Business school grads and quants are winning the battle to create the next P&G

This has happened despite the fact that historically most MBAs have gone to banking and consulting. With MBA grads shifting toward tech, we should expect that many more tech CEOs and founders will have MBAs.

edit: added Apple.

My colleagues and I are building new brands on Amazon every day. There are other ecommerce entrepreneurs building brands on Facebook ads and social media. It is now easier than before to find customers, build that list, and retain customers. There's been a shift and I see new brands challenging dominant sleeping brands every day. The craziest thing is that all these new challengers have very very small teams. I'm working on launching a product to challenge P&G, but I already know one startup, 3 founders, backed with VC money, that are already doing $50k+/mo on Amazon on that product.

There are three reasons to go to business school: knowledge, network and brand. People go for many reasons, such as feeling insecure, wanting insurance and taking a break from their job. These are not good reasons. Here is my evaluation of the good reasons:

- Knowledge (overall grade C-) Yes, you will learn things if you study. Could you learn these on your own? Sure. Will you? Likely not. If you weren't an accounting/economics/finance major in undergrad you may find the academics particularly valuable. Some of the classroom experience is useful for things like negotiations, management and other "soft" skills. My experience was that the greatest intellectual advancement I found was through cross registering in the engineering and statistics departments. Go to a large research university, particularly if you went to a small liberal arts school for undergrad, and make the best use of a world class institution!

- Network (Depends mostly on the competition to get in, B+) This is the biggest reason and often cited as the true reason people go. Academics are a joke and going for the brand seems gross, so people default to this answer, which is cronyism, but at least it's not as superficial as branding. In my experience, this was incredibly useful. I've landed three of my seven clients through business school classmates. The alumni network is good too, although not terribly strong unless you go to a smaller program, which lowers your odds that the alumni will be usefully placed for your purposes.

- Brand (depends entirely on prestige, A+) This is vastly underrated, at least in polite conversation. Nobody like a braggart, and playing the "I went to Stanford GSB" card is an ugly move, so savvy MBAs resort to more subtle signaling. It's hard to measure the value here because it makes everything easier, from pitching and starting conversations, to being taken seriously and getting access to programs and resources.

Finally, a word on digital vertical native brands. Developing a valuable brand is low probability event (that's why people buy a brand by going to business school!). That is not to say it's difficult, or any more difficult than winning the lottery, but it is rare. Intentionally creating a brand can be hard, but I doubt there's much correlation between effort and success. Besides brand, these digitally native vertical brands have no sustainable competitive advantage, and I fully expect their profits to get competed away. The market, however, can stay irrational long enough for many people to get rich. Best of luck to anybody starting or investing in a digital brand!

I've dealt with their management and executives (brand managers, marketing managers, etc) and even by their criteria of HR choices, and it's pretty clear what kind of people they want: they want smart, orderly people who can execute well.

Some they get them from specific business universities early - people above average - and enroll them on some internal college for some time.

They are not very creative and innovative, even if they were they will dry out because they don't have margin for it - and maybe that's part of their success: they need to have a multinational oiled machine that outputs results.

Even the product launches came either by market alignment, or simply from an internal catalog.

Most of their insights came from internal dashboards fueled by Nielsen, GFK, Kantar (amazing sources by the way), and many private studies.

The thing is, they got to where they are because they had the Mass Media(Communication) and Distribution upper hand for years. TV, the king for many years, was the most effective way to get to the masses but it was extremely expensive - yet they had the financial muscle so they just had to pump GRPs.

Same goes for Retail Distribution, they built good distribution channels/partnerships - people wanted their products, they had emotional relationships with their brands.

But times change... first it started with retailers creating their own brands (distribution brands) because they built the financial muscle to advertise them, and had the distribution channels, they just had cut down margins to win in price and win the volume game...

Now it's the internet - people who know what their doing can reach a specific audience, deliver great messages, build amazing brands, and have great distribution channels - such as Amazon.

It's a loud market, and they mumble terms, jargon's and keywords they don't fully understand. They have historial brands, with amazing value, yet they are not connecting with people like some of these brands are doing.

Maybe they are so big they don't even notice it in their market shares, but some of these numbers aren't even known in their holy reports... and it chips off, day by day. They are also too proud to assume their are not doing a good job - they rather blame agencies and create pitches instead of taking accountability.

I've quit the agency job because my goal was to learn from with their mistakes and successes - and I believe it's quite doable to out-pace them, since they are extremely slow. I'm working on that right now.

In my opinion they need to employ entrepreneur minded people and give them the opportunity to fail.

It's a weird-amazing time to be alive as a marketer :)