It is the season of the extended essay and the internal assessment and with it the extensive use of SWOT and PEST analysis. A few years ago these techniques were used selectively, but now they appear in the vast majority of business assignments and, in a growing number of cases, are the only real business theory of ‘substance’. As someone who has been involved for many years teaching and examining the subject, I find it slightly sad that business assignments have become rather formulaic and that areas of the syllabus, such as Operations and Accounting and Finance, are being widely ignored in favour of a the ‘softer topics’ of Marketing and Human Resources. I long for the days of investment appraisal and ratio analysis, when these were the focus of an assignment rather than a late add-on, because reports and projects that were predominantly numerical often scored highly.
Marketing topics, in particular, are fraught with danger. I think many students immediately think they ‘understand’ marketing, being children of a media obsessed era. However, marketing needs the same academic rigour as applied to any other business topic and this is far too often missing. One major reason is the lack of focus. Students genuinely believe they can investigate the entire marketing mix of a multinational within 2000 words, but in reality they will struggle to come to terms with just one of the elements, if they wish to do it justice. For example, analysing the pricing policy of a firm is enough to occupy a major business consultancy for months and the resulting project is likely to have earned the consultants some astronomic fee.
