Are Business Schools Preparing Marketers for the Real World? | Mike Kitz | CMO Confidential

This episode debates whether business schools are effectively preparing marketers for the real world challenges of today's dynamic business environment.

1. Business schools may focus too much on traditional marketing theories and not enough on integrating modern digital tools.
2. There is a perceived need for marketing education to include more real-world applications and cross-functional teamwork.
3. Effective marketing today requires a balance between data-driven decision-making and creative long-term brand building.
4. Soft skills, such as leadership and communication, are critical but often underemphasized in marketing curricula.
5. Continuous learning and adaptability are essential qualities for marketers in the rapidly changing business landscape.

1: Introduction

Mike Linton introduces the episode's theme and guest, highlighting the importance of adapting marketing education to current industry needs. Mike Linton: "Today we're exploring if business schools really prepare marketers for the real world."

2: The Shift in Marketing Education

Discussion on how technology and data have transformed marketing, with insights into the educational responses to these changes. Mike Kitz: "There's so much more data, and while that's powerful, we risk losing sight of brand building and creativity."

3: Integrating Skills in Marketing Education

Focuses on the need for an integrated approach in marketing education that combines hard skills with soft skills to prepare students for complex real-world challenges. Mike Kitz: "It's about balancing the technical aspects with skills like leadership and emotional intelligence."

4: Real-World Applications

Examines how business schools can better incorporate real-world scenarios and cross-functional projects into their curricula to enhance learning. Mike Kitz: "Hands-on experience through cross-functional projects is invaluable in understanding the interconnectedness of business functions."

5: Conclusion and Future Directions

Summarizes the discussion and explores potential future changes in marketing education. Mike Linton: "We need to keep evolving our educational methods to keep pace with the changes in the marketing landscape."

1. Embrace Technology: Marketers should continually update their knowledge of digital tools and data analytics to stay relevant.
2. Develop Soft Skills: Focus on improving leadership, communication, and emotional intelligence to enhance your professional effectiveness.
3. Seek Real-World Experience: Engage in internships, cross-functional projects, and real-world challenges to apply theoretical knowledge.
4. Balance Creativity and Analytics: While embracing data, do not neglect the creative aspects that build and sustain brand identity.
5. Continuous Learning: Stay curious and open to learning, which is crucial in a rapidly evolving field like marketing.

A CMO Confidential interview with Mike Kitz, Notre Dame Professor, former CMO of Office Max and P&G Brand Manager. Mike discusses the best ways to optimize your in school experience, why the abundance of marketing data may be crowding out long-term thinking, and the importance of learning "integration skills." Key topics include: the value of leadership and influencing skills; why presentation skills matter; and why "curiosity" is one of the best predictors of success. Tune in to hear how he made the switch from the C-Suite to academia.

People

Mike Linton, Mike Kitz

Companies

University of Notre Dame, Office Max, Goodyear, Proctor and Gamble

Books

• Leave blank if none.

Guest Name(s):

Mike Kitz

Content Warnings:

None

The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything podcast network looking to launch or scale your podcast? I hear everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit ihereverything.com dot. Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with being the head of marketing.

Hosted by five times CMO, Mike Linton. Welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them to chief marketing officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former chief marketing officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance and Ancestry.com, here today with my guest, Mike Kitts. Today's topic are business schools adequately preparing marketers for the real world?

Mike Linton

Now, Mike is uniquely positioned to talk about this. He's a marketing professor at the University of Notre Dame. Go fighting Irish, unless they're playing Duke, where he has been teaching integrated business and engineering for twelve years, a little over twelve years. He was previously the CMO of Office Max, the VP of marketing at Goodyear, and a Proctor and gamble brand manager. So he's really putting a very unique perspective here in my mind, combining engineering, marketing, academic and all of the real world stuff wrapped up into one interview.

Welcome, Mike. Oh, thank you, Mike. I am thrilled to be here. It's always good to talk to another Mike. There we go.

Yes, Mike's from Proctor. There's a lot of us. All right, so let's start with a quick overview of what you're seeing in marketing in the wild. When you look at all the marketers out there and what's going on, what is your view of how the profession is trending? Well, I get a lot of this from talking to some of my former colleagues, certainly lots of reading and a bit from the students who I'm interacting with, but a lot just trying to stay on top of what's going on.

Mike Kitz

It's amazing that so much more technology has come into marketing now and all this kind of data, but at the same time, I think the level of what's created has really suffered through that. And there's still great brands, there's still great things happening out there, but it's becoming a bit more technical than I remember from my time doing this, we were always very analytical. Some of the things we did, but it's even more so today. So are you implying that marketing, why it's adding math, is actually subtracting something else? Because I can't let this go because one of the things you would say is the ideal thing for marketing to be doing right now would be adding math and maintaining all its creativity.

Mike Linton

But what I heard in that opening statement is while we're adding a lot more math, we are actually sacrificing maybe long term vision and maybe creativity. Is that fair for what you just said? Yeah, I think there's so much more data and you can measure things and there's certain people in the C suite that wants to see things measured. So it's easier to go and show whether, I mean, long ago it was clicks. So thankfully we're beyond that.

Mike Kitz

But some people are getting back to that as sort of the crutch and they're losing the longer term business building and brand building aspects because of what you can deliver. As you get back to some of your colleagues, I think there's also a whole slew of marketers who are really just about kind of funnel marketers around, help bring some customers in, take them down the funnel, but very little in those cases around what do you really build in the long term? And the long term is where the value is. When a company buys another company, a good portion of that goodwill that can't be explained is the value of the brand. That's like Proctor buys Gillette and has to put a couple billion dollars on the balance sheet, but has nothing on the balance sheet for tide, crest or pampers, which, which is.

Mike Linton

That's super interesting. So let's flip this over to the B school front. What are most schools teaching now? And you don't have to speak for Notre Dame. You could just throw a blanket all over business schools.

And I'll give you a little background. We get a lot of calls in between the shows and some of our guests have intimated that much of marketing, the marketing curriculum at a lot of schools is outdated and very functional in nature, including some courses that are still teaching the four P's of marketing. Tell us about that. Is that, is that what you're seeing across the country? Notre Dame?

Mike Kitz

Yeah. I mean, I do look at some of the programs and some of the best ones, you know, northwestern and Stanford, and I'm a graduate MBA from Michigan. I thought it was a good program. Football championship, by the way. Yeah, yeah, it is.

There's still a lot of those kind of functional courses, but frankly, when I go over to finance. It's a lot of functional finance courses. You look at the, you know, the HR courses, again, all kind of functional. And I think that the challenge with that is what's missing is the integrative piece. Now, a lot of schools will have kind of programs or kind of courses where you're coming together sort of cross functionally, but I don't think there's enough of that.

A lot of schools in the kind of the projects that you go forward with. Because when I forward to my marketing career and my engineering career, everything tends to be done cross functional. And you need to know sort of how your decisions, whether the engineers who are creating products, how they affect marketers, the marketers, how their programs are affecting sales and profits in the bottom line. And so that holistic piece, I think, is one of the things that's missing. But I'm not sure.

It's pretty hard for, I think a school to do that. They may come up with projects or clubs where you do that, but my view is you really learn that on the job as you're going forward. But I do think you can better prepare people for those intersections and how to work with more people going forward. Yeah, we had one of our guests, Jim Stengel, also from Proctor, say the CMO job really is 90% c, 10% m.

Mike Linton

But, and I guess when I look at this, I think our schools really teaching that soft skill stuff and the leadership skills, particularly in this space, because one of the things, if you're in engineering or you're at the bottom end of the performance end of marketing or you're in finance, all those functional courses, that actually, a lot of that is the job. The marketing job is translating the data into something that moves today's numbers and sets you up to make tomorrow's numbers. And that requires people to buy into the story and discuss stuff. Are schools actually involving any classes there or even on the math front, involving any new classes, like, like how to manage all this data really at speed? Well, a few things also, I want to just give some clarity for the listeners.

Mike Kitz

Strangely enough, I sit in the college of Engineering. So I teach this business integrated engineering business class, and in a graduate program for entrepreneurship, I teach their fundamental marketing class. So just for clarity with that. But, yeah, the schools will have some leadership kind of courses and some other things, and there's very few in the engineering curriculum. We've actually added one before I got here at Notre Dame around that, and that's one of the courses I teach.

It's really the soft skills. I like to call it the high performance skills. What we see is that there's tons of graduates who are technically competent, technically competent in engineering, technically competent in marketing, technically competent finance, but the differentiator in your career are these other skills. What are your leadership skills, your management skills, your ability to persuade, your ability to, you know, in the case of marketing and product development, to lead a creative process. Yeah.

Mike Linton

To be good judgment of, be a good judge of. You got six choices. The math isn't clear on any of them. You have to make the choice before the math comes in.

Mike Kitz

That is hard to teach, so to speak. And so what we do in my class is we introduce some of the topics of leadership, emotional intelligence, the different leadership styles. We use a corn ferry assessment so the students can assess themselves. They learn a little bit about the theory, and then what we push them to do is start putting them in practice for in your clubs and the kind of things that you're working on. You're going to gain your experience.

That'll help you with interviews in your first job. But then what happens? In their early part of their career, they're getting more and more engaging assignments. We teach a segment on how to give a presentation. Whether you're a short one on one person, you're selling your ideas, or you're up in front of people, people struggle through it.

They get better over the course of the. And that's the number one thing I hear back from students, and they come back and they say, when I was presenting there, you know, there was a VP came up after he said, where'd you learn how to present? That's a big deal, because companies go, they join a story and a vision. They don't join a spreadsheet. Hardly ever.

Yeah. And we teach financial skills. The language and scorecard of business are the financial statements and the ratios. And so we teach that to the marketers. We teach that to the engineers.

And again, I talked to three or four years out, some of these engineers, there's engineers from Stanford and Michigan and Purdue, and the project comes up, and they still have their own swim lane. What they got to do, the Nord Ame engineer who've taken my class, but they're the only one who knows what return on investment is. Guess what? They now get to do their thing and then track the project budget and all kinds of stuff. They're interacting with finance people, and all this kinds of stuff really helps prepare them better.

They get all started. Why did you create this class? Because you created it, right? I mean, you invented this, no, I. Got to give a guy named Bob Dunn.

He came from IBM. He sat down and said, what do people need to learn? But to the school's credit, they kind of let then create it. Then it was a fight to have it count as a technical elective or whatever. But we cover lots of subjects, but only just an inch deep.

That just gives enough that people can converse. They'll learn better, they'll learn faster, and so it's really just stepping back. And my same course could work not so much purely in business school because they cover all generally the topics, but whether there are people who are econ majors and history majors or biology majors or whatever, it can all be very useful, because they just learn enough about business that when they learn the specifics about a company, what their mission and what their role is at that company, they're just far more effective. So what do you hear from the companies that come in and recruit? What are they saying about college graduates today?

I think a lot of them are saying that people are really focused on getting that first job, and some of them are focused on the big names and what's going on that. But what comes back more often, and it comes back in this question. Mike, I ask people, the recruiters, I said, so what distinguishes people in your company two or three, five years later, versus, you know, all these smart people who are hiring as you go through this. And the answer always surprises me. Curiosity, a willingness to speak up in meetings.

It just showcases a learning attitude. They think, we'll teach you kind of what you need to do, whether you go into consulting or whether you go into a traditional marketing role or whatever, they'll kind of teach you. But they want people who are curious and can communicate well, and they will do better. And how do you teach that in school or b school or anywhere? Like, how do you make kids more curious?

Mike Linton

Because honestly, you see a lot of marketing students come out thinking, I got the funnel. I got the math. I'm technically great at performance marketing. I should be promoted. And then you're managing them, and they're like, look at this.

I'm a super efficient semi person. I should get promoted. And that's, that's not the thing that gets you promoted. But what, what should they be teaching in class now to these kids to keep them from, like, actually, you know, getting in the way of their own career? Yeah.

Mike Kitz

You know, some of the schools are doing a bit more where maybe it's the influence of the design school, like the D school at Stanford. Right. Learning some of the design thinking methods, which you can apply in my mind, you can apply it to marketing. You need to know what's going on and what the trends are and whether it's culturally, technology, the whole thing. But can you then run lots of small experiments?

Is it okay to fail? So we have some classes where we do that where people are creating very fragile ideas and they may fail. And you begin to sort the ideas of what's working in the short class. You don't have enough time then to maybe revise them and certainly put them in the marketplace or anything, begin to see what happens. But that mindset of let me have do lots of small experiments, see what works, and then let me accelerate on those things that are working and that will help them better off in their career.

Because if you're just kind of doing what was done last year, I take last year's budget, last year's program, and I'll tweak it a little bit and be a little bit more efficient over here, you're going nowhere. And the pace of change and the technology and the expectation is so fast, your marketing metrics are going down. Yeah. Yes. So you've seen marketing students or actually engineering students, and I guess by definition you've seen enough marketing students.

Mike Linton

How is the student evolved over the last ten years? Certainly they're more on top of technology then. Certainly when you and I kind of were in school and always the latest in my career, I always found, I tried to find young people who were doing the latest things, so maybe even help tutor, mentor me. So they're digital natives, so that as they go, certainly they're beginning to use these AI tools and they use it. They're much more willing to experiment and create within that context.

Mike Kitz

I'm sitting back trying to figure out how can I add some AI like assignments into my class to make them. Which is super, super important to get some practice. But how about one of the things I've heard from callers not on the show is culturally, some of these students are really more driven to not to be wanting to join a cause versus a company, and that sometimes it gets in the way when they join the company. What are you seeing there? Yeah, there is certainly this view of what I'm doing.

I want to make an impact on the world. I want to make impact on the world. And so some of the older traditional, I'll say fossil fuel companies, for example, people don't want to join them, or defense companies or things of that nature, but a whole lot want to go into energy transition. Sure. Working for Tesla or the space companies or some of these new things because they want to make an impact.

And what I see a lot of companies in their recruiting stuff, they try to get to a higher level of what the mission and vision of the company is. That's a little bit more than, you know, selling soap. But I love selling soap. So do I. I'm still a tide loyalist.

Mike Linton

There you go. And think how well we can do laundry because of that job. So if I want to be a marketing leader, what classes or experiences should I be getting as a student now that I'm not getting? Like, should I just take the marketing stuff and be, or get my MBA and be done with that? What should I be doing?

Mike Kitz

Well, you know, you got to take the fundamental courses because that technical knowledge you've got to know. And then I recommend, you know, looking for experiences in clubs or internships where then the experience is broader. So like there's a. I think it's an international club, SIBC, which is really business council or something. International Business Council.

They get real projects from real companies from Microsoft, from Tesla, from Samsung, and they've got to come together to cross functional team and it's kind of a mini consulting project, but in that they get to work with marketers, finance people, engineers, wrestle with a company problem and then they go present to the company executives. Great learning experience. Now, that's outside of the classroom, but you've got to be proactive to kind of get those kinds of experiences. Start a small business. Now, there's lots of businesses in and around campus, I think is another way to really hone your skills, begin to see kind of what works and what doesn't.

And there are people who want to do startups, right, and they're maybe kind of working on those kinds of things, even if you're. That's not your thing. You work with the student team, doing a startup, maybe as a partial or just a traditional business, selling, you know, cupcakes on campus or interning for CMO confidential, for example. We have an intern. So, hey, you flipped over from a pretty impressive marketing career into academics.

Mike Linton

How did that work? What made you do that? And what advice would you give people trying to do that? Well, part of it was serendipitous. This specific program I teach in Notre Dame I was aware of, and I liked this intersection of business leadership and the kind of things that were taught.

Mike Kitz

But secondly, step back to myself. I always liked coaching. I liked mentoring. I was always tapped on my shoulder to do employer orientations, kind of classroom kinds of stuff inside. So there was something about that that.

That I liked teach somewhere, so that was further out. And then thirdly, I was doing guest lectures here at Notre Dame a couple times a year in different classes, one marketing, one with different, and also an engineering class. I loved it. So when the opportunity came up, what was unique about it? Well, there are a lot more of these than people think.

There are full time faculty members who are not research faculty. That's what we traditionally think of. So it's a full time job. Adjunct is very different. That's what a lot of executives think about.

Adjunct is part time. You're not paid much, and maybe you don't need to get paid a whole lot. But in my mind, I said, oh, this would be perfect when I'm 58. Well, the came up, and I was 50. So then I had to decide, do I want to step off that c suite track and switch to this as a second career?

And it was a, you know, a hard decision. I was in the peak earning years and nature, and there's parts of the job I absolutely loved, but I was. I was drawn to the teaching and that. And I will say my life's a lot less stressful. Yeah, I love what I'm doing because you're impacting so many young people.

They keep coming to you about career advice and all kinds of stuff beyond. Beyond the classroom. Let's go on that career advice a little more, because if college and b school can only get you so far, I think what you said, and I want to make sure I got this right, if you want to be a marketing leader someday, you should be getting as much hands on experience as possible while you go through your college years. Is that right? Yes.

And it may not be marketing specific, sure. But also just some general business stuff. You learn so much about people. You learn a little bit about working in teams, and you just have an understanding of the business. So wherever you get placed, you'll learn faster and you'll have a better impact.

Mike Linton

That's that speed of learning and also that curiosity. Go do something different and learn it and the practice. So when you get to a company, you can learn it better. Tell me one more thing before we get to the end, towards the end of the show, which is the adjunct professor? Like, one of the things is it's not the easiest thing to get, actually, to be an adjunct.

And it's also unclear that universities actually want all these people helping them. Any advice for people that want to do the adjunct gig? Yeah, I'd say first kind of get involved in a small way, whatever university you're interested in that small way. Maybe giving a guest lecture in a class leading case study competition, or you're giving feedback on a student finals. Like, I sat at a marketing strategy Jim Leszewski ran, and it was for Portillos.

Mike Kitz

And at the end, they came in present. That's a northwestern professor, right? Yeah, but he was doing this for Notre Dame at the time. Jim was. He was still a Google.

Mike Linton

I'm shocked that I just recalled that. But, yes. Okay. Yes. And so, you know, the CEO and the chief Mori officer of Portillo's were there.

Mike Kitz

The student teams were presenting, and I was another person there kind of judging, you know, the feedback and giving the students feedback. All that's all that work, Mike, is around building a relationship with the school, and maybe you get to know the department head, and then you drop some hints that you would love to teach a class. And in this subject or that subject or whatever, adjuncts are the part time faculty. So they'll get hired when they need more and they get less. You know, they don't get hired when they need.

Mike Linton

They get unhired when they don't. Yeah, yeah. But if. If you're teaching a class that is really well loved, it'll happen again and again. We've got a number of people in Mendoza that started that way near the end of their career.

Mike Kitz

They're beloved professors, and then over time, they got hired as full time professors. But you got to start with, if you just kind of walk in and say, hey, I'm a former CMO, and I'd love to come teach at, you know, at the University of Akron. They'll be like, who? What? You know, they may be happy to see you, but there's, like, this fit for.

There's a need, and they know you, and then they'll engage. You got it. Thank you. So we're almost out of time here. So this is a two part question.

Mike Linton

You have to take one part, and you can take both of you. Wish practical advice for our audience we haven't talked about yet and or funniest story you can share on the air. Okay. Okay. First, practical advice.

Mike Kitz

I mean, for marketers, they're creative. They love kind of the marketing thing. Know the finances. If you can't do a simple return on investment or even what you're, you know, some new event that you're trying to go, how is this going to impact the business? So that's my practical advice.

You're going to be so much more valuable to your CEO, your CFO, even your chief marine officer, if you know that funniest story. And then I want to add just one little code coming back to my education, teach. So I'm in Hollywood. We're doing a commercial shoot, and so I'm there, breakfast at the hotel, and I hear this conversation on the table next to me. These two guys yucking it up about how much they pulled with the huge budget they're doing on this automotive tv commercial.

Those guys in Detroit don't know anything. These people are tripling their budget, and they're kind of playing off each other. I did this with this company. I did that with this company. I'm just sitting there eating my breakfast, going.

So I knew about some people in marketing, in automotive companies. I relayed the conversation. And at least one company, about a month later, uh, they worked through their agency. I would have been pissed at my agency, too, but they, uh, you know, some of their. Their commercial shoot budgets came down about 40%.

So watch what you say. Watch what you say. Um, lastly, I just humble pie with my omelet. So. Yes, yes.

I, um. Uh. I. I just. I.

Super bowl. You watch the Super bowl, right? Yeah, everyone does. Yeah. So I had this unique thing this year with the Super Bowl.

A unique thing. Former students, three people were involved with the Super bowl. One was Drew Tranquil, who was on the Kansas City Chiefs defense. He's a mechanical engineer. I mean, great student.

I mean, how do you do engineering and play football full time? Fabulous. But I have two former students who did a startup called Hallow, and they did a Super bowl commercial. So they graduated in 2015, and they had a Super bowl commercial this past year. It's a faith based meditation app.

I'll just say, Mike, the commercial was so successful that a few days later, they were the number one downloaded app on Apple iOS ahead of Taimou. That was the other one. Did a lot of virtual paramount plus whatever. Some of the former students there at the Super bowl. Look at all that teaching you can be proud of there.

They were smart marketers. They bought. They didn't do a national commercial. They only bought half in the markets where they knew their customers were so. Spent a lot less money.

Huge effectiveness, no awareness. I mean, this is a. They're at Series D or something. They've been raising a lot of money, but how about that? Look at all that teaching impact you've had.

That's it. I hope they're at least getting the app for free. So, anyways, I think this is a great way to end the show. Thank you Mike and thanks everyone for listening to CMO confidential. If you are enjoying our show, hit the like button, share and subscribe.

Mike Linton

Look for all of our shows on Spotify, Apple and YouTube, which include marketing, the battle between believers and non believers, the Budweiser case, how not to manage socio political issues, what private equity really thinks about marketing, and is the CMO job headed for extinction? Hey all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO confidential.