Matt Symonds recently wrote an article in Forbes called ‘How Creative MBA Programs are Overcoming Bad Times’ and, in it, he talks about Melbourne Business School (MBS):

If there is one thing the less well-known schools where M.B.A. applications are holding up have in common, it is an ability to offer something different.

…

Melbourne Business School, one of the leading institutions in the Asia-Pacific region, has also seen its latest M.B.A. class grow. Dean Jenny George seems to share Antal-Mokos’ view that the secret may not be location, ranking or history but a unique underlying structural model. "We have the luxury of being what I’d term ‘quasi-independent,’" she says. "We have a strong link to our local university, but at the same time as a corporate body we have free rein to do what we think is best. That means we have the credibility to attract really good faculty but can hire people who don’t always fit the traditional, conventional picture of an academic. And that in turn means we can put together a learning experience that pulls in the very best students."

It’s a good article and I recommend you read it.

More about Symonds:

• SymondsGSB blog
• Matt Symonds on Wikipedia
• Matt Symonds on LinkedIn

I took a number of marketing courses in my MBA at Melbourne Business School (MBS) and it was during my Consumer Behaviour course with Brian Gibbs that we got the best, single-page overview of the marketing process.

Framework for Marketing Management

Gibbs called this the ‘Framework for Marketing Management’ and it’s an excellent summary of how marketing is done:

[Note: The diagram above is one that I made based on my notes from the course.]

It works like this:

• The marketing concept says you begin by looking at your customers, company, and competition – these are the three Cs. Let’s say your company makes pens:
  • Ask yourself what it is that your customers need. How can you satisfy that need? In real life a lot of research would go into answering questions like these. Then consider what your customers do to satisfy those needs. What factors contribute to their decision making process? Again, more research would be done.
  • Also look at your company. Can you make the pens your customers want? Do those types of pens fit with your company’s corporate objectives? For example, if you’re Montblanc, you won’t be making cheap plastic pens anytime soon even if some your customers say that’s what they want in a writing instrument.
  • Don’t forget to analyze your competition as well. How will your competitors respond to your product (say, when you introduce a new version)? Also ask yourself who else satisfies the needs of your customers. For example, should you be looking at companies that make markers and pencils as competition?
• Once you’ve done that, you segment your customers according to primary bases, such as their identified needs. For example, Group A wants cheap plastic ballpoint pens, Group B wants fancy liquid ink pens, and so on. You also segment by secondary bases, which are often things like demographics. You keep slicing and dicing using a combination of bases till you get useful segments; i.e. those you can target properly. For example, you could further segment Group B by age bracket and annual income.
• Next, you decide which specific segments you’re going to target (and why). For example, Montblanc may be targeting only, say, richer and older people from Group B. They know they can communicate well with these people, they can defend this segment from the competition, and ultimately that’s the area of the market they want their company to operate in.
• That sets you up with the positioning of your product. Getting your positioning right is incredibly important because it’s the key to your entire plan. So, for example, Montblanc may position themselves in the luxury space as a company that sells excellent writing instruments that have the highest level of craftsmanship. In effect, their pens are high-end gifts, much like hand-crafted jewellery. They would then position themselves appropriately in the luxury gift jewellery markets, but not in the broader writing instruments market.
• Once you’ve got your positioning done, you figure out how you’re going to to create, capture, communicate, and deliver value to your customer. This value is created by the existence of your product, captured by its price, communicated through your promotion, and delivered by where you place (or how you distribute) your product – these are the four Ps.
• Finally, as the market grows and develops, you will need to tweak these four Ps to maintain your positioning. Then, at regular intervals, you will need to re-do your three Cs because the market will change and you will need to change with it. Repeat ad infinitum…well, at least as long as your company continues to exist.

It All Comes Down to Positioning

As you may have gathered, a good way of remembering the entire marketing process is to think of the just the three Cs and four Ps. However, if you want to distil it further, you can bring it all down to positioning.

Positioning is a summary of the first part (analysis & strategy: the three Cs) and a guide for the second part (planning & implementation: the four Ps).

From the consumer behaviour point of view, it is also the psychological epicentre of the marketing process. That’s because positioning – with the help of the four Ps – is what translates the ‘actual product’ into the ‘perceived product’ within the consumer’s mind (they are often not the same).

So while a Montblanc pen is in essence just a writing instrument, in the mind of the consumer, it is much more than just that. And it is the pen’s positioning that will determine what qualities above its ability to put ink on paper set it apart from its competitors.

Thanks for Sharing, But What Was the Point?

This one-page overview of the marketing process is useful in many ways:

• It provides a great sanity check for what you’re doing in your job. For example, the Web & New Media Strategy that Melbourne Water developed over the last year followed pretty much this process. That strategy now forms the basis of my day-to-day work. So, if we hadn’t done the three Cs right, for example, I would have had a hard time getting the four Ps done properly.
• It’s a great way to analyze the marketing, branding, and product positioning that’s going on around you all the time.
• It brings good overall project management and business strategy rigour to whatever it is that you’re doing.

Oh, and if you’re a job seeker, it’s particularly useful because it provides a good framework for when you get asked questions about the company’s products or services.

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks at Melbourne Business School. Fortunately, the more recent recent news has been all good.

The latest of this is the excellent news that Acting Dean Professor Jennifer George has now been appointed Dean of MBS. Congratulations to her and I look forward to seeing what direction she steers MBS towards; particularly now that there’s no merger to think about. We should have exciting times ahead.

Melbourne Business School’s (MBS) MBA has been ranked #1 in Asia by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

Not only that, the MBA has been ranked #17 in the world (up from #26 last year) and this puts it ahead of INSEAD in Asia and even Columbia and MIT Sloan in the US!

Good job, MBS!

Joshua Gans has written an excellent post on the proposed merger between Melbourne Business School (MBS) and the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Economics and Commerce (FEC) that didn’t go through.

In it, he lists some of the factors that contributed to the merger being blocked; such as the differences in organizational culture, teaching culture, and industry engagement between the two schools.

He isn’t as concerned about competition from the FEC as I am (more on this some other time) but, like me, he is very optimistic about MBS’s future and place in Australia and the Australian education industry.

In an interesting turn of events, Melbourne Business School (MBS) announced today that its proposed merger with the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Economics and Commerce (FEC) will not proceed. (Go here for background.)

Indeed, this won’t even been put to vote at the 7 October Extraordinary General Meeting of MBS Ltd’s members (read: shareholders) because the resolution is bound to fail. That’s because enough members have already told the Board they will vote against the merger so there’s no way the Board will get the majority needed to proceed.

Why Will Some Members Vote Against the Merger?

I’m not exactly sure because they haven’t said.

I can speculate, though. Maybe they don’t want to dilute MBS Ltd’s focus (or brand) because, post merger, they would have had the added responsibility of managing the undergraduate economics and commerce programme. Maybe it’s less about the lack of focus and more about sticking to what you know you’re really good at (i.e. graduate-level teaching). Maybe they think the merger is good in theory but would be impossible to pull off in practice. Maybe it’s lots of separate little issues that, collectively, become one big one. I don’t know.

Regardless, the members are obviously not convinced that the merger is good idea and, since they have the deciding vote in the matter, it’s been called off.

As MBS Chairman Ron McNeilly said:

“Ultimately the continued success of MBS depends on the support of its members, alumni, students, clients and the broader business community.  The Board has accepted that without the overwhelming support of these stakeholders, a merger at this time would not be in the best interests of the School.”

Meanwhile, the University of Melbourne’s Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis had this to say:

“Over time this will be judged a missed opportunity for the University and the MBS to create the strongest business school in our region.”

That may be true and, who knows, the merger could still take place a year from now or three years from now. All we know is that it’s not happening now.

What Next?

Both MBS and FEC will continue to operate they way they’re operating now.

But, of course, they won’t. They’ve just gone through a process in which they identified their gaps, overlaps, and opportunities for growth. Their conclusion was that they should work together and they went as far as to plan exactly how they’d do that. And now they’ve been told it’s not going to happen. So, yeah, things won’t go quite back to normal.

Meanwhile, the confusion in the market of whether you should do a masters in business from FEC or a masters in business administration from MBS will remain. Here’s hoping they start by making things like that clearer because, if they don’t sufficiently differentiate themselves from each other, the competition won’t help anyone…least of all potential applicants to both institutions.

The AFR’s BOSS magazine recently published the results of its biennial rankings of MBA schools in Australia:

• List of 18 Schools Ranked in Survey
• Overview article: ‘Standard Bearers’ by Rose-Anne Manns (difficult to read online)

I haven’t bought the magazine and read the detailed results myself yet but Manns’ article lists the top five schools as follows:

1. Melbourne Business School (University of Melbourne)
2. Monash University Graduate School of Business (Monash University)
3. Macquarie Graduate School of Management (Macquarie University)
4. Australian Graduate School of Management (University of New South Wales)
5. University of Western Australia

The rest of the article was too painful to read online so I only skimmed through it and, therefore, have nothing further to say. Clearly they want us to go buy a copy of their magazine.

By the way, 22 business schools and 1,732 b-school alumni took part in the survey that these rankings are based on.

I haven’t been blogging much these last few months. That’s because three months ago my wife and I moved into an apartment that has no land line and only a satellite cable TV connection. (We didn’t think to ask about the former before moving in here because, really, when was the last time you heard of a house that didn’t have a land line connection?) What this means is that, till just recently, we didn’t have Internet access at home; certainly not cable and ADSL, but not even dialup!

What Happened Then?

It took Telstra (the only phone company that services this area) about six weeks (yes, six weeks) to give us a connection from the telephone exchange to our apartment building. However, we don’t have an outlet in the wall for a phone jack so we can’t actually use that line. Even worse, the electrician who came in to install that outlet couldn’t find where in the wall our telephone wire was so he wasn’t able to connect us. That was about a month ago and, since then, we’ve been waiting for our real estate agent to do something about this – specifically, getting the building plans from the owners and giving them to the electrician – but nothing’s happened yet.

I finally got sick of the situation so, a couple of weeks ago, I went and got us a mobile broadband connection from 3 (specifically, a USB wireless modem) and that’s what’s letting me access the Internet now. We then went a step further and bought a wireless router for the modem so now both my wife and I can access the Internet at the same time. It’s slow, but at least it works.

What about blogging from work, you ask? Unfortunately, work has been really busy (though incredibly enjoyable) so I haven’t had the mental energy to do any writing in the evenings (whether at work or offline from home). The only blog posts I have managed to finish are the ones I wrote on a weekend and published from the office the following work week.

So, Catching Up…

What all this is leading up to is the fact that I have lots of catching up to do. The way I’m going to do that is by giving you a bulleted list of all the stories I’ve wanted to talk about these last few months but haven’t been able to discuss. The stories range from basic, on-the-ground advice (and lists) to more high level discussions on a particular topic. They’re all good to read, though.

Jobs, Careers, & MBA

• You Suck, Interviewer [Ask a Manager]
• It’s here: the You-Suck-As-An-Interviewer Automatic Letter Generator [Ask a Manager]
• Interview Questions to Ask When Hiring a Manager [Ask a Manager]
• 4 Dumb Job Interview Questions (and 3 Possible Answers) [Clue Wagon]
• How to Make Sure You Don’t Take a Job That Sucks [Clue Wagon]
• Schmoozing 101: Tips for Shy Techies [Computerworld]
• How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups [PsyBlog]
• Latest research reveals the business schools employers prefer to recruit from regionally strong business schools [AME Info]
• 100+ Career Blogs ALL Professionals MUST Read [Career Rocketeer]
• State of Australian Corporate Career Websites [Michael Specht]

Social Media

• The Manager’s Guide to Social Media [SmartCompany]
• Facebook privacy: a guide [Ars Technica]
• 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Blogging [Smashing Magazine]
• The Big List of Big Brand Corporate Blogs [Debbie Weil]
• 73 Ways to Become a Better Writer [Copyblogger]
• 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online [Lateral Action]
• Writing a Social Media Comment [PR Communications]
• Twitter 101: A Special Guide [Twitter]
• 62 Ways to Use Twitter for Business [Web Worker Daily]
• Twitter Postings: Iterative Design [useit.com]
• The Importance of Social Media Audits [Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang]
• The Five Biggest Mistakes in Measuring Social Media [ClickZ]
• 360i Publishes Social Marketing Playbook [360i]
• 2 Million More Australians Go Social in 2009 [comScore]
• A new connection for Australians [Sensis]

Online Design, UI

• 8 Dimensions of Excellent Landing Pages [Search Engine Land]
• Building Respect for Usability Expertise [useit.com]

Online Marketing

• Do You Know Where Your Audience Is? [Search Engine Watch]
• A Checklist to Choose Which Internet Marketing Channel is Right for Your Business [seomoz.org]

General Life Advice

• How to Make Your Packed Lunch More Appealing [Lifehacker]

Quick update: The MBS Board met at an Extraordinary General Meeting on Wednesday to discuss the proposed merger between Melbourne Business School and the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Economics and Commerce (see previous post for details).

They decided to postpone their decision for six weeks so a more detailed consultation with constituents could be carried out. The MBS donors (i.e. the constituents of the Board) will now vote on the proposed merger and change of constitution on 7 October.

UPDATE (1-Oct-09): This merger will no longer proceed. Details here. Also read Joshua Gans’ post on this.

The last time I talked about the merger between Melbourne Business School and the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Economics and Commerce (FEC) the two schools had:

• agreed in principle that were going to merge
• started a consultation process to figure out how that would happen.

Since then, they have agreed on the proposed merger and are now waiting on approval from the Members of MBS Ltd – which is the not-for-profit organization that governs Melbourne Business School – before they can go on.

Announcements and News Reporting

This was announced by both MBS and Melbourne Uni:

• MBS news article: ‘Proposed Merger’
• MUSSE article: ‘Business and economics education powerhouse set for Melbourne’

And has also been discussed in the media:

• The Age: ‘University may shed more jobs in faculty merger’
• Financial Times: ‘Melbourne school merger’

Yes, the jobs angle was a funny one for The Age to take but I presume they did that because the timing of the merger announcement was unfortunate: Melbourne Uni had only just announced that they were going to cut 220 jobs because of the financial shortfall brought about by the global financial crisis.

Communicating the Plan

In order to give us stakeholders a chance to find out first-hand what was going on with the merger, MBS invited students and alumni for a Questions & Answers session with Acting Dean Jennifer George and Professor Richard Speed.

It was hugely encouraging to know that a session like this had been planned. Mergers are difficult times for both organizations and, during this period, it’s crucial to have this kind of stakeholder communication and engagement. And by ‘stakeholder’ I mean everyone involved in the organization so that includes employees, students, alumni, prospective students, faculty, academia, industry, government, accreditation organizations, suppliers, employers, partners, the media, and so on.

Further, this communication and engagement needs to be:

• frequent
• take place at all levels of the organization, and
• discuss the issue to varying levels of depth depending on who you’re talking to and what’s important to that group of people.

Fortunately, that’s exactly what MBS is doing and this session was an excellent first step.

What was also good was the kind of session that Jenny and Richard ran: it was completely open, honest, and we could ask them anything we liked. They didn’t, of course, know the answers to all our questions – there are still numerous details to be worked out – but they did manage to cover all the important points.

What I liked most about the session, though, was the sense of excitement and realistic optimism that everyone seemed to have. This merger is an exciting opportunity and, though everyone knows it will be difficult and complicated to pull off, we are looking forward having a crack at it.

Details About the Merger

So what have we learnt so far about the proposed merger?

• The organizational structure of the merged entity, called the Faculty of Business and Economics (FBE), has been finalized:

• The main merging is taking place in the graduate space because undergraduate and executive degrees and courses will probably not change very much post-merger. How exactly the graduate space (i.e. degrees, courses, schedules, fees, classes, faculty, research, etc.) will change has yet to be finalized. Indeed, that space may continue to change and evolve over the next 2-3 years as things get tweaked and improved.
• Academic oversight over all courses, subjects, and degrees offered by the FBE remains, of course, with the University of Melbourne.
• The management of the FBE goes to MBS Ltd. In exchange, the University of Melbourne increases its stake in MBS Ltd from 45% to 70%.
• MBS Ltd’s Board gets increased to thirteen members: eight nominated members (to be voted in), two university-appointed directors, one staff director, one alumni director, and one executive director.
• The current Chair of the MBS Board, Ron McNeilly, continues in his role. The current Dean of the FEC, Professor Margaret Abernethy, becomes the inaugural Executive Dean of the new FBE.
• Mt. Eliza Executive Education becomes Melbourne Executive Education. However, this is run by a wholly owned subsidiary of MBS Ltd (which I refer to in the chart as Melbourne Executive Education Ltd because I don’t know what it will be called). So, even though this is part of the FBE, it will be managed reasonably independently.
• The new graduate program will be split into two streams. The pre-experience stream will be for students fresh out of an undergraduate degree (or with limited work experience). The post-experience stream will be for students with some work experience. The existing MBS MBA degree will come under the post-experience stream while some of the FEC’s existing masters degrees will come under the pre-experience stream.
• Assuming the MBS Board approves this proposal, the FBE will officially come into being on 1 October 2009 with an aim for “full integration” by 1 January 2010.

As you can imagine, most of the synergies of this merger will occur in the graduate area where there are numerous win-win scenarios. For example, MBS students will get access to a wider range of electives while FEC students will get access to the specialist electives that only MBS offers.

What Next?

The next important date for the merger is 26 August, which is when Members of MBS Ltd will meet in an Extraordinary General Meeting to vote on the merger proposal. There is no real reason for the proposal to not be accepted but that is the last formal step that needs to be taken. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

Over the next few months, I hope to write more about this merger in particular and about mergers, cultural change, and stakeholder engagement in general. Stay tuned.