Preparing for the Rebound, Part I
June 8, 2009
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When Seenu Srinivasan is surprised, you know that something new is afoot.
Srinivasan, who has served on the Stanford University faculty since 1974, recently conducted an experiment asking MBA students to gauge the importance of a product's price on their probability of purchasing the product. In years past, when Srinivasan conducted similar experiments, students typically ascribed the importance of price as about 28 percent of the purchasing decision. This year, he says, that value shot up to 42 percent.
"I was quite shocked by that," says Srinivasan, who is the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management at Stanford and director of the Strategic Marketing Management program within the Executive Education wing of the university's Graduate School of Business.
"It shows how much of a factor product pricing is in today's economic environment, and it's just one indication of how big a factor the recession is on marketing products, particularly new products," he says. "What I would have done in terms of introducing a new product a year or two ago is very, very different from what I would do today."
That type of thinking, of course, is not specific to Stanford. The prolonged and pernicious recession that has blanketed the globe has filtered down to just about every strata of the economy. It also has provided the executive education programs at top universities in the country with a daunting challenge: to adjust their programs to help students position themselves and, by extension, their organizations, for when the business world gets back on its feet.
Offering highly relevant and forward-looking executive education courses has become a hallmark of success at New York University's School of Continuing and Professional Studies, which was established in 1934. One of the fastest-growing areas at NYU-SCPS has been the Digital Media Marketing certificate program, according to Renee Harris, the academic director for the school's marketing and public relations continuing education programs.
The Digital Media Marketing program, now two years old, consists of at least five courses that delve into a plethora of nontraditional media platforms-including online, mobile, blogs, Webcasts and social networking-and show students how each of these emerging vehicles can add bottom-line benefits to a company's marketing mix.
Harris says that while the Digital Media Marketing curriculum was not created with the current economic maelstrom in mind, it is highly relevant because marketing initiatives in the digital media space are, almost by definition, measurable, a key consideration for companies trying to survive and thrive in the current business climate.
"I've seen this trend toward digital developing for about the past two years, both on the agency side and at the marketing companies," says Harris. "But everyone is being asked to do more with less these days. So when your overall marketing budget gets cut back, you want to be able to quantify what's working. And these digital vehicles are quite measurable."
Harris says that another hot growth area for NYU-SCPS has been the Marketing Strategy and Branding component of the Marketing certificate program, a broad-based series of courses that are designed to help students excel in highly competitive battles for market share.
"Our programs have not all been designed in response to the recession, but they are all geared to helping our students be more successful on the job," Harris adds. "And that is more important now than ever."
Like NYU, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School has discovered that digital media has become a front-burner discipline among marketing companies and their ad agencies. In March 2008, the school founded the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative in the hopes of fostering a stronger working relationship between education and the advertising, entertainment and technology industries. The purpose is to better understand how interactive media such as social networking relates to marketing decisions and how statistical data culled from Wharton research can help to better understand that linkage.
For more Executive Education coverage:
Preparing for the Rebound, Part I
Preparing for the Rebound, Part II
Preparing for the Rebound, Part III