Marketing Strategy and Innovation

• Marketing Fundamentals

  The aim of this module is to provide you with a sound understanding of the principles of marketing. In a nutshell, understanding marketing comes down to understanding your customers.

  This module assumes no previous knowledge of marketing and will give you an overview of the basic marketing planning process including segmentation, branding, pricing, distribution, and promotion. These concepts are brought to life though interactive lectures and industry guest speakers.

• Marketing Strategy and Practice

  The objective of the module is to enhance skills in strategic thinking in marketing and developing and presenting marketing plans.

  This will specifically require forming objectives, situation (SWOT) analysis, market research and forecasting, target market selection, market mix strategy formation, marketing tactics development, and control procedure formulation.

  In addition, you will practically apply marketing theory. You will take part in a business simulation. In this simulated world, you and your team have been recruited as Marketing Managers for a division of a large diversified firm.

  Marketing strategy is your main area of responsibility, but you will also be concerned with financial matters, production planning, and R&D. You will have to integrate these various dimensions of business strategy into a long-term perspective in order to gain an edge on the competition.

  At the end, we can see how your decisions have affected your market share, your profitability, and your share price.

• Creativity. Innovation. Design

  Since design thinking is the new mantra in organisations, this module equips you with the conceptual and practical skills to enhance opportunity spotting and problem solving through creativity techniques, innovation processes and design thinking. Design is all about making the product or service you deliver useful, usable, efficient, effective and desirable.

• Essentials of Accounting and Finance

  Regardless of your eventual job title or function, a sound understanding of monetary flows and financials within an organisation is important. This module provides an overview of the core principles of financial reporting and managerial accounting. There will be an emphasis on how financial statements are compiled and how they should be interpreted. In addition, you will also get a flavour of key areas for consideration when making investment decisions.

• Market Research

  This module introduces you to the techniques and processes of understanding markets and gaining consumer insights. The focus of this module will be on both quantitative, qualitative and interpretative approaches to studying markets and consumers and their value for innovations and marketing strategy.

  This module also provides methodological tools that are fundamental to craft and management of research projects based on empirical (quantitative or qualitative) data.

  You will learn about traditional quantitative methods, such as surveys and field experiments, and more qualitative approaches, such as ethnography, interviews, focus groups, etc.

  The aim is to enable you to evaluate and buy market research from clients, and be able to understand and use research output for solving marketing problems.

• Analytical Methods for Marketing

  In this module, you will learn the most relevant and up-to-date quantitative methods for analysing data related to various aspects of marketing, but also running a business more broadly. Mastering these methods will allow you to improve the quality of your decisions by grounding them in empirical insight rather than intuition or gut feeling. You will learn how to develop research questions, analyse data with different methods, and draw inferences, always with a view to making better marketing decisions.

• Consumer Behaviour

  Via a series of lectures, case studies and in-class activities, you will be introduced to foundational psychological, sociological and cultural theories to understand behaviour of individuals in the market. The goal is to help you understand how to segment and target your market, and then, how to relate and foster a desirable behaviour from your customers.

  The coursework of this module is integrated with the modules Digital Marketing and Social Media as well as Brand Management and Communication Strategies. This integrated project gives you the unique opportunity to develop and pitch a customer analysis, brand strategy, and advertising campaign across all media to a group of experienced London marketers and investors.

• Brand Management and Communication Strategies

  When you work as a marketer, your "brand" will be the focal point of all your thoughts and actions. Why? Because the brand gives the entire organisation purpose and direction.

  The brand guides your company’s product and pricing decisions, store designs, advertising narratives, and many other important decisions. This module introduces you to the key branding theories and branding models that are used in practice. You will learn how to create, reposition, and extend a brand, and how to advertise it effectively to your target audiences.

• Digital Marketing and Social Media

  In practice, digital marketing often revolves around  driving more traffic to a company’s pages, no matter what. However, social media and viral marketing, search engine marketing, e-mail marketing,  banner advertisements, or pay-per-click (to name just a few instruments) are not the same as traditional media such as print and television, where such a focus on „more traffic“ made sense. Digital marketing is different, and much more powerful. It is a two-way street, where marketers interact with consumers, select traffic rather than accumulate it, and thus build consumer-brand relationships of different kinds. This module teaches you a range of state-of-the art tools and theories of how to use social media effectively to achieve your branding and communication goals

All students complete two core modules (Product Innovation Management and Technology and Marketing) in term three.

• Product Innovation Management

  This module teaches you how to continuously develop new and improved products in order to lead the market. Because product development is a risky business and most new products fail, you will learn how to continuously innovate and manage product development processes.

  Through the use of practical exercises you will gain a deep understanding of the most effective ways to develop new product ideas, to garner market reactions to your ideas, and choose the right  strategies to take new products to the market. Studying this module will not prevent you from eventually marketing a failing innovation, but increase your chances of becoming a successful innovator.

• Technology and Marketing: Engaging the Future

  How does the marketing of technology shape the future world we will be living in? When will drones be delivering your Amazon orders? Will the Uber of tomorrow be a driverless car? Have you thought about having your childhood pet cloned, but with pink fur? Will you be touring your new house as augmented reality before you build it? Will a robot butler be serving you breakfast in bed? Technological advancement is opening astounding prospects for the future and marketers are challenged to catch up.

  This module teaches key theories to understand what technology is, and introduces you to the latest technological developments as opportunities to create, communicate, and deliver value to consumers. The module also addresses the ethical, societal implications of new technologies and what they mean for marketers.

You can then choose to take either a Business Research Project or three electives.

• Business Research Project

  The Business Research Project offers an opportunity to develop your expertise and become an expert on a marketing topic of your choice.

  You can, for example, conduct an independent academic research study in the subject field of your supervising Professor (e.g. running a consumer psychology experiment, collecting interview data for a consumer culture study, running a survey study on a marketing management topic).

  This is the best route if you are playing with the idea of becoming an academic, but also if your goal is to work with data.

  You can also develop a marketing research study with a company that faces a practical marketing problem. Our alumni office can help you open doors to get you in touch with a company to collaborate with.

  You can use this format to build relationships with an organisation you might want to work for. It gets you a foot in the door and can lead to permanent employment once you have completed the MSc.

• Electives

  The electives route allows you to depend your knowledge in areas that you are particularly interested in. You can choose from a broad range of national and international modules across our MSc programs. Some examples from last year include:

  • Ethics, Society and the Finance Sector
  • Driving Supply Chain Innovation through Technology
  • Fashion Brand Management
  • FinTech - Financial Services in the Digital Age
  • Negotiation Skill for Multidiscipline Managers
  • New Market Creation
  • Practicing Management in the Digital Age
  • Project Leadership
  • Retail Supply Chain Management
  • Storytelling for Business
  • International Module: Luxury Marketing Strategy (taught in Paris).

Please note that an elective may not be offered if it is not selected by a minimum number of students, or might be overbooked. Please also note that international electives may be taught in alternate locations, depending on availability.

See the MSc in Marketing Strategy & Innovation programme specification.