<p>This thread is so pointless, amusing though. :)</p>
<p>VectorWega,</p>
<p>That was just a sarcasm.</p>
<p>The interesting thing about the '09 USNWR MBA rankings is Yale SOM @ no. 10… I remember arguing with a bunch of people about Yale’s MBA program. I had argued that Yale was poised to break the Top 10 in about 5 years time and go even higher within a decade… others were arguing that this would never, ever happen (too many other “established” programs they would have to overtake – Ross, Darden, Duke, NYU, Cornell, etc.)</p>
<p>Well, lo and behold, not even a year or so since that discussion they are already ranked in the Top 10 by at least one established ranking – totally validating everything I was arguing, and beating my own timetable by 3-4 years. </p>
<p>Being right feels so good. Btw, where were those people that were arguing against Yale SOM breaking the Top 10 within 5 years? I’ll post those previous discussion links once I find them.</p>
<p>^ I’m curious, prestige, where did you go to school?</p>
<p>^ I went to the school of being right.</p>
<p>^ Where you learned to be a smart ass, too… I like that. :)</p>
<p>the_prestige,</p>
<p>So the USN validates you and your school (Yale) but it doesn’t validate Northwestern. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>I think it’s in your best interest to embrace USN. ;)</p>
<p>Yeah, it’s what I like to call the Kellogg Exception.</p>
<p>Kidding aside, no one is arguing (at least I wasn’t) that Kellogg isn’t a top program.</p>
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<p>First off, for the record, I never said that Harvard engineering was “better” than UIUC engineering from a pure engineering standpoint. Obviously, if you’re just talking about pure engineering, UIUC is better.</p>
<p>What I said is that, from the student’s career perspective, Harvard engineering is probably better, simply because many engineering students don’t really want to work as engineers. Even at MIT and Stanford - which I think we can all agree are the elite engineering schools - many of the best engineering students choose not to take engineering jobs, instead preferring jobs in banking and consulting. The basic problem is, as I’ve always said, engineering firms simply refuse to provide equivalent pay and career opportunities that the consulting and banking firms do, and so many of the best engineering students determine rationally that they are better off not actually working as engineers. </p>
<p>Secondly, it is obviously true that HBS benefits from the general Harvard University brand name. So? Like I said, if Kellogg really has the best marketing program in the world, then Kellogg should be able to help the greater Northwestern University proper build its brand name as a whole, right? Otherwise, what really is the value of having the best marketing program, if you can’t even market yourself? </p>
<p>I personally have no axe to grind against Northwestern or Kellogg. Quite a few of my friends went to either (or both). In fact, I would venture to say that both Northwestern as a whole and Kellogg specifically are underappreciated schools that do not get the recognition they probably deserve. But that’s precisely the point. Why are they under-recognized? Isn’t the whole point of marketing to make sure that you are not under-recognized? To make sure that the public is aware of who you are? </p>
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<p>So what? Wharton doesn’t claim to have the #1 ranked marketing program. But Kellogg does. If you’re really #1 at something, you should be able to demonstrate that through eating your own home cooking. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request.</p>
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<p>That’s where I disagree: marketing is precisely about producing brand recognition above and beyond whatever actual quality your product/service may have. The greatest triumph in marketing history is probably bottled water: getting people to pay $5 for something that is available absolutely free from the tap. Similarly, we can all surely name a brand of salt, sugar, and milk. But why - after all, salt is salt, sugar is sugar, milk is milk. They’re all commodities. But people will pay more if a commodity is branded well. </p>
<p>Perhaps more importantly, businesses spend billions upon billions every year in marketing themselves. Why do they do that if it doesn’t actually shape the beliefs of the market? Surely they’re not all just irrationally throwing their money away. And yes, even universities (and by extension, business schools) spend large sums in marketing themselves. For example, I open my issue of the Economist magazine, and what do I see here in the back but all these ads from business schools, including the little known but up-and-coming school known as Harvard Business School. Seems to me that B-schools engage in quite a bit of marketing. </p>
<p>Look, my point is not to overly criticize Kellogg. I would actually argue, contrary to some others here, that Kellogg may well be the #4 B-school in the country, tied with MIT Sloan. I am simply pointing out that the fact that Kellogg (and Northwestern generally) do not have strong brand names is fundamentally incongruent with the general narrative that Kellogg has the #1 marketing program in the world. You would think that a program that does have such vaunted marketing prowess would be well-marketed itself. It would be like if MIT Sloan - arguably the world’s best information technology management school in the world - itself ran an unreliable and obsolete internal information technology system.</p>
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<p>Northwestern Kellogg has numerous great strengths. I have never said otherwise. Kellogg is arguably better than some of the more famous schools out there in terms of course offerings. Now if only Kellogg could find some experts who could help the school market its strengths to the public better…oh wait. </p>
<p>See, Sam Lee, that’s exactly my point. You’ve just proved what I’ve been saying all along. We both agree that Kellogg has a number of great strengths. So the question then is, why can’t it market itself better, given that it does supposedly have the #1 marketing program in the world? If it can’t, then what exactly is the value of having such a great marketing program? The fact is that a lot of people seem to think that Kellogg is not as strong as perhaps its actual quality seems to indicate that it ought to be. That’s a problem with marketing.</p>
<p>^So, by your definition, only the best school can be considered to have the best marketing program? I don’t think many would agree with that. </p>
<p>I think your argument actually supports that Kellogg has the best marketing program, namely that marketing does not gain as much prominence as finance or consulting, so on a relative basis, Kellogg’s reputation would necessarily be lower than other schools because they are more focused on marketing.</p>
<p>Uh, gellino, your argument makes no sense to me.</p>
<p>Let’s keep in mind what marketing actually is, or at least, what it’s supposed to be. Marketing is supposed to be the ability to popularize the brand name of your product in a manner perhaps undeserved by the actual product characteristics. Lots of products win in the marketplace not because they truly offer the ‘best’ quality by any objective measures, but simply by dint of superior marketing. </p>
<p>Hence, it is not the case that the best school necessarily has to have the best marketing program. Another, arguably even more powerful method would be to have a school that isn’t actually good at much of anything except for marketing, but that everybody thinks is strong anyway. Put another way, the marketing hype and brand name should exceed the actual characteristics of the product itself. That’s what good marketing can do. Again, I would posit that the greatest triumph in modern marketing history is bottled water: convincing people to pay for something that is available absolutely free as tap water. In fact, often times bottled water is nothing more than tap water, as Dasani and Aquafina have admitted, yet many people continue to think that they’re buying higher quality than what is available from the tap. That’s brilliant marketing. </p>
<p>The point simply is that Kellogg has a number of true great strengths, as Sam Lee has pointed out and to which I have agreed. The problem is that a lot of people don’t think it’s as good as it actually is. That’s a characteristic of bad marketing, to which I ask again: what exactly is the point of having the #1 marketing program if you can’t wield it to improve yourself?</p>
<p>To give another analogy, Vogue, Elle, and Cosmo are basically in the business of advising women around the world how they should dress and look. Yet what if you found out that their editors and contributors were themselves frumpily dressed? The natural response would then be to tune out those magazines. After all, any organization that espouses to be experts in a given field ought to be living examples of that expertise, right?</p>
<p>You can spend millions of dollars marketing crap and it won’t sell. </p>
<p>Take U$C for example, ah never mind. Ignore my previous statement.</p>
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<p>Which is precisely the difference between good marketing and bad marketing. A bad marketer will spend millions of dollars and not influence customer demand a bit. However, a good marketer will know exactly how to spend that money to enhance customer demand to the maximum degree. Kellogg supposedly has the best marketing department in the world, so shouldn’t it be able to enhance demand for itself?</p>
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<p>^^^ Yale SOM is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Yale SOM didn’t even offer the much more widely recognized “MBA” degree up until a decade or so ago (as I recall they were giving out an MPPM degree? what the heck is an MPPM degree?) At any rate, this in conjunction with the fact that the program was more geared towards (and more importantly, perceived by the market place to be a program) for those going into public policy (hence the MPPM degree) was, I guess, Yale’s way of “differentiating” itself from the crowd. It was a poor “marketing” choice. Yale SOM became pretty much an afterthought for those candidates looking at the elite MBA programs –> it suffered not only in attracting top candidates, but also in the MBA rankings and more importantly further creating this perception that Yale was not a “proper” b-school.</p>
<p>Fast forward to today. Its degree has been changed to the more widely accepted MBA degree. Their professors are constantly doing interviews on Bloomberg TV and CNBC and are constantly being quoted in WSJ, FT, Businessweek and other financial publications by leveraging the Yale “brand” and its location (close to NYC). In other words, they looked at the marketplace, they looked at their product and said, “you know what? its not working. we have the YALE brand in our back pocket, we SHOULD be a top b-school.” And they should. Starting out with the Yale brand name is like starting your program at 3rd base, but they have been languishing at 3rd base for a long, long time. Watch out. They have been very aggressive not only attracting top talent (candidates and faculty) but also with fund raising, alumni, etc. The latest USNWR MBA ranking has them no. 10. I recall a discussion I had with a number of posters about the potential for Yale SOM to break into the Top 10 and people just laughed at the suggestion. Now who is laughing? 10 years from now I have no doubt that Yale will absolutely be considered a default Top 10 program or better – which is amazing considering that it was considered a joke of a b-school for years.</p>
<p>Basically, don’t bet against the power of proper marketing.</p>
<p>A credible argument can be made that Northwestern does not have as much lay prestige because of a Midwest bias. Even UChicago’s recognition drops significantly outside of the academic world and those knowledgeable about different programs.</p>
<p>I think once you reach a certain level the difference becomes negligible- no one’s future is effected solely by whether they went to Sloan or Kellogg. </p>
<p>“U.S. News & World Reportwhat a stupid joke! Here is this third-rate news weekly, aimed at businessmen who dont like to read, trying desperately to move up in the race but forever swallowing the dust of Time and Newsweek, and some character dreams up a circulation gimmick: Lets rank the colleges. Lets stir up a fuss. Pretty soon all of American higher education is jumping through hoops to meet the standards of the marketing department of a miserable, lowbrow magazine out of Washington, D.C.! Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Dupontall jumped through the hoop at the crack of the U.S. News whip! Does U.S. News rate you according to how many of the applicants you offer places to actually enroll in your college and not another? Then lets lock in as many as we can through early admissions contracts. Does U.S. News want to know your colleges SAT average? Well give it to them, but we will be realistic and not count special cases such as athletes.” - Tom Wolfe</p>
<p>Do we all agree that Wharton is third? Or is that another multiple page debate? </p>
<p>I’ll make my official 4th Columbia. I met a family friend ( i guess?) and he got his MBA from there. He is making about $350,000 now. Not saying that I am basing this selection off of salary alone … and ONE person’s salary, but Columbia does have a lot going for itself. It has the Ivy League name, A strong reputation and program – regardless of it being an Ivy and location – it is right in New York City.</p>
<p>Now, I am no Sakky. He’s been through this and has met more people that have already been where I want to be. So I am sure he has heard a personal take on life and opportunities found at these highly-rated schools. But I personally do not see Northwestern being placed above Columbia.</p>
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<p>You’re not even a high school graduate.</p>