Strategic Marketing Issues

Introduction

The purpose of marketing strategy is to transform company's resources to satisfy customers' current and future needs more effectively and efficiently than the competing alternatives. The requirements to become a successful marketing manager have surged in recent decades, demanding new critical understanding of consumer reality and new competences in managing rapid changes in the environment. Not only that the customer needs are changing, but also more than ever before firms are required to respond to environmental and social challenges as well. To address these needs and challenges and secure their seat at the boardroom table, marketers are required to develop deep insights of strategic marketing issues and demonstrate the value of marketing investments.

This course is the capstone course in the master program centred on the notion of building marketing skills that increase such relevance for business through a combination of action-based, hands-on learning and in-class discussion of examples with empirical evidence from practice. As the final course in the master program, this course aims to bring together diverse elements of marketing and encourage students to implement the knowledge directly, analyzing quantitative data from case studies that seek to address various strategic marketing issues. In particular, this course encourages learning-by-doing approach in which, through teamworking, students have to combine critical thinking from literature with analyses of data to come up with practical strategies for business problems at hand.

The business issues span topics of selection and valuation of customers and competition, understanding trends and forecasts for growth, developing customer-centric products, trade-offs between different elements of marketing mix, evaluation of online vs offline sales channels and custumer groups, social media's return on investment calculation, etc.

Course content

The topics selected in this course aim to deepen students’ understanding of the complex strategic marketing issues that affect firm performance. In particular, the course addresses the role of marketing strategy and data analysis in driving business performance.

As we progress through the course, students will gain deeper understanding of the impact and trade-offs between different marketing elements and marketing’s impact on bottom-line performance.

Besides highlighting burning issues for marketing managers, this course aims to develop students' appreciation of the need for a marketer to quantify the impact of selected marketing solutions.

To achieve the outlined learning objective, this course takes an innovative, continuous learning approach in which the theory and applications of theory are intertwined and the students take steps through a Learning - Applying - Presenting approach for each subsequent main strategic issue.