Marketing Strategy and Innovation MSc

• Marketing Fundamentals

  Marketing is one of the most fundamental, most complex, and possibly also most misunderstood functions of the firm. The aim of this module is to introduce you to the fascinating world of marketing and provide you with a sound understanding of its central tools.

  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, integrated projects, 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 and Design for a Sustainable World

  Incorporating the cutting-edge use of 3D printers and generative AI applications, this module empowers students to produce tangible 3D prototypes of their imaginative concepts. As design thinking becomes an increasingly pivotal aspect of modern organisations, this course offers both theoretical insights and hands-on skills. Students are encouraged to align their innovative ideas with the United Nations' sustainable goals, aiming to address and solve pressing global challenges. Through creativity, innovation workflows, and design principles, learners will be equipped to make their offerings—whether products or services—not only useful, usable, efficient, and effective but also solutions that contribute positively to the world.

• Consumer Insights

  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 and qualitative 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 interviews, and more novel approaches, such as Big Data approaches, neuromarketing, crowdsourcing, 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 compulsory modules (Product Innovation Management and Technology and Marketing) in term three.

• Product Innovation Management

  In contemporary society, organisations that do not continuously innovate will be left behind by the market. Yet, many large organisations do not manage to be innovative. This is in part due to the risky nature of product development – a huge number of new products never see the commercialisation stage, and many others fail to ‘grab’ customers’ attention – but also has to do with the nature of large organisations, which typically are not places where creative and entrepreneurial behaviour is encouraged.

  In Product Innovation Management, we will focus on the challenges that innovation managers face. After evaluating their product portfolio, they might conclude that there are gaps. In that case, there is a need to add innovative new products. But many large corporations are not the most innovation-friendly environment. So innovation managers may need to consider creating a designated corporate entrepreneurship unit, changing the organisational culture, or setting up systems and processes that stimulate entrepreneurship. Through discussing these challenges, you will gain insight into how large organisations (should) manage their entrepreneurial activities.

• Technology and Marketing: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

  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 marketing is straining to catch up.

  This module explores the relationship between technology, consumer society and marketing. It provides you with a theoretical and conceptual basis for addressing the intersection between technology and the processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings

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

• General Research Project

  The General 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

• Country and Geopolitical Risk Management
• Driving Supply Chain Innovation through Technology
• Essentials of Accounting and Finance
• Ethics, Society and the Finance Sector
• Fashion Brand Management
• Global strategy
• New Market Creation
• Retail Supply Chain Management
• Strategy Consulting Skills
• Storytelling for Business.

International electives

• Corporate Open Innovation (Rome)
• Luxury Marketing Strategy (Paris)
• Start ups: International Field Trip (Lisbon).

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.