Why do an MBA in Marketing? Career Options & Prospects

All of us are born with talents and skills that are unique to each other. It sets us apart and also creates our identity. This also implies that not all of us are expected to strictly follow protocols or perform mundane tasks on a daily basis. That’s why we have something called ‘marketing’ in every organisation.

If you are a creative person who has a knack for bringing innovation to the table every morning, marketing is the place to be. Marketing is a dynamic field that allows individuals to identify the needs of consumers and develop unique strategies that can help fulfil those needs. It sounds intriguing, but it is also difficult. That’s why people undergo professional training in this aspect, commonly referred to as an MBA (Masters in Business Administration) in Marketing.

Master in Business Administration is the most opted course among student. The reasons are obvious; lucrative careers, high salaries and endless opportunities. However, we have listed here six ways in which doing an MBA will change your life for good.

Impressive Job Titles and Corporates Giants to Work for
Look at the below titles

• Foreign Trade Management
• Managing Partnership and Networks
• International Financial Reporting
• MNC Logistics and SCM
• Negotiation Skills for International Business Geopolitics
• MNC Corporate Governance
• International Derivatives Markets

Do they excite you? Or are you excited to work for an organization like Boston Consulting Group, Accenture, FedEx, Blue Dart, ONGC, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft Corporation, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and Pepsi, etc.? All the above-mentioned job titles and corporate giants have a huge requirement of marketing professionals who can make strategies at a global level. Lucrative salary and employee benefits are the additional things that you will enjoy with such respectable job titles.

Understanding Consumer Behaviour and Market Research

Consumer behaviour, also known as customer behaviour is the study of customers or consumers, especially those in a target market. It comprises recording and assessing the consumer’s behavioural, mental, and emotional responses to a product or service. This type of behaviour examines how a customer chooses a product, avoids a product, or has other specific buying habits. Thus, this concept transcends looking at what customers want and don’t want.

Factors that can affect the consumer behaviour:

• Purchasing power: Purchasing power is the buying capability of a consumer, which influences their buying decisions. For example, a person who earns a daily wage of Rs. 10,000 would buy a bar of soap that costs Rs. 5 or 10 and would never buy a shower gel worth Rs. 200.
• Marketing campaigns: This is a new trend in the market in which marketers try to attract customers through innovative marketing campaigns designed specifically to persuade them.
• Personality traits: Everything from our upbringing to the type of company we keep has a significant impact on our purchasing habits and choices. For example, if you are used to seeing your mother buy clothes only when there is a mega sale, you are likely to follow in her footsteps when you grow up.
• Individual preferences: Despite our upbringing or the type of advertising that we are exposed to, each of us has our own personal choices, which form an important part of consumer behaviour.
• Economic conditions: Recessions or poor economic conditions can also have an impact on consumer behaviour. People in first-world countries, for example, will be willing to indulge in luxury items; however, the same cannot be said for war-torn or third-world countries.
• Social influence: People are frequently concerned with "what others think of them." This is why we are always trying to show ourselves superior to others or leading a better life than others. These societal influences can also impact the consumer behaviour of several individuals.

What is the significance of Market Research in understanding Consumer Behaviour?

Performing market research helps businesses understand all the important components that can impact consumer behaviour. Market research is like an ocean; it progresses from primary to secondary research, and from qualitative to quantitative research. These can take the form of industry news sites, statistics sources, published studies, and more.

Surveys are an important component of market research. Several researchers use this method to understand where their target market lies and what influences consumer behaviour. It also allows them to make sound decisions and can help create a customer behaviour analysis report. This report consists of:

• What customers perceive about the brand or product
• How customers use products
• How customers behave while researching, browsing products, etc. 

Digital Marketing and E-commerce Strategies

Whether it’s your birthday shopping on Myntra or ordering your favourite food from Zomato, we have come a long way in implementing digital marketing in our daily lives. Gone are the days when we would put up posters and do field-level activities as the only form of marketing. With time, we have surpassed the traditional means of marketing initiatives and adopted technologies in the process. That has led to the evolution of digital marketing, also known as online marketing, which is the promotion of brands to connect with potential end-customers with the help of the internet and other forms of digital communication. Digital marketing is comprised of not only social media, email, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messages as marketing channels.
Nowadays, digital marketing has conquered every field. This is because of the rapid globalisation that has caused organisations to adopt digital means of communication for branding and promotion. One such industry that has reaped the benefits of digital marketing is the e-commerce industry. E-commerce allows you to shop, buy, order, or purchase anything and everything that is available online. So, here are some recommended e-commerce strategies that every retail business should adopt for its growth and development.

• Produce original content: If you want people to buy from you or become loyal customers, you must create content that is relevant, engaging, and 100% original.
• Create an attractive website: If you are into e-commerce, the first thing on which you need to focus is website marketing. This starts with optimising your website with content and graphics that can fit in the appropriate places.
• Focus on content marketing: You must focus on creating and sharing informative material online that does not only promote a brand exclusively but is intended to stimulate interest in the brand’s products or services.
• Build your social media: Social media is a completely different game these days. Even big brands and celebrities resort to social media to build their brand's presence across all the networking websites and grab the attention of their targeted audience.
• Email marketing: When done right, email marketing can help you reach your targeted audience with the accurate information that they need.
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Strategizing your digital marketing efforts through SEO services will optimise your website’s visibility, thereby bringing more qualified traffic to your website.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: Pay-per-click marketing allows laser-targeted visibility that helps speed up the customers' buying journey and boosts your conversion rate.

Sales and Distribution Management

Sales and distribution management (SDM) is the process of planning, organising, and controlling the activities and processes of a company's sales force and distribution network. SDM's primary goal is to ensure that the company's products and services are available and accessible to customers when and where they require them.

Objectives of Sales and Distribution Management:

• optimise the sales and distribution process
• Increase the revenue
• Improve the overall business of an organisation
• Minimise the usage of inventory

 4 Important Channels of Sales and Distribution Management

• Wholesaler: A wholesaler purchases goods from manufacturers and sells them in bulk to retailers at low prices.
• Retailer: Retailers buy goods from wholesalers and sell it to the customers for consumption.
• Distributor: They are independent merchants who act as an intermediary and help in sourcing the stock and negotiating the best deals with the suppliers and vendors.
• E-commerce: In this channel, goods flow from manufacturers to consumers through electronic means.

Product Development and Brand Management

The process of generating and differentiating your company's image, goods, and services from those of its rivals is known as brand development. As part of brand development, one’s brand must be in line with their company's goals, communicate with its target audience, and be updated or strengthened as needed.

Goals serve more or less as benchmarks for brand development, representing new concepts and items as the business expands. So, as culture develops and one reaches out to new audiences, its strategy may vary over time. It is very important to distinguish the brand from others by giving it a unique identity. The first step towards this is to understand what consumers want and how the brand can fill that gap!

Here are some of the ways in which you can specify your target audience:

• Create useful and relevant content.
• Focus on customer feedback
• Implement targeted advertising

Pricing and Promotion Strategies

Pricing and promotion strategies comprise sales tactics where a company lowers the price of a product or service temporarily or artificially to attract customers and increase revenue through bulk sales. The objective of doing this is to foster a sense of scarcity amongst the consumers, thereby inducing frugal customers to purchase the item.

Following are four common pricing and promotional strategies used worldwide:

• Penetration Pricing: Offering a new good or service for a low initial cost in order to attract clients is known as the penetration pricing strategy.
• Economy Pricing: In this strategy, products are offered at a low price to consumers due to low production costs involved.
• Psychological pricing: This pricing strategy uses emotional responses to attract customers. For example, selling a T-shirt for Rs. 499 gives an idea that is still in the range of Rs. 400, although it is only Rs. 1 less than Rs. 500.
• Premium pricing: Also known as image pricing or prestige pricing, premium pricing is the practice of maintaining an artificially high price for a product or service in order to promote positive opinions among customers solely on the basis of the price. 

Advertising and Media Planning

In today’ competitive world, it is very important that marketers thoroughly plan he most efficient way to communicate a message to the targeted audience.

Types of media planning:

• Paid Media: This refers to paid placement of your brand and includes strategies like PPC (pay-per-click advertising), display ads, and branded content.
• Owned Media: Owned media refers to the content or media collateral that is owned by your brand such as blog posts and social media posts.
• Earned Media: Earned media describes the coverage a brand receives from sources other than their own business such as word of mouth, customer feedback, etc.

The main objectives of advertising and media planning:

• To raise brand awareness
• Provide leads
• Encourage conversions

Benefits of advertising and media planning:

• Increased ROI
• Budget tracking
• Customer division and analysis
• Establish processes

Market Segmentation and Targeting

The processes of identifying a company's potential consumers, selecting the customers to pursue, and producing value for the targeted customers are referred to as market segmentation and targeting. It is achieved through segmentation, positioning (STP), and targeting procedures.

To put it in a nutshell, segmentation is the process of grouping customers with similar needs and then determining the needs of the customers. Targeting allows the company to select the customers that they want to focus on.

Types of market segmentation:

• Demographic segmentation: It divides customers on the basis of age, gender, source of income, occupation, etc.
• Geographic segmentation: division of the customers on the basis of geological boundaries
• Behavioural segmentation: It divides the audience based on behavioural processes and approaches to purchasing.
• Psychological segmentation: This type of segmentation divides customers on the basis of behaviour, lifestyle, thinking, attitude, and interests.

Types of markets targeted:

• Undifferentiated marketing: Undifferentiated marketing, also known as mass marketing, ignores the market segments and treats the entire market as a single target.
• Differentiated marketing: This is segmented marketing where we only focus on those market segments that hold the potential of becoming our consumers.
• Concentrated marketing: It is also known as niche marketing," where one focuses on a niche or a narrower segment of the audience as its customer target base.
• Micromarketing: Micromarketing is the process of targeting a small group of individuals within a niche market.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer relationship management, or CRM, is the combination of methods, strategies, and technology that businesses employ to manage and analyse customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. CRM's goal is to improve customer interactions in order to increase client retention and sales. 
Any organisation that is customer-oriented must focus on organising and understanding CRM data insights. This is significant because it helps you understand your own customer and helps you to engage with them via different tools and technologies. This is one of the primary reasons why several businesses and industries are using CRM tools to create a central hub for audience reports. Moreover, CRM software enables them to interact with new clients, save time and effort through automation, boost customer engagement, and get more deals.

 Components of CRM:

• Salesforce automation: To track customer interactions and automate specific business functions throughout the sales life cycle
• Marketing automation: To automate the repetitive tasks such as ending bulk emails, etc. to enhance the efforts of marketing
• Workflow automation: Using technology to automate and standardise the daily mundane tasks
• Artificial Intelligence (AI): With the help of AI, we can now identify customer-buying patterns and predict future customer behaviours, etc.
• Geolocation technology: integrating GPS (Global Positioning Systems) or other forms of technology to target customers that are geographically distributed.

Supply Chain Management and Logistics

Supply Chain Management (SCM) and logistics is the process of overseeing the storage and shipping of goods and services across the supply chain. It begins with the acquisition of raw materials and concludes with the delivery of finished goods to the customer or final destination.

Are Supply Chain Management and Logistics the Same Thing?

This is a very debatable topic because while logistics is all about the storage and movement of items in the supply chain, SCM is a more comprehensive approach. It addresses the coordination of all channels and partners involved in this network, including procurement, manufacturing, transportation, storage, and selling. SCM uses logistics to get products to customers. It aims to improve financial performance and strengthen a company's competitiveness. To put it in other words, SCM establishes the strategy and oversees the daily logistical operations that take place in manufacturing plants, distribution centres, and other facilities.

Similarities between Supply Chain Management and Logistics

• Both are concerned with goods, information, or services.
• Both aim to support the company’s success while distinguishing it from competitors.
• Both seek to enhance customer satisfaction.
• Both have to follow the same lifecycle of sourcing, manufacturing, storage, distribution, and selling.

Data Analytics and Business Intelligence

The organisations that are into the game of data management utilise the benefits of data analytics and business intelligence (BI).  BI uses technology, data, and applications to make sound business decisions.  Data analytics is the examination of unprocessed data to provide inferences about such information.

Here are some common differences between data analytics and business intelligence.

Leadership and Team Management

John Maxwell once said, "A leader is the one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way." Teamwork is important in achieving an organization's goals, but it is the leader who fosters a positive work culture and motivates employees to deliver the best results possible.

Times have changed, and gone are the days where strict, heartless managers evaluated the productivity of an employee by the number of hours he served at the company. Nowadays, it’s all about creating a healthy workspace where each team member feels motivated enough to reach their optimum potential. In order to do that, a leader must possess the qualities of charisma, creativity, consciousness, empathy, and integrity.

For every leader, it is very important to focus on team management, as unified efforts lead to the accomplishment of goals faster and easier. It also promotes critical thinking, solves problems rationally, encourages open communication, and builds a strong team bond among the members.

So, here are some tips for team management that every leader must follow:

• You must stop believing that you are the sole 'correct' person. You should train yourselves to accept opinions and criticisms from others and admit that even you can go wrong. There is no limit to what one can learn in one’s life.
• Encourage a transparent workspace where employees feel connected and motivated. This will build mutual trust and respect among your team members, both within themselves and for their leader.
• Set boundaries when there is a need for them. It is good to be kind, but one must not mistake your kindness for weakness. You must exercise authority when you believe it is necessary to maintain team discipline.
• Engage in light-hearted conversations with your team members. This creates a jolly and enthusiastic work environment and also promotes employee well-being.
• As a leader, you must be accountable for your team’s growth. Appreciate them for their good work and allow them to grow to the next level in the organisation.
• You must be open to change. We must understand that the world we are living in is always evolving and dynamic. Therefore, we must upgrade our thinking and adapt to newer technology, workflow, and support systems.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Ethics in Marketing.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and marketing ethics are moral actions that are taken to instil a positive energy and impact on all of the company's stakeholders, including employees, clients, shareholders, and the community. These decisions are socially and morally conscious with respect to the environment, human rights, and society as a whole. Marketers use this strategy to create a positive brand value through their philanthropic activities, without any hidden intention.

According to the concept of CSR, organisations should balance their profit-making operations with endeavours to benefit society at a local, state, national, or global level. This imbibes an optimistic approach in the brand’s consumers who want to associate with it for its social contribution and impact. Several businesses have incorporated socially conscious components into their marketing strategy in an effort to benefit the community through useful services and goods.

Ethical marketing is all about brand positioning with respect to honesty, integrity, impartiality, and moral responsibility.  The principles of ethical marketing are as follows:

• Mutual trust in marketing communication
• Clarity and transparency in endorsements
• Maintenance of individual privacy
• Adherence to the government’s policies and standards

Conclusion – Should you opt for an MBA in Marketing?

Numerous job opportunities and Scope of further education

PGDM provides you ample job opportunities, some of which we have mentioned above, however, while completing the course you can explore your fields of interest and make a career in the respective field. This course additionally provides you a scope of further education or professional education if you are willing. Management institutions provide some value-added courses with this MBA course so that you have a competitive advantage over others in the job market.

Scope of Earning Handsome Salaries

On completion of this two-year formal degree in Business Administration you will be capable of earning jobs with lucrative salaries and excellent benefits. However, a lot will depend on the organization you choose to work with but be assured that with an MBA you are already holding a poised position. In case you have prior experience, accomplishing this course will open to you more career-enhancing opportunities.

Scope of Working and Travelling Abroad

While pursuing your studies in International Business, and even after that you will explore multiple opportunities for traveling to all parts of the world both for academic and professional reasons. Additionally, pursuing your MBA in marketing course you will come in touch with collaborators, scopes of internships, and training providing you enough scope of traveling to domestic and international destinations.

Self Enhancement and Great Interpersonal Skill

MBA is a comprehensive amalgamation of management, trade, sales, marketing, and aspects related to international law and economics. You will also get acquainted with principles and techniques of ethical negotiation and distributive justice, theories of negotiation, signalling, argumentation, and real options. The course further will groom you with a distinctive personal negotiation position and style.

Enhance your Entrepreneurship skills

As this course equips you with skills and perceptions of international business, it will pave a smooth path for your entrepreneurial dreams as well. However, every international business has a huge customer base, fluctuation in revenues, various product cycles, and a lot more. With an MBA in marketing, you can acquire a critical role in an organization.