Review: Marketing Week MiniMBA in Marketing
I took the Marketing Week MiniMBA in Marketing in autumn 2024. Here's my belated review.
What is the mini MBA?
Marketing Week runs three courses, created by Mark Ritson: Marketing, Brand Management, and Management. Each course is 10-12 weeks long, and aims to give marketers essential training to a high standard. The courses are delivered by on-demand video (one video per week), and include core readings, optional materials, and properly challenging assessment (more on that later). Course costs are around £2000.
Note that the marketing course is aimed at a high level: marketing principles and ideas, not necessarily specific techniques. It does get into tactics, but if you are looking for the nitty gritty of how to run a digital ads campaign or a content marketing program, you'd need to do additional learning beyond the course. What this course gives you is the fundamentals behind any type of marketing work. It's pitched as being equivalent to a module on an MBA course.
Why a marketing course for a tech writer?
Before I dive into the review, why was I taking this course? After all, I'm not exactly the target audience (marketing professionals).
I've known for a long time I have a skills and knowledge gap around marketing. Documentation isn't marketing, but a good tech writer should be able to work well with marketing. And marketing skills are definitely useful if you want to run your own business, or work at small startups, where sticking strictly to your specialism isn't really an option.
Matt Fleming took the course years ago, and recommended it to me. He's a super-technical guy who successfully ran a content agency, which makes me inclined to trust his judgement. So it had been on my to-do list for more about seven years by the time I finally carved out the time (and cash) to do it.
The good
The course was excellent. There are a lot of good points to list:
- Fantastic content: it was exactly what I was looking for and more. It massively increased my understanding of marketing, and my confidence engaging on marketing topics.
- High quality videos.
- An engaging, entertaining teacher: always helpful when ploughing through quite a lot of hours of training.
- Really well planned: you could get through the course doing just the videos and the core reading, but if you had the time and motivation, there was ample secondary material each week. This means everyone can tailor the time demands to their own needs and interest level.
- A properly challenging assessment: the final exam was stressful, but also a great learning experience in itself. I think a good level of difficulty in the assessment increases the value of the course.
- Resources that I keep returning to.
The underwhelming
The negatives are much smaller than the positives, but I did have a couple of small criticisms:
- There's a fresh LinkedIn group for each cohort of the course. I expected this to be active, and provide some community (and perhaps networking). In the end, it worked well as a support forum, but was otherwise very quiet. Myself and a few others tried starting conversations early on, but I ended up feeling like the girl in class with her hand up all the time. This seems like a missed opportunity: when you've got an audience of ~1400 people taking your course, there's a real opportunity for community building. They could have done some proper community management, rather than just monitoring it for support questions. I'd expected that at minimum there would be discussion threads on each learning material, each week's video etc.
- While the assessment was generally brilliant, it became clear that there was a single right answer for the entire thing, including sections that were somewhat subjective. For example, making different targeting choices to Ritson could cause you to haemorrhage marks, even if you articulated good reasons for those choices. To be clear, this isn't sour grapes (I got an A), but the value of that grade feels slightly diminished by my sense that I got it as much because I was good at guessing the Ritson answer as for anything else. They mentioned using AI to help with marking, so perhaps lack of nuance in the assessment is inevitable.
The personality
I wish I didn't have to write this bit, but I think potential students need to consider the instructor's online persona. Mark Ritson is very smart, and very funny (though his humour may be more suited to British/Australian audiences than Americans - but as a Brit it suited me). Reading his articles he comes across as having principles, and being a decent guy. However, his LinkedIn activity is . . . unfortunate.
A couple of examples:
- A recent post on AI and Studio Ghibli was at best tone-deaf. He may well be right about AI changing everything, but the people involved in discussions about ethical AI don't deserve to be mocked, nor do the people saddened by what's happening to artists and human creativity.
- Ritson likes to write in a pretty, erm, lively style. For example, in an article on Pret A Manger's brand positioning and ethics troubles he opines that "I continue to be of the opinion that most chief executives get into their position because they are masterful political operators and rarely the best men to run their operations." Ok, fair enough, he's punchy but also funny. However, you can't go around throwing rhetorical punches if you can't take the occasional hit. So when someone criticises one of your views in a similar style, you have a bunch of options, but defensiveness isn't one of them.
Conclusion
Would I recommend the Mini MBA in Marketing? Yes. It's very high quality, excellent value for money, and relevant not only to marketers, but to anyone working alongside marketing or with an interest in the subject.
Would I take another of Ritson's courses? I was going to. I was all set to do the management course this spring. After thinking it over (a lot), I decided against it. I've no doubt it would be valuable, and I may still do it in the future. But . . . wow do I not want to give my money to the guy gloating about the destruction of artistry, no matter how smart he may be.
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