Pathways into Marketing: The Student Experience - Part 1

This week, Sally and Sam are joined by Lynn McBain, a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University to discuss Marketing and the student experience. Listen to find out more about how students and businesses alike can benefit from university marketing courses.

(0:42) Student expectations of marketing
(6:08) The generalist marketer in modern marketing
(15:27) Dealing with deadlines
(18:41) Learning skills for the workplace

Connect with Lynn McBain on LinkedIn

We'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences, so please share! Tweet us at @meanderspod, message us on Facebook, or email [e-mail]

Marketing Meanders is hosted by Sally Green, Partner at YMS and Senior Marketing Consultant, and Sam Birkett, founder of Amiable Marketing and Specialist Marketing Consultant.

Sally Green:

I am an experienced marketing consultant who loves helping people plan and implement successful strategies, creating campaigns that both strengthen the brand impact and increase revenue streams.

Working with me will give you a proper understanding of what does and doesn’t need to be done, how you can measure your success and how to get the best return on the effort you put into your marketing. Working with both large organisations and SMEs, I will help you set achievable goals, create a strategy and develop sustainable marketing plans that will show positive returns on your marketing effort.

Connect with Sally on LinkedIn.

Sam Birkett:

I specialise in higher and executive education marketing strategy, and operational and tactical support. Specialisms include LinkedIn lead generation and conversion campaigns, Persona and Proposition development, Content strategy, Webinar, Interview, Podcast and Video creation.

My consultancy works with institutions and organisations both in the UK and internationally, and over the last 16 years, I've been fortunate enough to work for world-leading organisations.

Connect with Sam on LinkedIn.

Creators & Guests

Host

Sally Green

Partner at YMS and Senior Marketing Consultant

Host

Sam Birkett

Founder of Amiable Marketing and Specialist Marketing Consultant

Editor

Nick Short

Graduate Podcast Producer at Story Ninety-Four

What is Marketing Meanders: The Marketing Podcast for Marketers and Small Business Owners?

Welcome to Marketing Meanders with Sally and Sam, the fortnightly podcast with over 50 years of marketing experience squashed into each episode.

We discuss the many aspects of marketing, emerging trends, and challenges we all face in marketing our businesses, sharing our own experiences and advice from industry experts. If you're a marketer, you'll recognise some of the stories we tell, and if you are a small business owner, hopefully, we'll answer a question or two.

Sally Green - 0:04
Hello everybody, it's Sally and Sam from Sally and Sam's Marketing Meanders and today we're doing something very slightly different. We usually talk about tactics and techniques and troublesome office issues. Now we're talking to Lynn McBain this morning and Lynn McBain actually teaches marketing to students at Oxford Brookes University and we thought it would be extremely interesting to talk to Lynn about what students are experiencing before they even get into the world of work and what they're expecting and how they function and what goes on. So welcome Lynn, thank you very very much for joining us.

Lynn McBain - 0:40
You're welcome Sally.

Sally Green - 0:42
So we're going to start asking you tricky questions, none of which you have to answer, but we will meander around the subject. So I thought we'd just start off by asking you just, not a difficult question, but just a question. Do students know what they're getting into when they start a marketing degree? Do they really understand what it is before they start?

Lynn McBain - 1:03
I think they have a general overview because, especially if they've been to our open days, because we do go through the programme structure and then if they go on and they become an applicant and they're offered a place at Oxford Brookes, then they attend an applicant day and that's in a little more detail about why study marketing, what things they might do, we might set a little task for them to get involved in. There's an opportunity for them to ask questions of the lecturers and we give them an example of what sort of assessments are going to be involved, content on the various modules. So yeah, I think by the time they get to that point, they've got quite a good taste of what they're going to get into for the next three or four years if they do a placement.

Sally Green - 1:46
That's interesting because Sam and I have been talking before because when Sam and I were young, you know, much… a long, long time ago, when we first started marketing, you basically did everything. Marketing was just one thing. You did the whole shebang. You were a multitasker. Whereas now they're going to learn quite specific individual tasks. Like digital may not be the same as advertising, may not be the same as assessment, all of that kind of thing. So it's a more multifaceted subject now. Are they kind of aware of that? They don't arrive and think, "I'm going to be an advertiser."?

Lynn McBain - 2:18
I think some of them have a vague idea of what they might want to to do after they graduate, especially if they have parents who are in the industry. So for example, we do see parents at Open Day, perhaps either run their own agency, or they've worked in a marketing department or something like that. So because of that, I think that's inspired the students to apply to study marketing and often actually the parents have got more questions for the lecturers than the students do, which is quite nice. It's quite useful to sort of talk to people who, you know, still work in industry as well. So yeah, it is generally quite broad still as a subject in the first year, but they have opportunities to specialise depending on things like which modules they choose for their electives. The first year is going to be from September because we've just done a big program revalidation, all compulsory. So we have three different degree programs now. We have marketing management, and these are undergraduate degrees I have to add. We have business and marketing, and we have digital marketing. So all three student groups, and generally there are about 200 of those every year starting the first year, they all study that as a common year and what that also allows them to do is to swap degree programmes if they feel that halfway through their first year they decide they want to do digital marketing, whereas they were on business and marketing, they can quite easily transfer for their second and final years. So I think that's quite a useful thing. But yeah, I mean, it is hard, I think, for business schools to keep marketing programmes current, because marketing is such a fast-moving subject these days.

Sally Green - 4:11
Absolutely and for you, your teaching and the people who are teaching them, you're busy teaching, not busy keeping up to date with the latest trends. I mean it's really hard when things are suddenly, are we all suddenly going to start marketing absolutely everything on TikTok? Are we all going to do the next…? How do we market to China? I mean it's a really interesting, as you say, fast-moving place, marketing.

Lynn McBain - 4:36
I think we all do try and keep up to date to be honest. I mean we go to conferences, you know, we keep in touch with industry publications. I mean, I subscribe because I mostly teach communications, marketing communications and campaign and things like that. I try and keep up to date through campaign and marketing week and so subscribing to all those professional publications, I think is really important. Reading the newspaper, just immersing yourself in the subject as much as possible. Talking to colleagues about the research they're doing and we have research-oriented teaching now as well. So we try and bring research into our teaching. If we are setting an assessment, for example, and every year we use a case study, we write that case study ourselves. So it's current organisation that's undergoing a specific issue and then that assessment is based around that. So, you know, we do try and keep up, but obviously it's not the same as working in the industry.

Sally Green - 5:33
Yeah.

Lynn McBain - 5:34
But some of my colleagues work part-time in the industry, teaching, some of them run their own consultancies and do teaching as well. I was in that position about six years ago but I've since been full-time now and I must admit being full-time as an academic does make it difficult to keep on top of the latest developments but we try.

Sally Green - 5:56
I'm sure you succeed. Sam, you've thought a lot about this haven't you and I can see Sam was pre-prepared some interesting questions. Off you go, Sam.

Sam Birkett - 6:07
Yeah, yeah, well actually I'm fascinated because I suppose working in mainly executive education and in the higher education area in marketing, I'm particularly interested in this. But there's two things really. I mean there's more of a macro thing I suppose which is more about the latest generation of students coming through, you know, what their aspirations and ambitions are. I'm always fascinated to know what they are looking to do in terms of, you know, are they sort of starting out thinking, well, you know, I'm looking for a portfolio career or I want to generally get into marketing. I want to have as many options open as possible. So I suppose there's there's that area to begin with. But then I mean, I'm fascinated by this concept as well as the general marketer or the marketing generalist, like, does that really still exist? Obviously, in different contexts, and I'm almost answering my own questions by sort of saying that it depends, I guess that's the thing. But to start off with an actual question to you, because there's lots I’d like to get into, I suppose was around yeah, there's just really that sort of feeling of the students you're seeing nowadays, do you… is there a certain sort of an ethos about what they're thinking they want to do in their lives like, you know, making a… we hear a lot about generation X and generation Z wanting to make an impact to go out there and have multiple careers and do lots of different things. Do you find that or was it more sort of people coming through that, as you said, at the top, they're just working out what they want to do and they'd like to get a qualification in the area and then see how it goes. Is there any sort of trends that you've seen?

Lynn McBain - 7:26
Yeah, I think from a point of view, as a general student cohort, I've been teaching on and off since about 1997. So I've been bouncing in and out of industry and in and out of teaching for that length of time. I've certainly seen a difference in the sort of student who studies marketing, mainly because I think all the students we teach now are digital natives. They're born into digital. We weren't born into digital. So sometimes they know more about us than they know, more than us rather, about the digital things that, you know, we're trying to talk them through, but they only know about it from a consumer point of view. So trying to open their minds and to ensure they see it from a business perspective, I think is quite a challenge and also because they're born into digital, their brains have developed in a different way from ours. So their concentration spans very short. So from a teaching point of view, that makes it quite challenging because you're constantly having to up the ante, the rate of change and different activities and what have you, so that you keep them engaged. But certainly from a business school point of view, what we try and do with all of our modules is bring in an element of entrepreneurship, enterprise and social enterprise. So sort of not just sustainability in terms of what recycling bin am I going to put this piece of rubbish in, but things like the triple bottom line. So you know, what does it mean to be sustainable in terms of finance that you deliver? How are you going to reinvest that in the organisation? Where are you going to reinvest that? How do you look after your people within the organisation? Because I think that these are really key things for marketers to understand. Many students sort of shy away from finance when we sort of talk to them open daily, like, oh, no, I don't like maths, I can't do that. It's really difficult and you know, it's not difficult and you can't be a marketer without getting involved in the money because you might have a considerable budget to manage or not to consider a budget to manage, which is even trickier.

Sally Green - 9:35
Or a considerable budget that's suddenly halved in size.

Lynn McBain - 9:37
Exactly and then you've got teams and you might eventually become a manager and lead a team and so all of those people issues and financial issues are important for marketers too. So I think for students, that's quite a wake-up call when they start on a marketing course, because they think it's going to be all about advertising and being lovely and creative and, you know, drawing nice pictures and colouring in and stuff. Now it's a little bit more technical than that. But yeah, so that's sort of interesting.

Sally Green - 10:09
It's also really good to hear that you are actually focusing, that you do actually teach them and focus on the finance end of things. Because years ago when I was first employing people to teams, it's often, as you say, when you say, can the campaign afford that, when they look at you with this slightly blank face and you think, you do know we have to pay for all this, don't you? This isn't just free. I mean, it's quite interesting because a lot of digital expectation is kind of free. As a consumer, digital is free. I can get free television. I can get free advertising. I can watch YouTube for free and everything's kind of free as a customer. But actually it's not like going to the cinema, but actually you have to pay to make that free and that's always a bit of a shock for people to go, Oh, hang on a minute and to get them to actually work out return on investment was sometimes overwhelming.

Lynn McBain - 11:00
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, so yeah, so we're sort of really key on that in our undergraduate programs. The other thing that we're really keen on is marketing analytics. because obviously marketers are accountable. You know, years and years ago, they weren't as accountable as they are now. But certainly, you know, in the boardroom, you need to be able to defend your case. Yeah, the only way you can do that is by a) understanding the finance and b) understanding the analytics behind all of that. So…

Sally Green - 11:30
And analytics aren't easy.

Lynn McBain - 11:31
No, absolutely. But we've got some amazing modules that have got really good chunks of analytics built into them. So the students do have that challenge, if you like, on modules. But I think that that is an important learning for them too.

Sally Green - 11:47
Yeah, that's really interesting to make sure people don't just cower away from, "Oh, I don't do maths, I'm too creative."

Lynn McBain - 11:52
Yeah, we don't let them cower away. It's just a number and it's nice because it's black and white. You know, there's not any grey areas. It's either right or wrong. It's, you know, that equals that, you know, and that. It's only addition, subtraction, percentages. It's, you know, it's not tricky.

Sam Birkett - 12:11
Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, actually, funny enough, that was one of my questions about this, because I mean, when I in my career, the idea of, you know, the left-hand, right-hand brain marketer, whether that's still sort of a term that is used all the time, but I mean, as you say, in my mind, quite often, it seemed as if, you know, there isn't an ideal marketer, of course, I guess, but somebody who is comfortable with, you know, has the creative vision, and not the whole vision, but can work in a creative team with creatives, and then has the analytical side and likes to get into a bit of the data. It almost makes me think that sort of person, it's certainly an experience of people I've seen, are the ones who are likely to then get to that more managerial position because they've got, put in both camps, they can understand both sides. Then there's something that we always go on about, is the operational level as well. So this whole thing of, well, yes, there's a lovely ad campaign, lovely idea of we can do X, Y, and Z. But then actually, can this actually happen with all the resources we have available and all the different teams we're interacting with and so on and so forth. So we always seem to come back to that in the podcast, and I think it's sort of something that does seem to ring true, but I'm not, I was quite interested as you said, though, about the sort of the technological proficiency of the students coming through, as you say, being digital natives. I'm fascinated by this whole thing of, you know, no matter what the technology is and however it evolves, you need to have an understanding of it, but you need to come back to the core human triggers, et cetera, of, you know, of humanity. Cause I will say that, you know, technology evolves far more quickly than we do. So there's all that side of things. In terms of technical proficiency then, are you finding that people are, students are coming in with, you know, even challenging you with new ideas about how technology could be used as well, or is it more sort of, they're just, they're open to learning the concepts first of marketing before they get into the technology side of it?

Lynn McBain - 13:54
I don't think they come in with particularly excellent skills in technology. I think they're very able on things like social media to chat to their friends, upload photos, share things, etc, etc and they're very good at adopting the latest trend and being part of those dynamics, if you like. But we do find that they are fast at picking things up. I mean, for example, yesterday, I started teaching a workshop with some final year students and there's six of us that teach these workshops, there's 200 students coming through. But basically it's all based on a marketing simulation. So yesterday was all about them logging in and usually in the part we've had to do sort of demonstrations, show them how to log in, what to do when they get in there. But they were right in there doing it, happy. You know, I was walking around the class feeling a bit like a spare part at some point because are you okay and you win you know what you're doing yeah yeah we're fine we're fine we don't need you type of thing you're just like oh okay you know which is really nice and so using technology I think to put them in a position where they're experiencing sort of real-world ostensibly situations I think is really important and I think that we can take advantage of their technical sort of competence, if you like, as we do now.

Sally Green - 15:27
By the end of the day, just because technology has made everything quicker, do you think your students, by the end, and I'm sure you're teaching them beautifully, because often going into work you suddenly realise basically being a student is quite relaxed, nothing's that urgent, but you get to work and people will say, "Can you finish this yesterday?" and are they up for that kind of, they suddenly get to work and everything has to be done now?

Lynn McBain - 15:50
I think some of them are. Certainly the students that have been out on placement, their industry year out, and they come back to their final year and they're really sort of shocked at the fact that it has been sort of full-on, very stressful, and like you say, everything needs to be done yesterday. They come back to uni for their final year and they're like, "Oh, yes, this feels good."

Sally Green - 16:11
This is nice.

Lynn McBain - 16:13
Exactly and they share those experiences with students that haven't gone out on their industry year, obviously. So, you know, for example, yesterday, in the teams, because we put them in teams, when they do their simulation, there were placement students dotted in the various teams. So they were sort of the ones that you could see already, they were straight into the simulation, they were starting to, you know, okay, Who's doing what role? Who's got responsibility for this? How much marketing research are we going to buy? Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, you know. So they do come back with better skill sets, I think, than those students who don't go and work in industry for a year. But we do in some modules put them under quite a lot of pressure. I mean, there is a module I teach to the final-year students. Sally comes in and talks to the students to encourage them to think about content marketing. But it's campaign management and development and basically, we really put the pressure on them for that module, because speaker comes in, talks about whatever the subject is, they're talking about content marketing, the following week, they get a brief based on the content that the speakers talked about and during that four-hour session, they work on that brief, respond to it in teams, and they have to present an assessed presentation that same afternoon and they find it incredibly stressful and we do that at four points during the semester. So by the end of the semester, they're almost on their knees, but they've enjoyed it and you'll get really good comments from students, excuse me, because of the fact that, you know, it's farm paced, we're doing industry related stuff and they leave there with a much better appreciation of a bit, sort of an idea of what hand pressurised it might be in the real world. We tell them that's why we're doing it in that way so, so yeah, there are points that we do in the modules that where we try to put that pressure on.

Sally Green - 18:05
That's so good to hear. Cause the other thing is that you get to work and you don't want them to suddenly think, Oh, I don't like marketing anymore, so I'm going to have to go and become a teacher. So you don't want them to leave the university, but at the same time, you just have to learn that maybe compromise isn't so bad when you get into the real world, if that doesn't work, and I don't think one should aim for, Oh, that'll do as a kind of campaign proficiency. But sometimes you have to be prepared to say, Oh, that'll do because we haven't got time for to fix it, we haven't got the budget to change it and if they're learning how pressure might make that happen, that's really valuable.

Lynn McBain - 18:41
Yeah, yeah. I do think we're really keen to teach students employability skills as well to make sure that they leave with a good CV. So that's why we vary the assessments. That's why we try and make the real world as possible without it turning into a training course, of course. So you know, that's the other sort of tension that there is in universities, it has to have some academic rigor, it has to be under theory and research. So yeah, I think, you know, when students apply to go out on placement their industry year for those students who do, the employers really like Brookes students, so we must be doing something right. So I helped a student, for example, recently prepare for an assessment centre for L'Oreal, and she was applying for a PR role in her internship, and she got the job. Now it's very, very competitive. You can imagine how many universities there are with students applying for these roles and there are hundreds of students going through the system at any one time. So we are constantly seeing our students get really good placements in really sort of hard, you know, big blue chip organisations. So like I say, we must be doing something right.

Sally Green - 19:53
That's amazing, because marketing is customer-facing marketing, PR, all those things is very customer-facing. It takes a lot of trust for these people to say yes, we will take you. You're an innocent student. You've never done this before and we are going to give you basically our brand to play with, to be responsible for. So I hadn't thought of it like that before. It's a huge responsibility that they're being put in their hands.

Lynn McBain - 20:17
Yeah, it is absolutely Sally and the other good thing that often comes out of these industry placements as well, which again shows how and well the students perform while they're out there in industry is that they often get offered a job by the organisations after they graduate. So they say, "Come back, come on to our graduate training scheme." I had a student a few years ago who went and worked at BMW's marketing department down in Farnborough and she ended up on their graduate training scheme after she graduated because she did such a good job and she was working in their digital marketing department. So, you know, it's great. It's lovely to be able to be so proud of the students and know that industry really values what we are.

Sally Green - 20:59
But it's also really interesting that they go on to a graduate training scheme that their learning hasn't just finished. You don't just pop out at the end of your degree and then think, I can do marketing. Because actually marketing isn't the same everywhere. BMW's marketing won't be the same as L'Oreal's marketing. They're going, so that's why it's always learning isn't it?

Lynn McBain - 21:18
Absolutely, yeah.

Sally Green - 21:20
Okay that was very interesting we've been talking to Lynn McBain from Brookes University about the student experience of being and learning marketing. That's the end of the first half and we hope very much that you come to the second half.