing & Sales.
That's interesting, never heard of that. Do those in the specific marketing practices work similar hours and get similar comp?
MBB use marketing concepts in their case interviews and in their work - they use them simultaneously with microeconomics, accounting, corporate finance, operations, and strategy. Hence the earlier comment: necessary, but not sufficient.
Right, thanks. I understand that.
Also just to clarify, I do understand that marketing is part of the skill base used in consulting in general. Just like it is in almost everything. I was mainly wondering if marketing was truly a "target major" for consulting firms, only because I have a marketing prof that told us this last week. I am not trying to sneak into consulting through an "easy major" or anything like that. Simply curious. Maybe I brought my question to the wrong place.
Yeah, I edited my comment after circling back to your original post and seeing what you wrote about IB and AM.
I can understand your frustration about your Marketing courses seeming vacuous. On their own, in isolation, I submit that they indeed are. 3Cs, 4Ps - you mean I paid tuition money to hear some fatass in a tweed jacket tell me this for 7 weeks?
This is a general flaw in our education system: business is a few abstract concepts plastered onto a lot of common sense, and it's meant to be an interdisciplinary field. But we divide our education into discrete course units, taught by people who don't speak to each other very often or even have much interest in each other's course offerings, and therefore a lot of students don't connect the dots on their (usually pricey) education.
A very quick 101 on how the different pieces fit together, and how marketing is relevant in the big picture of business:
The building blocks are Microeconomics and Accounting. Microeconomics looks at widget sellers and widget buyers: how both respond to widget prices, and how widget sellers consider their cost structure. Accounting is the reporting convention for what the hell happened with widget sellers.
The next level would essentially be Operations (follow the widget), Marketing and Finance. Finance is often paired with Accounting, but Accounting is a reporting convention and usually backwards looking - what happened to sales/costs, cash, and how you split up a firm between what the firm owns and who financed the firm. Finance is forward-looking and attempts to mainly answer three questions: 1) what the right level of skepticism (ie. discount rate) is for any given forward-looking projection (which can't be taken at face value; it'll be known in the future, but for the time being, what's the present value?) 2) what's the whole business worth and 3) how to divvy up the spoils.
All of that is nice and dandy but when you're noodling away on cost of equity, cost of debt, WACCs, etc, you run the risk of forgetting what the hell the company is about in the first place - and how on earth will your forward-looking accounting statements mean anything if you don't know how the business works? If you're looking at a business that sells widgets, it's pretty damn important to put a dollar value on global widgets sold, what slice of the widget market your company can get, and how the hell it plans on capturing the attention of those widget customers and putting the widgets in their hands in exchange for some wallet action.
Businesses, as a going concern, are constantly grappling with that question - and any number of other questions in which this one is embedded. Ie) I'm a widget maker in Spain and I want to enter the Latin American market, should I buy a widget maker in Colombia or Mexico? Are their widgets the same as mine? Is the perception of widgets as a brand different? What do people buy alongside widgets? Does the Latin American widget buyer have different preferences? They're poorer but their population is growing and so are their incomes - is it growing fast enough? Bla bla bla. I might want to ask MBB to help me answer these questions.
And MBB would use some marketing concepts, along with a number of others, to prepare their analysis for this widget-making client.
Hope that was helpful. Intro Marketing courses are almost categorically lame.
Yes, exactly the same from my understanding. Some BA's who enter McKinsey with some kind of special interest in Marketing & Sales will be aligned under the Marketing & Sales practice - they are the same as a generalist BA but focus on more engagements in their own practice.
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