How is Marketing at Broad Different?

The traditional educational approach to learning marketing is silo-oriented, with individual courses in pricing, advertising, sales, channels, and so forth. At Broad, these marketing functions are integrated into intense, process-oriented courses. Each of our courses uses a pedagogy that fits with the teaching style of our entrepreneurial professors. However, all the pedagogies have clear deliverables that are important to firms that recruit our marketing MBA students. There are two categories of deliverables: The MSU Way of Thinking and skill tool sets.

Our students are taught how to reason in an open-ended manner, with an ability to derive an unlimited number of solutions. They are able to construct the situation (not merely report on an existing one), discover opportunistic problems (not merely identify managerial roadblocks), compile and analyze information in new ways (not merely run regressions or cross-tabs), and create new-to-the world solutions (not merely apply a previous solution to a new problem). All of this is done with supported reasoning behind the solution.

Each course also delivers reasoning processes, with collateral, specific tool sets that students apply in attacking problem solving exercises. The real world exercises range from intensive statistical analysis, to extensive cases, to live field projects. The exercises require the application of sophisticated, leading-edge analytical tools that are computer-based as well as conceptual, but always with a critical view of the practical implementation of the final solution.