Programme Overview

This is a core course on marketing at the strategic level. It is intended for expe​rienced marketing professionals who already have proficient knowledge of marketing but need higher-level insights to prepare themselves for management roles that require enlightened perspectives on the strategic functions of marketing.

Although most of the issues discussed in this course are viewed from the perspective of a senior marketing executive (e.g., a Vice President of Marketing or a Director of Marketing), the course is also relevant to those intending to pursue careers in related functions, including general management, corporate planning, business development, R&D/innovation, sales/key account management, and even finance.

As a participant, you will get to address critical decision issues involved in strategic marketing planning, including segmentation and positioning, product development, new market entry, coordination of marketing mix actions, and management of the marketing budget.

In order to prepare you for the above challenges which can arise very soon in your career, this course provides an experiential learning environment in which you will gain not only an appreciation but also a personal feel for the tasks of strategic marketing planning and decision making.

You will learn to become an effective marketing decision maker, one who is capable of minimising (though not completely removing) much of the uncertainties surrounding marketing decisions through disciplined analysis and prudent judgement.

This course also requires you to manage a hypothetical marketing budget. You will therefore learn to behave like a responsible marketer, exercising fiscal discipline and properly justifying all marketing expenditures using sound commercial reasoning. 

Brands are increasingly important. A brand that connects with consumers can differentiate a company and its products from its competitors. This course covers branding from the perspectives of consumers and marketers. The course examines how consumers  react to branding strategies, and how a brand can build a strong presence in the market.

This course will introduce you to key consumer behaviour concepts, equipping you – as a current or future manager – with the knowledge to evaluate and design effective marketing decisions.

After completing this course, you will be able to understand:

• The psychology of how consumers think, feel, reason, and choose between different alternatives (e.g., brands, products)

• The influence of social and cultural environments (e.g., friends, family, and culture) on consumer behaviour

• How marketers can adapt and improve their marketing campaigns/strategies to more effectively reach and influence the consumers.

  You will also learn to appreciate the relevance of consumer behaviour for marketers and policymakers.

In the marketplace, firms need to address marketing problems and make marketing decisions quickly. Information collection and information analysis should serve as the key base for solving those problems and making those decisions. Hence, it is important for you to learn the tools, skills, and methods to collect and analyse relevant data.

The modern organisation has scores of data (e.g., web retail traffic data) that are often under-utilised for business planning and market research opportunities. This course equips you with the knowledge and skills to investigate existing business operational data to continually develop innovative marketing insights and new solutions for marketing decisions.

You will be exposed to various data modelling techniques using real-life business data that will allow you to provide useful predictions such as supply and demand forecast, pricing and profitability forecast, consumer trend analysis, and the likes.

This course systematically introduces the process of developing a strong business analytic case starting from the exploration of the data context to finally obtaining the explanatory or predictive results.

It is important for non-financial professionals to be able to interpret and analyse the myriad of financial information to contribute effectively to their organisations. This course has been developed to integrate financial concepts into a broader decision-making framework, and specifically to show how financial information is tied to the strategic context of organisations. Emphasis is placed on how non-financial professionals should effectively include financial considerations in their respective functional roles and how to harness critical financial information for their tactical planning and strategic business decisions.​

Digital marketing will dominate the way companies communicate with and sell to consumers (and other businesses). This course covers the principles and practices of digital marketing and how digital channels are used to build brands in conjunction with an effective content marketing strategy.

This course examines how digital marketing can build or break influence, be used as a research and customer service tool. It will give you the tools and strategies to design and evaluate digital marketing campaigns for brands, explore changing customer needs, and gain consumer insights. 

This course focuses on B2B marketing – the strategic decision of what value to provide, how to provide it, and how to do so profitably. Students will understand that marketing is a B2B discipline integrally related to accounting, finance, operations, human resources, and statistics. This course will help students differentiate customer-based strategy from Sales, Business Development, and Selling.

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

1. Understand the fundamental components of a B2B customer-based strategy;
   1. Customer Analysis
   2. Execution Strategy
   3. Financial Model
2. Understand the fundamental components of branding,
3. Understand the fundamental components of innovation.

This course will provide you with the opportunity to learn about how developments in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and related new technologies are changing marketing practices. You will learn how these new technologies influence consumer behaviour, marketing strategies, and the future of brand building. 

Integrated marketing Communications (or ‘IMC’) has been a popular ‘buzz phrase’ since the fragmentation of marketing communications budgets and the proliferation of communication channels.

IMC essentially looks at different ways for companies to communicate about their brand, in an integrated fashion. Yet IMC is much misunderstood and is rarely successfully implemented. The core of IMC is that everything a company does, and sometimes what it does not do, can send a powerful brand message.

The emphasis of this course will be on understanding target customer motivations and persuasion, crafting effective and creative messages, making efficient use of media, and understanding metrics. By the end of this course, you should not only be familiar with a large body of advertising knowledge, but should also be able to apply this information to create effective advertising strategies and tactics. 

Ethnography has been widely adopted by marketers, service teams, and product designers to help develop a rich, holistic, and nuanced view of consumers and users.

This course helps you understand what and how ethnography is used to deal with today’s marketing challenges in the real and online marketplace. The focus of the course will be to:

• Introduce you to the motivation, rationale, and power of the ethnography method
• Equip you with the necessary skills to
  • conceptualise and design ethnographic projects for real and online spaces
  • apply ethnographic tools and techniques
  • organise, analyse, and interpret ethnographic data.
    

This course introduces the fields of neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience. It is vital for anyone who wants to understand consumers or customers at a deep, emotional level and to be able to craft marketing messages to consumers with greater precision.​

By studying consumers’ subconscious responses to brands, products, and marketing materials, you will be able to more accurately predict purchasing behaviour than using traditional market research methods alone.

For example, regular focus groups and surveys are usually confounded by the fact that people don’t always tell the truth about what they think or they don’t always know how they feel. As a result, neuromarketing is now widely used by multinational companies to develop superior products that will also succeed in a global marketplace.

The course will delve into the range of new neuromarketing techniques that are now available. For example, you will get to examine the pros and cons of:

• Using eye-tracking devices to monitor people viewing websites to see what they are looking at, and where they are looking
• Monitoring consumers’ brain activity as they view adverts or new products to measure their emotions)

In addition, case studies will be used to demonstrate how the different approaches are being used by companies to tackle a very wide range of marketing questions.

You will also learn how insights from the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience can be applied in order to make marketing messages and communications more attention grabbing, more memorable, and emotionally engaging.

Also covered will be emerging research showing how digital technology is re-wiring the human brain and changing our behaviour in subtle ways, ways that you will need to understand in order to create more effective campaigns and messaging in today’s digital environment.