Teaching
1. Marketing Strategy (Spring 2018)
In this course, you will learn how to solve marketing issues with tools that are readily available: Models of marketing problems, Excel spreadsheets, and your own intelligence in solving problems. Various marketing models, to which you will be exposed over the semester, have been developed over the years to deal with important marketing analysis and decision problems. Excel spreadsheets (MEXL software) provide a consistent and useful format for implementation of the models. Finally, your interest and intelligence in problem solving allows you to use marketing models in Excel spreadsheets to deal effectively with important marketing problems. This is a course that emphasizes application. Lectures and textbook readings expose you to the marketing models, and, importantly, several case exercises have you apply the models to marketing situations. You are required to prepare and hand in written solutions to the case applications, and we will also discuss the case applications and their solutions in class.
A key component of this course is Markstrat simulation. The decision making process in Markstrat is designed to illustrate and implement product management concepts and techniques to successfully develop and market new products. The course revolves around the computer simulation exercise. Students will participate in small groups to work and provide (multi-period) input for the competitive simulation game. Each team is assigned the responsibility of managing a Markstrat firm for six decision periods. A Markstrat industry is comprised of several firms. Each firm is only in competition with other firms in the same industry. Six class sessions are dedicated to Markstrat decisions. In addition, you will be required to develop and submit a team marketing plan for markstrat periods 4,5 and 6.
In your capacity to manage a Markstrat company, you will be expected to establish long-term objectives, formulate product strategies, and make marketing mix decisions. This requires a well-defined marketing plan. Each team will have the opportunity to make six sets of operating decisions over the course of the simulation.
2. Marketing Research
The broad objective of this course is to provide a fundamental understanding of marketing research methods as employed by better-managed firms and proposed by leading academicians. The course is aimed at the manager who is the ultimate user of the research and the one responsible for determining the scope and direction of research activities. The techniques of research design, data collection, and data analysis occupy an important space in the work of a marketing manager. This course focuses on helping managers recognize the role of systematic information gathering and analysis in making marketing decisions.
Marketing research is simply an organized way of developing and providing information for decision-making purposes. The quality of the information, for example its validity and reliability, depends on the care exercised in executing the various steps of the marketing research process. The steps include problem definition, research design (exploratory, descriptive and causal), data collection methods, questionnaire design, attitude measurement, sampling schemes, and data analysis. Emphasis will be given to both qualitative and quantitative aspects of marketing research.
You will learn how to collect reliable data efficiently and effectively and how to analyze “real life” data using statistical software. It is imperative that you have a strong understanding of the techniques and issues involved in collecting and analyzing data to judge the adequacy of the information with which you are presented. You will gain hand-on experience in collecting and analyzing data.
3. Social Media and Search Engine Analytics
This course introduces you to the world of social media and search engine, with a particular focus on data analytics. Rather than just analyzing the data from social media and search marketing context, we will try to develop predictive models and discover data patterns – the main purpose would be to understand how intelligent firms would develop their business strategies in the digital age. We will use MS excel (advanced skill with MS Excel is not a pre-requisite) and varieties of free software tools for various analytics exercises including text mining, data analysis etc. This course also offers a strong grounding in the principles of social media and search engine marketing.