Marketing Classes at Wharton

I’ve been a Product Marketing Manager since 2016 and I’ve always found it amusing that I’ve literally never taken a single marketing class in my entire life (during my first interview I remember wondering what the interviewer meant by “key visual”)

So I was pretty excited to attend Marketing Academy, an annual training program for Googlers at the Wharton School in UPenn

College was a looonnnggg time ago but I’m pretty sure I was rejected by Wharton when I applied for their undergraduate program, so…who’s laughing now?

Sadly, still me as I come to the realization that I would probably still get rejected by Wharton if I applied for their MBA program

Now that Module 1 is over (Module 2 is scheduled for November) I thought a great way for me to really learn the content is to summarize and share key takeaways externally (in the form of these posts) and internally (presentations to Googlers who didn’t attend)

Key Takeaways

1. Marketers should always optimize for Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) (full post here)
2. The key to customer segmentation is sacrifice (Yes, Google should be for everyone…just 1 segment at a time)
3. STP - First segment your users, then target a specific segment, and finally position your product for the segment you decided to target
4. It is absurd for businesses to treat all customers equally
5. Focus most of your resources on customers with the highest Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) but hedge with the long-tail
6. Be crystal clear whether a new program is aimed at retaining customers or developing them
7. When conducting a marketing experiment, always remember that randomization will set you free
8. If you find that the costs of conducting the experiment will outweigh the benefits, don’t run the experiment
9. Beating Google in the search game is easy: you just need a good verticalized search engine
10. The best pricing models should always over-index on how much value YOUR USERS place on your product
11. People are much more sensitive to changes than to absolutes
12. The secret to achieve creativity consistently is to embrace limits (i.e. think inside the box)

You can find the full summary from each session below 👇🏻

1. Day 1 - We heard from Professor Eric Bradlow of The Wharton School on the importance of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) in the field of Marketing
2. Day 2 - We heard from 2 professors on Day 2: Pete Fader on the topics of Customer Centricity and Lifetime Value, and Elea McDonnell Feit on running Business Experiments
3. Day 3 - We heard from 3 professors on Day 3: John Zhang on how to correctly price products, Joe Simmons on how human biases affect our decision making, and Rom Schrift on how to achieve creativity…consistently