The objectives of this course are to enable the participants: (1) Better appreciate the importance of strategic (“out of the box”) thinking and customer-focused strategy; (2) Understand the essentials of strategy formulation and a proactive strategic orientation; (3) Apply a framework of customer-focused strategy formulation; (4) Understand best practices in customer affiliation and in attracting and retaining the right customers; and (5) Apply a framework for managing customer relationships. The key topics covered include: strategic mission and vision, aligning vision with strategy, planning for customer-based growth, formulating a customer-driven marketing strategy, understanding customer value and needs, customer segmentation, customer satisfaction and loyalty, profitable customer relationship management, and organizational change to customer orientation.
Dr Venky Shankar
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Customer Value Management
This course is designed to give you a good understanding of how marketers develop an understanding of customer value and use that understanding to make sound marketing decisions. The focus will be on understanding the basic concepts and application of marketing for customer value in the form of case analysis, discussion of real-world examples, and development and presentation of marketing strategies. The course will emphasize the following key elements: (1) Customer Analysis: Issues of focal concern include analysis of customer value, segmentation analysis, target market selection, and value proposition or product positioning, and customer satisfaction; and (2) Marketing Decision Making Process: This process enables the marketing manager to systematically organize the relevant issues to make appropriate marketing strategy decisions based on analysis of the market situation. The major emphasis of this process will be on application of the relevant marketing tools of analysis to the marketing decisions. Financial analysis of marketing decisions will be stressed.
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International Marketing
This course is designed to give you a good understanding of how marketers evaluate, develop, and implement marketing strategies and programs in the international context, to meet with the needs of their customers while achieving their business objectives. It will enhance the skills you may have developed in earlier marketing course(s) by emphasizing their application in an international context. The course is designed for students who expect to undertake international marketing assignments, work for multinational corporations, or help smaller companies expand internationally. The focus will be on understanding of international marketing concepts and application of the concepts in the form of case analysis, discussion of real-world examples, and development and presentation of an international marketing plan. The course will emphasize the following key elements: 1. International Marketing Environment: The focal concern is the impact of external forces that shape marketing decisions, i.e., economic, cultural, legal, and political environments; 2. International Marketing Strategy: The important elements include international market evaluation, market entry, and market development strategies; and 3. International Marketing Mix: This section will cover analysis of the key elements of marketing mix such as product, price, place, and promotion to make appropriate decisions in the international context. The course will cover the different international regions such as Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America and North America. It will also cover a gamut of industries ranging from food to software. In addition, the students can pick an industry and international region of choice for their final project. The major emphasis of the course will be on application of the relevant marketing tools to international marketing decisions. Financial analysis of marketing decisions will be stressed.
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Marketing Strategy
This course is designed to give you a good understanding of how marketers develop and implement marketing strategies to meet with the needs of their customers while achieving their business objectives. The focus will be on understanding the basic concepts and application of marketing strategy in the form of case analysis, discussion of real-world examples, and development and presentation of marketing strategies. The course will emphasize the following key elements: Strategic Analysis of Market Opportunities and Marketing Strategy and Marketing Decision Making Process. The major emphasis of this process will be on application of the relevant marketing tools of analysis to the marketing decisions. Financial analysis of marketing decisions will be stressed. The competencies developed include: market opportunity analysis, strategic marketing analysis, product analysis and pricing analysis.
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Seminar in Marketing Models
The objectives of the course are to review the foundations, major contributions, and recent developments in marketing models, to develop the abilities to understand, formulate, and critique marketing models, and to enable the creation of a research proposal involving marketing models. This seminar will review the foundations, major contributions and recent developments in marketing models. The emphasis will be on foundations of modeling and the most recent developments in research using marketing models. We will examine commonly used models in marketing, as well as emerging ones, and discuss their principles and implications. This review and discussion will provide participants with new ways to think about modeling marketing phenomena. In addition, a principal purpose is to generate new ideas, new research topics, and new modeling applications for existing marketing problems. The seminar is meant to provide an overview of marketing models and will only cover selective research using marketing models. The seminar will facilitate their learning of methodologies. Participants are expected to fully get into the research rigor of modeling in the readings, assignments, and research proposals. Participants are also expected to attend presentations involving marketing models by visiting speakers and candidates and be prepared to discuss the presentation material in class. Occasionally, external speakers will make research presentations in the marketing department. If relevant, such presentations could be made part of this seminar and participants would be required to treat such presentations as one of the classes.
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Marketing Management
This course is designed to give the student a good understanding of how marketers develop and implement marketing strategies and programs to meet with the needs of their customers, while achieving their business objectives. The focus is on understanding of the basic concepts and application of the concepts in the form of case analysis, discussion of real-world examples, decision-making using game simulations, and development and presentation of marketing solutions. The course emphasizes the following key elements: 1. Strategic Analysis of Market Opportunities: Issues of focal concern include analysis of company, industry, competitors and customers, segmentation analysis, target segment selection, and product positioning; 2. The Marketing Program/Mix: The important elements include the 4 P’s of marketing mix, viz., product, price, promotion, and place (channels of distribution): and 3. Marketing Decision Making Process: This process enables the marketing manager to systematically organize the relevant issues to make appropriate decisions on marketing strategies and programs based on analysis of the market situation. The major emphasis of this process is on application of the relevant marketing tools of analysis to the marketing decisions. Financial analysis of marketing decisions is stressed. The course also highlights special topics in marketing such as digital or online or interactive or direct or Internet marketing, services marketing and international marketing, which are weaved into the course in the form of cases and industry examples.
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Research for Marketing Decisions
With the spurt in complexity of problems facing the marketing executive, there has been an increase in her/his need for relevant marketing information about the environment, competition, and particularly customers. The sophistication in information technology has accelerated this process and has underscored the utility of marketing research toward managerial decision-making. The objectives of this course are to: to develop marketing research problem definition skills, to develop the abilities to create marketing research designs as well as critically evaluate alternative research designs, and to provide an introduction to the various data analysis procedures. This course is designed to make the interaction between management and marketing research as productive as possible, by making each student an intelligent user and consumer of marketing research. Three learning vehicles are used in the course: a) textbook and readings, b) lectures, and c) discussion of problems and cases. This course is designed primarily for executives who will be using marketing research than just doing marketing research. The course recognizes that to be an intelligent user of marketing research, the marketing executive needs to have a very good understanding of the various stages in the marketing research process. The learning vehicles aim to provide this understanding.
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Symbian: Customer Interaction through Collaboration and Competition in a Convergent Industry
by Fabio Ancarani and Venkatesh Shankar
This article was published in Journal of Interactive Marketing, 17 (Winter 2003), 56-76.
In a convergent industry, the boundaries between traditional industries are blurred and, as new competitors emerge, traditional rules of competition are challenged. Firms need to effectively compete and collaborate with one another simultaneously by focusing on customer needs. In this paper, we argue that integration of customer needs and strategic alliances is a critical aspect of competing in the convergent industry. We propose a framework for analyzing competition in convergent industry, comprising five critical factors: customer intimacy, degree of competition among different players in focal markets, alliance formation, brand equity, and execution. We apply this framework to the case of Symbian, a joint venture among Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, Matsushita, Siemens and Psion that licenses an open operating system for third generation mobile information and communication services in hybrid mobile devices. We derive insights into the ongoing competition between Symbian OS, the first mover in this emerging market and Microsoft’s Smartphone, the late mover.
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Price Levels and Price Dispersion Within and Across Multiple Retailer Types: Further Evidence and Extension
by Fabio Ancarani and Venkatesh Shankar
This article was published in the Journal of Academy of Marketing Science, 32 (Spring 2004), 176-187.
In this paper, we develop hypotheses on how prices and price dispersion compare among three types of retailers, pure-play Internet, bricks-and-mortar (traditional), and bricks-and-clicks (multichannel) retailers and test them through an empirical analysis of data on the book and compact disc categories inItalyduring 2002. Our results, based on an analysis of 13720 price quotes, show that when posted prices are considered, traditional retailers have the highest prices, followed by multichannel retailers and pure-play e-tailers, in that order. However, when shipping costs are included, multichannel retailers have the highest prices, followed by pure-play e-tailers and traditional retailers, in that order. With regard to price dispersion, pure-play e-tailers have the highest range of prices, but the lowest standard deviation. Multichannel retailers have the highest standard deviation in prices with or without shipping costs. These findings suggest that online markets offer opportunities for retailers to differentiate within and across the retailer types.