Marketing Concentration

Overview

To be effective, managers must view products, services and customers as assets. The Marketing concentration builds skills in four key areas:

• Customer Management examines cutting edge topics such as one-to-one marketing, data mining, customer profitability, customer acquisition, customer development and customer retention
• Product Management involves the development of new products and management of existing products, and encompasses both goods and services in traditional markets as well as the technology-intensive
• Marketing Strategy examines decisions facing managers concerning market selection, entry timing, positioning, targeting, and execution approach in domestic and global markets
• Market Analysis builds skills in:
  • critically analyzing brand, market and firm level data to guide marketing decisions
  • familiarizes students with data sources, tools and techniques in common use
  • the building and use of marketing models

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Concentration Requirements

In addition to core courses required of all students, Marketing students take six courses from the following:

• Marketing Research

  This course is designed to prepare MBA students to be good consumers of marketing research. It will give you an overview of the tools and techniques used in marketing research to provide input to the many decisions that marketing, product, and brand managers have to make every day. It will provide an overview of the marketing research process, and give you insight into how to best prepare for commissioning or conducting a marketing research project and how to use the research information gained to help you in the decision-making process.

  What this course will not do is teach you how to DO market research. In my experience, most MBA students do not do marketing research; they are primarily consumers of marketing research. You will NOT learn a great deal about data tabulation or statistical techniques, though I may discuss this in class and point you in the right direction to gain more information on some methodology or statistical technique that intrigues you.

• Global Marketing

  This course examines specific issues involved in developing and executing marketing strategies on a global scale as opposed to a domestic scale. The course is intended to provide a thorough understanding of global marketing strategies, including: (1) fundamental trends underlying convergence of world markets; (2) pitfalls and challenges of entering other countries; (3) ways to design global marketing strategies; (4) the impact of organization structure, management processes, culture, and people on global marketing strategy implementation; and (5) the important and unique role emerging markets play in global marketing strategies. The course will help you achieve your career goals as you work - as virtually all of you will - in or with companies that are active in the international marketplace as well as domestic companies who face active international competitors.

• Brand Strategy

  Most organizations understand that brands and brand equities are an essential source of sustainable competitive advantage; increasingly consider them among their most valuable assets and carefully hire and develop managers responsible for these assets. Surprisingly; however, decisions regarding pricing, advertising or distribution, etc. are made in isolation without fully considering their impact on brand equity, eroding brand loyalty and diminishing this key resource. Many organizations still assign individuals to manage these brand assets with little formal preparation or training – the supposition being that the selectees have learned what are highly-specialized and different-in-kind skills in their MBA programs or as field sales managers.

  Brand Management/Brand Strategy is an advanced MBA elective that will prepare you to recognize brand-building opportunities and to enjoy improved outcomes by:

  • Building understanding of strategic issues in branding; measuring the impact of marketing decisions on brand equity and building and managing brands and brand portfolios or categories.
  • Build familiarity and facility with the theories, concepts and tools/skills associated with a sophisticated creation and sustenance of brand equity.
  • Build familiarity and facility with many of the specific tasks specific to brand manager/category manager positions and organizations as they have evolved over the past decade.

  This course will: 1) develop understanding of branding strategies, tactics and tools available to managers regardless of their job titles or formal roles within organizations; 2) develop and build confidence using analytical and decision-making skills frequently useful in branding/brand-strategy-type decisions; 3) build confidence in your ability to quickly assess key issues and opportunities in a variety of situations, and then add value by clearly articulating your insights both orally and in writing, and 4) provide an enjoyable and intellectually stimulating environment to test new skills and thinking.

• Retail and Channel Management

  The objective of this course is to share with the student the power of branding on customer behavior and its impact on business results. Both the theory behind branding and its practical execution will be covered. Presentations, examples, assignments and in-class group exercises will be used to communicate key concepts.

  Topics covered include Importance of Branding, Brand Experience and Internalization, Brand Strategy, Brand Promise & Positioning, Brand Attributes & Personality, Messaging & Taglines, Building the brand, Brand Identity & Design, Naming, Managing the Brand and Measuring Success.

• Customer Relationship Strategy & Practices

  Intensifying competition and new opportunities enabled by technology are leading firms to ‘customer-centric marketing’. The term Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was popularized in the 1990’s – but all too often meant little more than (expensive) software and technology. This course addresses customer relationships at a strategic marketing level where the goal is to use customer information to build customer loyalty and relationships with the ultimate goal of improving both customer satisfaction and the firm’s bottom line. The course will focus primarily on firms in ‘data-rich’ environments – that is, firms with detailed data on individual customers and firms with many customers. Topics covered include the satisfaction – profit chain, customer loyalty and loyalty programs, customer economics including customer profitability and lifetime value, customer acquisition, customer development via up-selling, cross-selling and personalization, customer attrition and retention, and customer winback. The course will use a mixture of readings, cases, in-class exercises and guest speakers.

• Marketing Analysis and Decision Making

  This analytical case-based course will emphasize how to analyze data to support and guide marketing decisions. Marketing managers often need to understand and predict the response to one or more marketing variables such as price, advertising, competitors’ actions, or product changes. Examples of data and the accompanying decisions are (1) using historical data to examine the effect of advertising spending on sales, (2) analyzing data from a field experiment to test different advertising messages, and (3) exploring survey data to assess drivers of customer satisfaction and profitability. Other topics will include segmentation, positioning and forecasting. This will be a hands-on course using Excel and SPSS (a leading statistical analysis package). No prior familiarity with SPSS is assumed. The course will also use a web-based program, Management by the Numbers designed to build proficiency with the calculations and concepts that underlie the most popular marketing metrics and economic concepts used in decision-making.

• Product Management

  This course is designed to provide students with the opportunity to develop an in-depth understanding of the job of the “typical" product manager/brand manager in marketing consumer and business-to-business goods and services. This course focuses on the major activities common to this position: analyzing market information, developing a product strategy, and programming and implementing the strategy. To better understand these activities, we will examine them from theoretical, methodological, strategic, and practical perspectives.

• Innovation & Product Development

  Innovation & Product Development will deal with the following questions. How are companies tackling the innovation imperative? How can innovative products and services be created using design thinking? How can inspiration be obtained from internal and external sources? How can the voice-of-the-customer be “heard” and then “translated” into customer requirements, product specifications, and product prototypes?

  We emphasize that an understanding and appreciation of the interaction between marketing, design, and engineering is necessary to develop successful new product offerings. This course will introduce several tools and techniques, including brainstorming techniques, the use of personas, the KJ Method (affinity diagrams) for structuring a large amount of qualitative information, quality function deployment, and conjoint analysis for quantitatively assessing the tradeoffs between attributes.

  Key concepts will be learned via team and individual assignments, as well as case studies. Several in and out of class hands-on exercises will also be used to vividly demonstrate these concepts. A team project applying many of the tools and techniques is the centerpiece of this course.

• Marketing Models

  An introduction to the models which can be used to address marketing problems - both the more traditional spreadsheet models, which are best used to address more tactical problems, and systems dynamics models, which are best used to address high-level strategic problems. Material on spreadsheet and systems dynamics modeling techniques, data sources and uses, and marketing decision support systems will be included. A number of model-assisted marketing cases will be used.

• Pricing

  Pricing is one of the most exciting and challenging topics in marketing. Mastery of pricing is essential to the profitable operation of any business. Nothing the marketer does has a more direct or greater impact on the bottom-line. It draws together all the diverse elements of marketing, such as product policy, advertising, market research, distribution, consumer behavior, competitive strategy and financial analysis. The various elements of marketing become an integrated whole when they are brought together for a pricing decision.

  The objective of this course is to bring to students the fun and excitement of this interesting subject and to help them master its intricacies, vagaries and complexities.

• Sales

  The objective of the course is to give you a practical, hands-on understanding of the selling process so that you can add value to your future company’s sales activities, regardless of your job title. The course consists of two parts:

  Part 1 – Sales Skills
  The first part of the course is a two-day sales skills workshop, SPIN Selling, by Huthwaite, a leading sales training firm. Based on years of research, SPIN Selling will teach you the same sales skills used by top sales professionals.

  Part 2 – Sales Strategy
  In the second part of the course, we will answer the essential questions of sales strategy including:

  • What are different ways to sell – direct, telesales, internet, etc?
  • What is the essential task of the salesperson?
  • How do you assess a sales opportunity?
  • How you understand the customer’s buying cycle and create an appropriate sales cycle?
  • How do you develop a sales strategy?
  • How do you navigate the competitive and political forces?
• Services Marketing

  The primary objective of this course is to supplement basic marketing and marketing strategy courses by focusing on problems and strategies specific to marketing of services. Problems commonly encountered in marketing services - such as inability to inventory, difficulty in synchronizing demand and supply, difficulty in controlling quality - will be addressed. Strategies used by successful services marketers to overcome these difficulties will be discussed.

  The emphasis will be on service universals rather than on any particular industry (such as bank marketing). However, concepts will be illustrated using cases, examples, and exercises in service industries such as financial planning, airlines, the hospitality industry, and communication as well as manufacturing and high tech industries (both of which depend heavily on services to provide value).

  The course is designed not just for students with careers in services industries but also careers in goods industries with high service components (e.g., industrial products, high tech products, durable products).

• Health Care Marketing

  Health Care Marketing is designed to teach students how to apply marketing concepts and tools to health care service and product management. It is an advanced marketing course that builds on the material covered in MBA 741, the core marketing course. There are two primary course goals:

  Goal #1: To help students recognize and solve health care marketing problems. Health care marketing problem-solving skills will improve decision-making for marketing managers as well as for managers in other functional areas.

  Goal #2: To develop the skills needed to structure, create, gain support, and execute strategic health care marketing plans. A marketing plan that is clearly written, supported by data, and insightful can lead to profitable results for services, products, and organizations.

  One of the key objectives of the Health Care Marketing course is to understand how value is defined and delivered in health care markets. Another objective is to explore how the marketing mix (product, price, place, and promotion) is effectively managed in different types of health care organizations. Health care marketing theory and models will be reviewed; but our priority will be on case studies, best practices, and applications. A hallmark of the course is active student engagement and participation.

  The course is most valuable for students who will work for a health care organization, consult with health care organizations, or who are with a company that offers health care products or services. Others interested in understanding the dynamics of the market-driven forces in health care will also benefit.

• Entrepreneurial Marketing

  This course covers the marketing tactics - from advertising to blogs to public relations to website design - needed for entrepreneurial companies to succeed. We begin with branding issues like product name, positioning and segment choice. Then we assess the criteria needed for an early stage company to evaluate tactical options - what works and how to make them more effective given a limited budget. The course uses cases and current examples from a broad range of industries ranging from technology ventures to consumer products, retail, financial, and service industries. Cases will be assigned for almost every class although we will also use current events to supplement our discussions.

• Marketing Strategy

  Marketing strategy concerns the planning and execution of decisions concerning where, how and when to compete for customer business. This course will focus on the planning and implementation aspects of these decisions using a mixture of lectures, cases, readings and exercises. The emphasis will be on practical tools and mechanisms for real world applications from a seller organization perspective. We will cover the use of customizable analytical tools such as environmental scanning, SWOT analysis, business position assessment, customer value mapping, as well as organizational behavioral approaches such as power and politics, implementation planning, internal marketing. The course will also address the overarching phenomena of market orientation and the role of marketing in building market-driven enterprises.

Who's Teaching

Barry Bayus
Tarun Kushwaha 
Mark McNeilly
Jan-Benedict Steenkamp
Valarie Zeithaml

Related Links

• See what's happening in the Marketing Club
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