Responsible Marketing: Distance learning Egham Plenary 2012 Business Consultancy Week

For a third consecutive time in as many years the Miller Brands, the UK operating arm of brewing giant SAB Miller offered a real business question for a management consultancy assessment designed for student groups from Royal Holloway to address.

Thirty six students drawn from all over the world worked in six groups during an intense week to make recommendations to Jonathan Bennett, Head of Corporate Affairs, Miller Brands UK, on the challenging question he posed on responsible marketing.  

Students, who worked together in virtual teams for four weeks ahead of coming together in the newly extended School of Management building in Egham, found the question stimulating and challenging.

 Dr Sigrun Wagner, who lead the student interaction, highlighted the high standard of work achieved by the multi-cultural groups, who had to work intensively from Monday to Friday to produce a coherent recommendation in the form of a 14 minute presentation.

"Students are at the end of a particularly demanding journey when they take on the capstone business consultancy project." stated Justin O'Brien, MBA Director, "combining family life with work is often challenging enough, but I take my hat off to these guys, who over a period of two to five years have devoted significant time to research, write course work and sit exams.  The consultancy and dissertation are the final steps on this journey and this years cohort did extremely well, delivering highly polished pitches, worthy of a masters degree."

Students are studying for either an MBA or MSc in International Management at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Five common dissertation 'mistakes'

(1) Spending too much time worrying about the perfect title. They evolve over time & really need lots of literature reading before they crystalise - many students flap and don't do the hard work of reading academic journals around their subject. (see this blogs post on finding a dissertation title)

(2) Taking it far too easy once the title has been decided & approved. This is the time to crack on with deep and wide literature research and developing/planning the methodology.

(3) Students trying to stretch 5 or 10 sources too thinly. Deep, deep research (including relevant texts and academic research journals) is necessary. The better the content, the easier it is to write - it's a beauty contest on what to exclude - you have such an embarrassment of riches. Saying little with nothing much requires literary genius few of us possess. The research is the most important phase, yet it takes the most time & yet generates the fewest words. (see this blogs post on using a shell document).  

Royal Holloway, University of London



(4) My computer crashed. Of course I always back up. Just not the dissertation

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(5) Insufficient time polishing. Ironically the last sections to be written (intro, conclusion and abstract) are often rushed. These are your prime real estate - the first thing a marker looks at. If they are peppered with spellling errors, grammatical nonsense and is hard to follow - you start by creating a bad impression (sub 50%) and an amazing lit review and methods section will only see you play catch up. Make sure you BEST writing is show cased in the abstract, introduction and conclusion.