March 30, 2006

Overall, the future looks bright for marketers, at least those who are job hunting, since most of the marketing departments at Fortune 500 companies are currently hiring, according to a new study from Aquent Marketing Staffing.

Depending on any specific region, between 50 percent and 80 percent of the marketing departments surveyed plan on hiring more marketing personnel this year.

The survey also reveals that Internet marketing is the number one area where marketing departments plan to increase spending across all regions.

Other areas where marketing departments plan spend more include the old reliables, branding, market research, advertising, data analysis and direct mail.

In related news, Florida State University reports that, while the job outlook for MBA graduates has been murky, smoother sailing lies ahead.

"Probably starting back around 2000, some of the cachet of having an MBA had diminished, and I think some employers were cutting back — and so the recruiting was down and the starting salaries had kind of leveled off," said Patrick Maroney, the associate dean for graduate programs at the FSU College of Business.

"But in the past couple of years, things have turned around quite a bit."

A recent survey, from the Graduate Management Admissions Council, the organization that oversees the test students take to get into a graduate business program, found that MBA graduates are receiving some of the highest average starting salaries since 2001.

For example, Goldman Sachs awarded $140,000 to each of its Class of 2005 hires, and the average annual base salary for MBAs in 2005 was slightly over $90,000.

"Right now, it's a good time to be a student in the MBA program," said Dean Maroney.

Or maybe not. A new report just released by Coogan & Partners, asserts that an MBA is not only worthless to marketers, it can be a liability.

In a survey of marketing executives from 32 consumer-products companies, combined with scanner and panel data from ACNielsen, the consulting and strategy practice found that marketers from companies with significant market-share gains are far less likely to have MBAs than those from companies posting significant share losses.

In fact, under-performing companies, where sales grew 7% less than their category averages over a two-year period, were twice as likely to have been managed by MBAs.

Of the executives from under-performing companies, 90% had MBAs, while companies that were outperforming industry averages had only 55% MBAs.

Source: eMarketer