MiniMBA: A marketing education shortcut reviewed

I struggled to write this review.

Like an undergraduate, I’ve pushed the assignment all the way to deadline.

Now it’s here. I’ve got to knuckle down and write. I’ve got to tell you like it is.

Here we go.

The MiniMBA in Marketing is good. It is very good. If you’re a marketer who never had any formal marketing training, if you’re a marketer with formal training but need a bit of a shot in the arm, if you’re not a marketer but need to know how marketers think: consider taking the course.

It will take you a couple of months to complete.

You can do it while you are working full-time.

You don’t have to get up in the middle of the night to listen to Mark Ritson deliver lectures in real-time.

Yes, you will come out of it with a thoroughly Ritsonian marketing worldview.

And no, Ritson did not pay for this review. It would be nice to prove my objectivity by saying there are some serious problems with the course. But there aren’t. It’s clever, and it’s engaging, and it’s enjoyable. You will get that learning feeling – the sense of burgeoning possibility – all over again.

In the beginning

Do come in: Mark Ritson in one of his many greenscreen scenes

I started as editorial director at Mumbrella earlier this year and I needed a shortcut to understanding the people and organisations I was reporting on daily.

I had read “How Brands Grow”, by Byron Sharp. I had read Mark Ritson’s Marketing Week columns. I was daily reading the trade press and the statements of founders, creatives and CMOs in the press releases sent to us, but needed more background. I needed the theoretical underpinnings, the discipline, the ideas behind the ideas. So I signed up for the MiniMBA.

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting, but the course wasn’t it. It’s structured as 10 modules, each to be completed in a week, with two gap weeks where you get to catch up. There’s the option of doing an exam at the end, for which you will receive a grade.

While there is that exam possibility – which I didn’t do – the MiniMBA is not a formal qualification. I have no idea whether your future prospective employers will look on it favourably, but that is not the point. Instead, the MiniMBA to me is what a marketing course would look like if you didn’t care about perceptions, but only wanted the actual learning: the intellectual and practical meat.

As I progressed through the course, ideas for how to apply the things I was learning to my business – Mumbrella – kept popping into my head. I wish I had written more down, paid more attention. In fact, I want to watch the modules all over again.

What fine modules you have

The main module interface, showing the video ‘lecture’ and readings/podcast on the side

Each module has a main video – the “lecture” – which varies from an hour to close to two hours in length. There are required readings, and optional readings, and a podcast, which contains some of the readings read aloud. That’s it.

The bare minimum weekly commitment is watching the video and listening to the podcast. You can do it. Mumbrella is one of the busiest jobs I have ever had, and I managed the course by watching the lectures on the weekend and listening to the podcasts while I was driving, walking, or on the train.

Something that makes the task a lot easier is that the lecture videos are not actually lectures. They are produced pieces with Ritson speaking to camera from a green-screen studio, enabling all sorts of tomfoolery in the way of overlay graphics, costumes and scene changes. Graphics play a big part in the videos, and it’s clear that a lot of effort and inventiveness has gone into them.

The course is structured logically to reset your assumptions, run through the big-picture strategic questions, and then progress to tactics.

Module 1, Market Orientation, is all about cognitive – rather than personal – humility. The big lesson here is that “you know nothing”, and that the answer you seek lies not within yourself or your company or your brand. It’s out there, among the real people who constitute the market.

From Ritson:

All truths derive from the market, not the marketer. Your brand might be your focus, your salary, your ambition, your path to greater things. But to the consumer it’s just vegetable spread.

The shape of the course

From that challenging introduction, the modules proceed:

• Market research
• Segmentation
• Targeting
• Positioning
• Objectives
• Product
• Price
• Marketing communications
• Distribution

Having smashed your assumptions and enshrined curiosity as the cardinal virtue in Module 1, Module 2 runs through research techniques. Ritson’s method here is illustrative of his whole approach in a number of ways.

Turns out 400 people is usually just the right amount of survey subjects

The topic is so big, it could easily be a course in its own right, so he settles for a drive-by of the major qualitative and quantitative research techniques. He doesn’t claim the list is exhaustive, and he doesn’t dismiss techniques out of hand or say there’s only one answer. He presents a range of possibilities, depending on the budget of your organisation, and emphasises that there’s no perfect solution and no perfect knowledge. You just need a “good enough” research approach that gets you the data you need to make a plan. After all, you work for a business, not an academic institution.

He recommends a mixture of qual and quant techniques, and runs through some tried-and-true formulas. One standard approach is starting with secondary data, doing some ethnography (research in the wild), followed by a quantitative survey and then focus groups.

The surprising moderate

This brings me to an aspect of Ritson’s approach that – in his columns and public statements – you may have missed: he is actually something of a moderate. Not in tone, but in substance. His is a practical approach that focuses not on who is right, but what theories and techniques you can turn to your advantage. This really comes to a head in Module 4, Targeting, where he expounds the benefits of “Bothism”: you don’t have to choose between quant and qual, mass marketing and targeting, brand building or performance marketing, differentiation or distinctiveness, or even between the creative tribe or the media tribe. In fact, you must not choose. To be an effective marketer, you must do all these things, and remain cognitively flexible enough to incorporate new developments as well.

For me there were two high points in this course, and Module 4 was one of them. It was where the practical and the theoretical smashed into each other, where the overall structure of the method was most clearly laid out – diagnosis to strategy to tactics – and where the interesting ideas of marketing theory began to be connected to real world examples.

Ritson and the hall of mirrors

Looks chaotic, made sense at the time: Working out the segments for the MiniMBA

There’s something the course does that I think works really well: it’s self-reflexive. It uses the MiniMBA in Marketing and its development as an example, and so becomes both a vehicle of instruction and an instruction in itself.

In this pedagogical hall of mirrors, the course teaches you how to do marketing by showing you how it was marketed … to you. 

This begins in earnest in Module 3, Segmentation, where Ritson runs through how the students’ answers to the post-course survey allowed him to segment his customers. The distinctions are real, and illustrate not only Ritson’s point that there is business value in understanding real segments (which are not demos) but, for me, made a deeper point: I didn’t see myself in any of those segments. I am not typical, and therefore, in order to understand the business imperatives and effectiveness of the MiniMBA in Marketing, I had to look at whether it was effective for its targets – not for me. “You know nothing” all over again.

My other high point

The course becomes less intellectually focused and more practical as you progress to tactics. Then you hit Module 8, Price. I could never have anticipated this would be my other high point in the course, and my favourite module. It sounds boring, right?

It isn’t. This module convinced me that pricing is not only essential for your business, it is intriguing. To do it right, you have to understand the fundamentals of business: how price, sales, and costs interact to produce (hopefully) profit, how focussing on revenue alone is for fools, and how very very bad discounting is.

The module also covers the Van Westendorp Price Meter – a survey-based method for determining the highest price your market will happily bear – and a roadmap for climbing out of the “discount toilet”.

Did I mention that Ritson hates discounting?

Notes on style

Who are you, and what have you done with Ritson? Evidenza take the stage

Ritson is very good at speaking to camera. I can tell you, as a former TV news director, that his facility for actual communication through the cold dead eye of the camera is remarkable. This was amply demonstrated in a bonus AI module (nominally 11, but in my mind not part of the course) where a couple of Ritson’s former students – Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg of synthetic data company Evidenza – took over. I had to force myself to watch the episode. They sold Evidenza pretty hard, which I resented, they presented an implausible thesis, but most of all, they reminded me that reading a script to camera and appearing natural and engaging is just bloody hard.

Which brings me to what is possibly the MiniMBA’s great strategic weakness as a business. There is nothing here without Ritson: his thinking, experience, and humour. At one point, the man himself points out that there is one segment of marketers he just can’t reach: the segment that detests Mark Ritson. I’m not sure how big that segment is, but that’s not the problem I’m talking about. My point is just that if Ritson were unavailable for any reason, the business would disappear overnight.

In terms of Ritson’s personal style, you can come away from reading his columns with an impression of arrogance, of anger with all the bloody fools in the world. I didn’t find that attitude in the course. 

Sure, he does write off 50% of marketers as idiots at one point, and refers to Byron Sharp as “The Dark Lord of Penetration” at another. It’s funny, and lightly done, and not too prevalent. The tone is one of instruction, of inclusion (“well hello, MiniMBAer”) and of ironic humour.

The other bits

The Linkedin MiniMBA Alumni group

After every three weeks of modules, students get a live Q+A session with Ritson, where he answers submitted questions. You can listen to these afterwards. There is a Linkedin group where you can meet and discuss the course with your fellow students, and there’s a Linkedin group of alumni that seems active. There’s the exam I mentioned earlier, which I didn’t do. I believe the reports I have heard that for those who put the effort it, this is an important opportunity to bring all the knowledge together.

Most important for me, in terms of the bonuses, is the fact that you can continue to access the modules and podcasts when you have completed the course. Some of the readings – the Harvard Business Review stuff, for example – are no longer available for copyright reasons. I would encourage you to make full use of that material while you are in session, it’s valuable and heavy duty stuff.

What I know now

I think I could have got more out of the course if I’d put more in – like doing the exam – and I already got a lot out of it. More confidence in dealing with marketers, buyers, planners, creatives and others, particularly around terminology and concepts. I can more easily pick out the substance from the bullshit. It’s also nice to have the glimmer of an idea when faced with a challenge like pricing (how much for Mumbrella Pro?) or market research (who actually reads us, and who doesn’t?)

You can’t take this course without starting to think of all the ways you could be applying the theory in real life, in your own business.

There’s also something else, not directly related to the material, that I found wonderful: the process of learning itself. Curiosity really is a great virtue.

Is the MiniMBA in Marketing worth the cost? If you’ve done the course, you already know the answer to that … and you’ve got the Van Westendorp graph to prove it.