The 30 Day MBA in Marketing

Your Fast Track Guide to Business Success

Colin Barrow

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780749474997
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Carriera

The 30 Day MBA in Marketing provides a complete marketing 'course' spanning twelve disciplinary areas, and including hot topics such as: buyer behaviour, marketing strategy, promotion and advertising, pricing, managing the marketing organization and marketing and the law. Each chapter includes at least one practical real life example to illustrate how marketing concepts apply to business decision making. Learn what they teach you on professional marketing courses and at the world's top Business Schools and why it matters to you; eliminate gaps in your marketing knowledge and take part in business decision making on an equal footing with MBA graduates or your company marketing director. The 30 Day MBA in Marketing includes detailed information on how to find and analyse market data on any business or market anywhere and online resources that enable you to test your own knowledge. It also provides an invaluable guide to finding further information and free resources on each topic covered.Online supporting resources for this book include a bonus chapter on business communication, self-test question and answers and appendices.

12

Additional core general MBA subjects

---

• Understanding accounting reports
• Sourcing finance
• Interpreting financial data
• Setting the strategic direction
• Motivating and managing

---

Every MBA student, whether he or she takes a general programme or one that specializes in a particular discipline, as this book does, will be required to study the four core disciplines. These contain the basic tools that an MBA will use or need to refer to more or less every working day and comprise:

Marketing. The subject of this book.

Finance and accounting. The construction of the key accounting reports – profit and loss, cash flow and balance sheet. The tools required to access a business’s financial health and performance. Finance covers the vital areas of where a business gets its money from and the risks and responsibilities associated with each of those sources.

Organizational behaviour. Organizing, inspiring, motivating, rewarding and managing both individuals and teams are the enduring challenge in organizations as they grow and develop. Often people are the defining advantage that one organization has and can sustain over its competitors.

Strategy. This is the unifying discipline, often called business strategy. It deals with the core purpose of an enterprise and how it should respond to the challenges of a fast-changing environment. It centres not just on how strategy is shaped with the recognition that no organization can be truly great in the absence of shared goals, values and a sense of purpose – a shared picture of the future of the enterprise.

This chapter contains the essential tools within each of those disciples to enable an MBA Marketing student to bring their skills to bear and play a more rounded role in shaping and implementing the direction of the organization they work in but are inhibited by their lack of fundamental business knowledge.

Accounting and finance

The dividing line between accounting and finance is blurred. In basic terms accounting is considered to be everything concerned with the process of recording financial events, producing the key financial reports – cash flow, profit and loss, income statement and balance sheet – and ensuring such recordings are in compliance with the prevailing rules. Finance is the area concerned with where the money to run a business actually comes from in order to be accounted for. In order to be able to understand and interpret the accounts, using such tools as ratios, you need a reasonable grasp of both these areas, though the ratios themselves are generally considered to be in the accounting domain.

In many business schools you will find an array of options in addition to the core elements of this discipline. At the London Business School, for example, you will find on the menu: asset pricing, corporate finance, hedge funds, corporate governance, investments, mergers and acquisitions, capital markets and international finance. Members of the finance group also run the BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre, the Centre for Corporate Governance, the Private Equity Institute and the London Share Price Database. At Cass Business School, City of London, you will find options on behavioural finance and on dealing with financial crime and derivatives. In this chapter there is all that you would find in the core teaching that you need to understand and sufficient to move on to more esoteric aspects of finance, should the need ever arise.

Accounting

Although accounting has become more complex, involving ever more regulations, and has moved from visible records written in books to key stokes in a software program, the purposes are the same:

• to establish what a business owns by way of assets;
• to establish what a business owes by way of liabilities;
• to establish the profitability, or otherwise, at certain time intervals, and how that profit was achieved.

Accounting is certainly not an exact science. Even the most enthusiastic member of the profession would not make that claim. There is considerable scope for interpretation and educated guesswork, as all the facts are rarely available when the accounts are drawn up. For example, we may not know for certain that a particular customer will actually pay up, yet unless we have firm evidence that it won’t – for example, if the business is failing – then the value of the money owed will appear in the accounts.

Obviously, if accountants and managers had complete freedom to interpret events as they will, no one inside or outside the business would place any reliance on the figures, so certain ground rules have been laid down by the profession as to reporting structures and methods, to help get a level of consistency into accounting information.

Cash flow

There is a saying in business that profit is vanity and cash flow is sanity. Both are necessary, but in the short term – and often that is all that matters in business as it struggles to get a foothold in the shifting sands of trading – cash flow is life or death. The rules on what constitutes cash are very simple: it has to be just that, or negotiable securities designated as being as good as cash. Cash flow is looked at in two distinct and important ways:

• as a projection of future expected cash flows;
• as an analysis of where cash came from and went to in an accounting period and the resultant increase or decrease in cash available.

The future is impossible to predict with great accuracy but it is possible to anticipate likely outcomes and be prepared to deal with events by building in a margin of safety. The starting point for making a projection is to make some assumptions about what you want to achieve and testing those for reasonableness.

Take the situation of High Note, a business being established to sell sheet music, small instruments and CDs to schools and colleges, which will expect trade credit and members of the public who will pay cash. The owner plans to invest 10,000 and to borrow 10,000 from a bank on a long-term basis. The business will require 11,500 for fixtures and fittings. A further 1,000 will be needed f...