IIT’s MDes/MBA program looks more relevant. But it takes longer than doing the two programs sequentially! So who knows how much synergy is actually happening in the program, but it’s awesome that they’ve at least recognized the potential.

VCU’s Creative Brand Management is a specialization for the Master of Science in Mass Communication/Advertising degree: it appears to be a professional degree for account execs.

Let’s not pretend, though, that the branding issues for Axe deodorant have a great deal of similarity to the branding issues for, say, GE’s MRI machines. From 100,000 feet, sure, it’s all marketing, but the importance of agile cultural surfing compared to getting technical trade-offs right is entirely different between the two.

An analogy: Houseflies and people are each subject to friction and gravity, but friction is way more important for housefly locomotion than gravity is and gravity is way more important for people than friction is. Both factors matter for each, but a climbing race between houseflies is mostly about overcoming friction and a climbing race between people is mostly about overcoming gravity.

Possibly we should have more institutional specialization, with some schools focusing on industries where the Axe-issues predominate while others look at MRI-issues. And B-schools probably do underweight the Axe-type markets, and their specific cultural concerns, in the curriculum. What’s funny is that our students tend to have a natural tropism toward thinking that marketing is about coming up with clever advertising, and our marketing faculties try to beat it out of them by talking about targeting, positioning, etc.

Comment: It’s interesting that you select the Axe and Dove teams at Unilever as good programs. They’ve been innovative, for sure, but the fact that they’ve operated so independently has created a brand/corporate reputation issue for Unilever.

When Dove launched its campaign against beauty ads, critics pointed out that this message was absolutely incompatible with Axe’s misogynistic ads.

To quote from an op-ed: “A Company’s Ugly Contradiction” in The Boston Globe: “Viewers are struggling to make sense of how Dove can promise to educate girls on a wider definition of beauty while other Unilever ads exhort boys to make ‘nice girls naughty.’ … Unilever is in the business of selling products, not values, and that means we, the consumers, are being manipulated, no matter how socially responsible an ad seems.”

I think this is a cautionary tale suggesting that renegade activity should have limits and that some corporate oversight is essential.

Question: David Aaker seems an unlikely or at least an unexpected person to single out to represent all that’s wrong with the business school model of branding. How so? What has he done to deserve such singular attention?

Of course, now when I hire graduates I don’t look for what they have achieved during their studies. I look at what they have learned. I look at how they have learned. And I try to understand whether they have a flexible mind, a focus on outcomes and an ability to achieve despite roadblocks. Often the best graduates dont come top of class, but somewhere in the top 20%. They need to know what its like to overcome obstacles.

This is scary stuff. Just read Stuart Elliott’s report last year for the NRC:

http://www7.nationalacademies.org/cfe/Stuart_Elliott_Paper.pdf

predicting that by the year 2030, 41% of managers will be replaced by a computer. And I wonder if deep down, the recipient of an “average” cookie-cutter MBA can sort of sense this.

Lest the design/creative types get too cocky, though, their/our turn will come soon enough. The post-human workforce is not as far away as we’d like to think.

BTW, speaking of skunkworks, my colleague and friend Jeremy Alexis had a nice article on the topic in the winter issue of Stanford D-School’s “Ambidextrous”. Unfortunately not available on-line, but posted as a PDF here:

http://www.id.iit.edu/155/getdocument.php?id=152

The money quote: “I have always been skeptical when clients or managers claim they
want to set up a ‘skunkworks’ for product development. What they generally mean is: ‘We want to move to a location separate from the corporate headquarters, spend a lot of money, tell no one what we are doing, and have no real accountability.’”

(He goes on to say how he changed his mind about this opinion.)

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/aeronautics/skunkworks/14rules.html