Are you a marketer interested in furthering your education with Mark Ritson’s Mini MBA? Have you found yourself wondering if the course is right for you? Is it worth your time? Your money? Are marketing skills even worth any investment these days? Well, if you’ve been umming and ahhing over enrolling, if you need the ROI spelled out to you, if you’re desperate for a review, we’ve got you…
The Mini MBA is a unique, flexible course that’s easy to build into your schedule. It provides a great deal of depth across the key areas of marketing, it gives you real tools to make a difference in your role and, oh yeah, it’s fun. If that’s still not enough for you, go on, read the full review…
Okay, we’re pretty sure you’ve already heard of Mark Ritson’s Mini MBA in Marketing. You’re here, for starters. So, you already have a sense of the course’s appeal. It’s Mark. It’s built around the busy lifestyle of people in the industry. It’s 10 modules, over 12 weeks, all online. It promises increased knowledge and confidence. It sounds ideal for those of us who aren’t formally trained in the discipline (I mean who really is?) and that’s partly why we enrolled.
It’s safe to say, sometimes we marketers get ahead of ourselves. We’re excitable and eager. We can fill our pockets with tactics before we’ve even thought of strategy, and this comes back to bite us. The Mini MBA is designed to take you away from any of your ill-founded instincts and back towards the basics; the fundamentals; the must-dos and don’ts of marketing. The course guides you through the marketing jungle, step by step. To ensure that you stay on track and don’t hop too many steps, jump too high or trip and fall. Essentially, it makes sure your marketing starts out at the right place and gets to the right place.
Mark walks you through the practices of proper marketing in 10 modules:
– Market Orientation
– Market Research
– Segmentation
– Targeting
– Positioning
– Objectives
– Product
– Price
– Integrated Marketing Communications
– Distribution
In the first six weeks, you put distractions aside and focus on the customer, you discover how to gain insight into the market and how to dig into the data to identify distinct sub-groups. When you’ve found the right people to target, the course shifts the focus to strategy with the right times to target and your optimum objectives. Once you’ve found the footing for your strategy – and you’re no longer plucking your ideas from thin air – you get a look into those famous four P’s: Product, Price, Promotion, otherwise known as Integrated Marketing Communications, and Place aka Distribution. It’s a whole journey.
Good marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. And good training doesn’t feel like training.
What stood out beyond the depth of information was the format of the course. It manages to cover so much in so little time. It’s unique and grown-up. You get a lecture plus reading per week. With a catch-up reading week in between and an optional exam at the end. It has an additional podcast for those on-the-go industrious types. But that doesn’t mean it’s arduous. In fact, we found it quite fun. Of course, Mark matches the great pace of the course with his great sense of humour. Between his lectures and columns, he turns what’s academic and theoretical into easy, applicable content. And, by the course end, you have a toolkit of useful frameworks to whip out and apply to real-world challenges. Watch out world!
“It's been fantastic to have such instantly applicable MBA level experience from an engaging, fun, and interesting course."
Upon some research, people join the course from all over the marketing plane: strategists, product managers or data analysts. And it makes perfect sense. Whether you’re interested in the Mini MBA as an individual or as team, the course goes some way in helping you understand the moving parts of a marketing department. With two of us on the course, we enjoyed the benefit of discussing the course material week by week. We got to reflect upon where we could push ourselves individually, together and as part of the wider agency. All with the hope of driving business results, of course.
Naturally, like any good student would, we both finished the course wishing we had longer to do it. To ponder, to soak it all up or get our heads down. But the Mini MBA knew we’d feel that way. That’s why the course is designed for time-poor people, who might only give it 80%, 70%, or even 60% of the time they’d hoped for. The final exam is brilliant for course consolidation and testing out your learnings but, like we said, it’s optional. And either way, you get a CPD accredited certificate. Between the two of us on the course, our approach varied. One of us went full throttle, the other studied casually around their schedule (not naming names!) Still, the Mini MBA ensured we both came away feeling better prepared and better trained for our job. Honestly, we think it’d be damn hard not to get anything out of it.
“The Mini MBA was the sweet spot of plugging the gaps in our knowledge and validating the things we already knew.”
The Mini MBA is a reminder that there is a strategy for finding the best strategy. For whatever your product, brand, solution. The best way we can explain it is this…Imagine you’ve got a brand spanking shiny product you want to get to market. You’ve already envisioned this masterful marketing campaign. But there’s your problem, it’s all in your head. Training with the Mini MBA sets off the sirens in your busy brain. Warning, warning, you haven’t followed the steps, you haven’t applied your training young padawan! Just like Luke, you need to leave your attachments behind and focus on what matters. What’s that you ask? Well, if you hadn’t realised already, it’s usually the customer!!!
So, there you have it. It doesn’t really matter where you’re at in your career, the Mini MBA feels like a preventative measure for imposter syndrome, for doubting your own abilities or mislaying your efforts. With good, thoughtful and actionable training, you’re not going to make up marketing as you go along. You’ll know the steps you need to take and the tools you need to implement to become effective in your role. We have no doubt you can turn this training into wins for your business and your career. That’s your ROI.
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