UC Davis Working Professional (Bay Area) MBA course review
MGB 204A: Marketing Management with Jenni Smith
Date evaluated: Spring 2009 at the Bay Area Working Professional San Ramon campus.
Official course description: Teaches a systematic approach to developing a sound marketing plan. Considers the business mission, situation analysis, strategy formulation, the development and implementation of product, pricing, communication, and distribution policies, and ethical issues facing marketing managers.
The real course description: Marketing case studies. SWOT analysis. Segmentation. Branding. Brand equity. Positioning. Pricing. Distribution and channels. One big project that pulled everything together, culminating in a group presentation to the class.
The professor: Jenni has a 10-year background in consumer product marketing experience. She thoroughly understands practical marketing tactics and the planning aspect of marketing management. I really enjoyed discussing her experiences, but many others in our class (and most of the Others in the other class) didn’t like her unstructured presentation style. My one beef with Jenni was her lack of a marking scheme. We were given assignments with no grading scheme, and grades with little or no feedback. She graded our presentations relative to others, and we received only a single number. That sucked given the effort we put into our work.
The course: The textbook sucked. Totally useless. Jenni agreed and didn’t assign anything from it. The cases were good, I spent a ten-hour flight working out my response to one particularly interesting case.
The grade: I got an A. I give the Jenni and the class an A-.
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