Post IGNITE session: Do you need an MBA to become a marketer?

If you can’t make head or tail of the relevance of an MBA to become a marketer or if the bewildering question of whether a marketing gene is required to be successful in the industry beats you, then you have landed at the right place. So, roll up your sleeves and get ready to get your hands dirty to gain powerful insights and understanding of this domain.

Whether an MBA is necessary to become a successful professional or not is a moot point among young grads and business enthusiasts. Many are at odds with others over the tag of an MBA degree from a premier B-School. But does it really matter? What exactly is behind the vague and dusty clouds of perceptions?

After hosting a series of successful IGNITE sessions, we have Jasrita Dhir, Head - Brand Marketing & CSR at Fortis Healthcare and Shashank Shekhar Sharma, Co-Founder, Brainpan to give young graduates a quick insight into the business world. Jasrita Dhir has 14+ years of experience in the Marketing domain, and Shashank Shekhar Sharma has worked with brands like Nestle, Dabur, and Pernod Ricard. Let’s hear from these pioneers from the healthcare and FMCG industry.

Do a product and brand share a common denominator?

If you want to become a marketer, what can be a better way to start than to clear the erroneous interpretation of the product and brand? Product and brand are the most incorrectly used jargon in the business world. So, before you get hold of the wrong end of the stick, let’s figure out the elementary differences between them.

Product: Collectively, they are just a set of features, and to create them, one requires R&D, supply chain, manufacturing, and everything that is needed to deliver the product to retail. They can give you a set of functional benefits.

Brand: It is not tangible or a feature or a tagline but it is what people talk about. The most coveted thought about the brand is positioning, which means holding a unique, relevant, and real state in mind. Talking about the benefits, a brand is much more than functionality, it is about the emotional benefit. Since consumers tend to be rational, a brand enables you to charge a premium.

The development of a brand is a dynamic process and can be due to branding or marketing team or due to the experience that happens at retail, or while using the product. All in all, a brand is a sum of everything that a company does that goes into creating it and charges a premium.

Understanding the whole gamut of marketing

Whether you are a B-Schooler or a business enthusiast trying to pitch in the world of marketing, you must be aware of the much-enthralled concept of ‘4 P’s of Marketing’. If not, let take a quick detour of the concept.

Dating back to the 1960s, McCarthy noted down 4 major elements of marketing in his book ‘Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach’. These elements, Product, Price, Place, and Promotion play an important role in every company irrespective of its size. If you see marketing as a keyword, the idea is to move from a push-kind to a pull-kind of sales, where one doesn’t have to go door to door trying to sell the product, and instead, someone comes to a retail shop and asks for the product itself.

The crux of the matter is that marketing encompasses the entire process from identifying an opportunity, need, and a product to fulfil that need to everything that goes into creating that product, branding, and selling. Also, there is no need to muddy the waters by getting confused between branding and marketing. To keep it simple remember, “Who and why is branding. What and how will I do it is marketing”

A day in the life of a marketer

Depending on the sectors, marketers wear many hats. For instance, in the healthcare sector, they work as a facilitator or enabler where a day kicks-off by connecting with different sub-functions, getting the updates of positive or negative sentiments, number of OPDs and IPDs, keeping a check on virtual consults, etc. But whatever the sector is, taking a dip into what people are saying about your brand, the good, bad, and ugly - all the pictures need to be addressed. This is followed by the analysis of business performance, how is the strategy performing, whether it needs to be tweaked or not, or taking a view on budget prospects, looking at internal stakeholder coordination, collaborations, consumer experiences, so on and so forth.

For many sectors, a day for a marketer can look like 50% PowerPoints, 30% meetings and phone calls, and 20% Excel sheets! It cannot be gainsaid that Brand Managers or Product Managers are like the mini CEOs of the brand. It is just like a hub-and-spoke model, where one has to coordinate with the stakeholders and think on their feet if anything goes wrong. Apart from this, Brand P&L - the overall input and revenue and what could be done to improve it, creating advertisements, attending workshops, going through scrips of the brand, talking to factory managers are some of the tasks that keep a marketer occupied for the most part of the day.

The unending dilemma of the relevance of an MBA degree

When we talk about marketing and aim to become a successful marketer down the lane, think beyond the degree. It demands more of your common sense, ability to structure, analyze, and handle the situations, and this is what one learns in an MBA. When you work in teams, you build tenacity to hear people, drag your thoughts, motivate others, implement your strategies, and whatnot. So, MBA as a degree is not a die-to kind of essential part to becoming a marketer. Even with good knowledge, skills, and expertise, one can make great headway. How can one ignore the importance of online courses and certifications that are there to endow you with the required mettle?

However, from the recruiter’s lens, they have some criteria and values that can act as barriers in the journey. But this should not be a matter of worry or dismay, as people are looking for diversity and probably these barriers will soon melt away. At the end of the day if you are considering marketing as a career, stay aware of the trends, understand where your audience is, show the hunger to learn, and keep reminding yourself that you are not working for your boss, you are working for the consumers.

Be a hustler, build your profile, and get going!

Quick notes

Mind that a brand should always complement the product.
Charging a premium depends on the strategy which starts with segmentation. So, first, analyze as a business which target segment you are catering to. For instance, if its a highly luxurious segment and the premium is not set accordingly, the volumes will not be met.
The relationship between sales and marketing is like a relay race, where handling of baton requires perfect coordination. Also, one can anytime make a switch between these roles. Moreover, having experience of both the stints can give an edge to the profile of marketing as well as sales.
If the idea of switching the sectors or the industries gives you the heebie-jeebies, then it’s in vain because the principles of marketing are not confined to a particular sector. One just needs to learn the language of the brand and adapt to the new environment.
Data analysis is critical if you want to become a marketer. Whether it is about devising a media plan or promotion plans, a marketer must know how to how to inspect consumer data well.
Communication has a great impact on marketing. So try not to be tone-deaf in your conversation especially during these dark unprecedented times. It is time when something is bigger than your brand and your sector, therefore along with the right context, focus equally on collaborations.
Another significant factor that should be absorbed during these changing scenarios is agility. Real-time listening and taking a relevant action accordingly is the need of the hour.
If you want to become a marketer, scenario planning, business continuity planning, and frugal innovations should be focused on with a hawk’s eye in order to combat the repercussions of the pandemic.
Dig into the digital world, brush up the skills required to engage effectively with the virtual model.
One can choose to turn the CSR into an opportunity by creating good fodder for their content marketing.

We are a young nation and one in every three people is a millennial. They care about a different set of things than GenX, so keeping up with the thought process of millennials a marketer can lay emphasis on what Carbon footprint you are leaving behind, what can be down for empowerment, literacy, or education. This is where the whole story for a brand comes from. So, marrying of CSR with brand purpose will become more and more important. To help you dive deeper into the business world, here are the links to our other IGNITE sessions which consisted of highly esteemed panels across big conglomerates: