International Marketing and Management

Course Description

This course guides students to prepare for their thesis writing process by surveying various topics in the field of International Marketing. The three main foci are: literature review, research methodology, and hypotheses. First, by systematically highlighting the differences between the annotated bibliography and the literature review, we emphasize the link between the existing literature and the research questions at hand. Second, by skimming through the preliminary data, we check the data availability and the feasibility of the chosen research method. Third, by articulating the hypotheses, we evaluate the proposed research design. The course lasts throughout the semester and concludes with the written Research Proposal and its defence.

Learning Outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Identify a gap in marketing literature and cultivate interests in topics relevant to students’ career paths.
• Critically evaluate various research methods, especially given the data availability.
• Formulate a series of hypotheses relevant to the given research questions and develop a habit to continuously assess the progress of own research.
• Strengthen communication skills both in the written form as well as in presentation in order to stimulate discussions in the field of financial economics.

Annotation

Communication is a fundamental part of most marketplace transactions. In its purest form, price communicates the information necessary for a transaction. In most cases, however, marketers have to communicate more than just price in order to establish, sustain, and grow their business. So how does communication in the marketplace work? How can marketers succeed in nowaday’s increasingly digital and international communication environment? In order to address these important questions, this course aims to provide a deep understanding of marketing communication, both in terms of real-life application and as a field of scientific research.

Over the duration of the course, students will work in groups to develop a communication strategy for a real industry client. The lectures will provide inspiration for the group projects in two ways:

1) It discusses key theories and findings in communication planning and consumer psychology. These insights are applied in the communication strategy, but we will also pay close attention to theoretical and methodological challenges in these research areas.

2) We will meet guest speakers holding various key functions in marketing communication (e.g., on the agency side, the client side, the media side). These practitioners will provide insights into the daily business and the current challenges of marketing communication.

Course Aims and Objectives

This course aims to provide students with a systematic knowledge and understanding of the core concepts of integrated marketing communications.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand how Integrated Marketing Communications fits into the overall marketing mix and marketing strategy;
• Understand how the communications process fits into and works with consumer behaviour with emphasis on the consumer decision making process;
• Develop an awareness of the connection between marketing communications tools, and how each can be used effectively- individually or in an integrated mix;
• Obtain a practical, real-world application of Integrated Marketing Communication theory;
• Gain a critical awareness of best practice in reputation management and sponsorship on corporate context.

Course Description

The role of corporate responsibility and sustainability has gained momentum in the last decades. This advanced course focuses on a deeper understanding of the interaction between organizations, society, ethics, corporate responsibility and sustainability. The dominance of US based literature, has suggested the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility as the main doctrine. However, considering the historical, economic and political context – the situation in Europe is fundamentally different. Unlike in the United States, the question of philanthropy plays only a minor role in Europe. On the other hand, the question of social, legal, environmental, and economic responsibility – within the context of a welfare state – dominates daily business life. The course will therefore take a more holistic approach – and concentrate on the question of how Corporate Responsibility has to be handled in an international context. Moreover, alternative models aiming at a win-win situation of society and corporations will be present. Besides, a focus will be on stakeholder theories, as well as on the role of NGOs, consumer perception, and the government.

Learning Outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Understand the forces which are driving CSR and Sustainable Development in a European Context.
• Understand the impact of the government and the capitalistic system which drives the role of the corporation in a society.
• Understand the philosophical background of current CSR and sustainability theories.
• Apply CSR and sustainability concepts in practical business situations.
• Develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Course Description

Customer Value Analytics is about turning customer data into insights, into decisions, into business value. Overall, the course is designed to provide students with a foundation on how to measure and manage customer value to increase profitable growth – and how to raise company’s customer value accountability to a higher level. The relevance of any marketing organization depends on its ability to systematically manage customer value, and the best marketers aspire to make this happen. From a leadership vantage point, there’s a lot riding on marketing’s ability to make a shift from product orientation to market and customer value orientation, because reactive and purely tactical marketing doesn’t exercise much impact.

This course covers some of the key ideas for customer value analysis and analytics. The approach taken throughout the course hinges on three questions:

• What are the outcomes that the business needs to achieve to meet its goals?
• What does senior management expect marketing to contribute towards these outcomes?
• How will senior management know that marketing has made contribution?

Learning Outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Analyse the importance of customer value analytics and how it can help improve the measurement and management of marketing performance.
• Practice key customer value analytics concepts.
• Apply customer value analytics to a company and present customer value analytics and metrics in a management report, or in a form of a dashboard.
• Identify the barriers to successful implementation of customer value analytics as well as the potential for improved performance and profitability.

Course Description

An activity course involving practical experience in planning a research project, designing questionnaires, sampling, interpreting results and preparing a research report. The course provides an introduction to research methods used in business and management. It covers qualitative and quantitative methods, using primary and secondary data. The course is designed to provide students a solid foundation for conducting their own research and for critically evaluating and reading prior academic research. The course presents the fundamentals of the research process. The knowledge and competencies acquired in the study process will enable students to make methodological decisions in designing and planning research. The overall goal of the course is to equip students with the skills necessary to perform research.

Learning Outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Understand the relevance of research in managerial decision- making.
• Have a critical awareness of research issues, methodologies, and methods used in business and management as well as an understanding of potential ethical problems of the research
• Obtain skills to identify a business problem/need, translate it into a research question, and design an appropriate way to answer it.
• Develop skills to identify and understand the main qualitative and quantitative strategies of research, of their advantages and disadvantages and of appropriate application areas.
• Develop skills to design a research project and collect data.
• Obtain skills to analyze data and draw reasonable interpretations as well as communicate research findings in a clear and well-organized way
• Develop skills to critically evaluate the quality of other researchers’ findings and the process used to obtain them.

Course Description

The course builds on basic consumer behaviour courses and discusses specificities of consumer behaviour in international context. Beside more general overview of the consumer behaviour in different cultures, the course will focus on topics that

are critical for understanding consumer behaviour in international context, such are: global consumer segmentation, consumer cosmopolitanism, consumer ethnocentrism etc. It will be discussed how culture influences consumers and what can companies do to achieve better understanding of their customers in international context.

Learning Outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Get acquainted with consumer behaviour concepts relevant for international business practices.
• Gain in-depth understanding of the methodological tools for gaining consumer insight in the international environment.
• Distinguish between different individual and social factors that influence consumer decision-making process in the international environment.
• Perform consumer behavior research by applying relevant scholarly measures and analyse the results.
• Be able to propose relevant recommendations for marketing programs in contemporary business based on the research output.
• Foster a holistic approach to international consumer behaviour by critically thinking about coherence of individual and social factors within different cultures.

Course Description

This course is designed to facilitate a more “practical” understanding of strategic issues facing companies who manage (or intend to manage) their operations within as well as across national boundaries.  The course focuses on the real challenges companies face in a ‘international management’ context.  In general, these challenges pertain to identifying, evaluating, and making tradeoffs across international, national-, industry-, firm-, and personal- level contexts. Thus, this course will discuss strategy formulation- and implementation-related issues as well as generate solutions to companies’ international management dilemmas.

Learning Outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Perform strategic analysis in a variety of industries and competitive situations and, especially, to provide them with a stronger understanding of the competitive challenges of a global market environment.
• Assess business strategy, reasoning carefully about strategic options, using what-if analysis to evaluate action alternatives, and making sound strategic decisions.
• Participate in the managerial tasks associated with implementing and executing company strategies, drill them in the range of actions managers can take to promote competent strategy execution, and give participants some confidence in being able to function effectively as part of a company’s strategy-implementing team.
• Practice managerial judgment, help students learn how to assess business risk, and improve their ability to make sound business decisions and achieve effective outcomes.
• Employ proficiency in using personal computers to do managerial analysis and managerial work.
• Acknowledge importance of exemplary ethical principles, sound personal and company values, and socially responsible management practices.

Course Description

The course provides an understanding of how marketing research is practiced today. It gives the overview of different research methods and practices in marketing, presents the trends in the field such as neuromarketing research and usage of artificial intelligence in research. In the modern world data itself is no longer a competitive advantage, the main competitive advantage is what companies and businesses are doing with the data they already have or the data received while performing marketing research. The course will overview different research methods suitable for answering various marketing questions, e.g. what are the needs of my consumers, whether my brand stands out in competitive environment, how to enter the market with new brand or product, etc. The knowledge and skills acquired by the students during the course will allow to critically evaluate different possibilities of conducting the research and empower to design the needed study by themselves.

Learning Outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Identify a marketing problem, translate it into a research question, and design a methodology to properly conduct the research.
• Compare different research strategies and execute them.
• Design a research project and collect data.
• Analyze data and draw reasonable interpretations as well as communicate research findings in a clear and well-organized way.
• Examine changing marketing environment and use proper up-to-date research methods and technologies to solve marketing problems.

Course Description

The course builds on focal marketing courses and discusses digital strategies and tactics from a brand perspective. Beside more general overview of the digital marketing and social media phenomena, the course will focus on topics which are critical in leveraging the power of social media, such are: content management, development of social media presence, mobile marketing and viral marketing. It will be discussed how power has been shifted from brands to consumers, how to engage consumers through social media, and what is the interplay between social media and other digital marketing activities.

Learning Outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Acknowledge core digital marketing concepts and the specifics of digital marketing environment.
• Assess the marketing potential of digital technologies for a particular real-life marketing challenge.
• Determine value of data in digital marketing and develop skills for data acquisition, analysis and its usage for digital marketing decision- making.
• Interpret the new role of consumers in digital environment and develop digital personas.
• Prepare relevant online value propositions and tactics to create value in the digital environment, choose relevant digital platforms and propose digital tactics to achieve marketing goals.
• Employ a holistic approach to marketing management by critically thinking about new digital marketing trends, and questioning their applicability for marketing strategy in contemporary business.

Course Description

The study of brand management is considered a crucial area in marketing and business curriculum as brands are one of the most valuable assets a company can have in today’s highly competitive marketplace. An understanding of the psychological aspects of consumers’ awareness, preference, and loyalty to brands is vital in developing long-term company growth. The course aims to develop the necessary knowledge and skills needed to prepare the managers to create an enduring advantage for their products in a competitive marketplace. It deals with important issues both at the individual product and the firm level and is designed both for those anticipating careers in brand and product management as well as for those with an interest in marketing management or general management. Particular emphasis is placed on hands-on experience of analyzing, assessing and managing brands.

Learning Outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Increase understanding of the important issues in planning and evaluating brand strategies.
• Differentiate between appropriate theories, models and other tools that help to make better branding decisions in organizations.
• Apply branding principles in practice in a students’ forum format.
• Develop an in-depth knowledge on the planning and implementation of a branded product.
• Perform brand analysis, draw reasonable interpretations and objective judgements out of it.
• Develop skills of presenting research / field work findings.

Course Description

Due to the recent silent revolution of “tertiarisation,” the service sector now accounts for almost two-thirds of GDP globally and is also the fastest growing sector worldwide. Odds are when somebody graduates there will be two to three times more jobs in service-oriented businesses than in goods based businesses. Indeed, all manufacturers today offer a number of services to their customers. As services are inherently relational, there are always relationships between a service organization and its customers. The key issue is whether a firm uses these relationships properly in the way it manages customers or not.

This course aims to provide an in-depth understanding of how services are marketed, with emphasis on the significant difference between marketing of services and marketing of products. The attraction, retention and building of strong customer relationships through quality service and services are at the heart of the course content. The focus will be on internationalisation of services in world-class organisations rather than on a particular country or culture.

Learning Outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Analyse and critically evaluate differences between services and goods drawing on the understanding of how these differences influence the practice of services marketing.
• Outline and analyse the different components of the “services marketing mix” for developing strategic thinking in services marketing.
• Demonstrate understanding of the role of employees and organizational culture in service delivery.
• Investigate how customers evaluate services and how customer behaviour and expectations play a role in the service environment.
• Analyse and assess the relevance of service recovery.
• Examine best practices in dealing with service customers in international organisations.
• Discover the role of customer relationship management in services.
• Demonstrate an awareness of major cultural issues influencing services on an international basis.
• Contribute to the academic debate relating to services marketing strategy and implementation.
• Practice a set of analytical skills and presentation skills for debating central issues in services marketing in a group-context.

Course Description

The course deals with two main processes: innovating the business model and innovating products and services. In the first part of the course we will focus on business model innovation. To do that we will rely on the business model “Canvas” as developed by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur (Business Model Generation, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey). In parallel to frontal lessons, students will work in groups with the aim of analyzing and improving the business models of three (real) firms/start-ups participating to the course. In the second part we will focus on the process of new product development (NPD) and deepen the stage-gate approach. Examples related to real firms (small firms and multinationals) will be provided. The course is based on a mix of class discussions, frontal lectures, case-study discussions and experimentation. A willingness to work in group and to interact in class is a necessary prerequisite to successfully complete the course.

Learning Outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Assess the innovativeness and the coherency of an existing business model.
• Create a new business model for the company.
• Apply a portfolio logic for allocating resources to multiple innovation projects in a company.
• Interpret a NPD process through a stage-gate approach.

The Master’s Thesis is the culminating experience in graduate level education for Master degree candidates. It is an individual endeavour of analytical nature, which contains elements of originality and is performed in conformity with general requirements of academic papers and scholary projects. For the student, the Master’s thesis should be a learning activity that is stimulating and engenders a sense of pride and accomplishment.

The intent of the thesis is to provide an opportunity for Master’s degree candidates to refine, in some cases acquire, a range of skills at an appropriate level to do capable and competent research. A successful thesis is evidence that the candidate has acquired the minimum level of research skills required and can therefore be accredited a Master‘s degree. Skills required of thesis writers are those associated with research design, data collection, information management, analysis of data, synthesis of data with existing knowledge and critical evaluation of the writer’s own ideas and those presented in the literature reviewed. The thesis should be written in English, within a given period of time and comply with commonly accepted principles of academic ethics.

Course description

The course explores determinants of industrial competitiveness and successful economic development viewed from a bottom-up, microeconomic perspective. While sound macroeconomic policies and stable legal and political institutions create potential for industrial competitiveness, wealth is actually created at the microeconomic and firm levels. The sophistication and productivity of firms, the vitality of industrial clusters, and the quality of the business environment are the ultimate determinants of the productivity and innovation capacity of nations, regions and industries.

This course examines both advanced and developing economies and addresses competitiveness at multiple levels – nations, subnational units such as states or provinces, particular clusters, and neighboring countries. The course is concerned not only with government policy but also with the roles that firms, industry associations, universities, and other institutions play in competitiveness. In modern competition, each of these institutions has an important and evolving role in economic development.

The course explores not only theory and policy but also the organizational structures, institutional structures, and change processes required for sustained improvements in competitiveness

The Microeconomics of Competitiveness is a distinctive graduate course offered in cooperation with prof. M. Porter and a team of his colleagues at Harvard Business School (HBS). It is designed to be taught to second year MBA students at HBS and affiliates of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School (http://www.isc.hbs.edu/moc.htm).

Learning outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Analyse and evaluate the major elements of competitiveness
• Analyse, compare and evaluate the role of clusters.
• Analyse and evaluate the interaction between the micro level (entrepreneurial activity), meso level (regional clusters) and macro level (national policy).
• Analyse the complex relationship between government activity and business activity within institutions for collaboration.
• Apply knowledge in the framework of a concrete research project for a concrete country and cluster.

Course Description

This course introduces advanced applications in financial management that are geared to maximize firm value. Topics include valuation, investment techniques, estimation of cash flow, and various aspects of risk management. This course will go into details into some of the major corporate finance issues: financing and optimal capital structure, investments, considerations on becoming a publicly-traded company, company valuation methods most commonly used.

Learning Outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Interpret various financial statements.
• Improve financial analysis skills on financial statements.
• Evaluate companies using market multiples of comparable traded companies.
• Practice the concept and calculation of cost of capital.
• Evaluate companies using discounted cash flows.
• Analyze major corporate finance dilemmas and acquire some tools to help on decisions.
• Assess and compare the attractiveness of corporate investment opportunities.

Course Description

Multivariate statistics encompass fundamentals behind quantitative data analysis, which is widely applied in data-driven decision making, marketing research and consumer behaviour studies. It is virtually impossible to succeed in the business world in the age of big data without a working knowledge of basic data analysis approaches and statistical software. The aim of the course is to introduce a variety of standard statistical methods used to analyse multivariate data, emphasizing the implementation and interpretations of these methods. The course covers the design of a research project, the choice of suitable multivariate methods, the testing of the fundamental assumptions underlying various methods, the application and evaluation of multivariate methods and interpretation of the results. Practical examples, having a real-world relevance, will be provided and participants involved with hands-on experience of data analysis using SPSS and R/radiant as the main tools. Students will be advised to study relevant chapters from textbook and read articles in academic journals.

Learning Outcomes

During this course, you will:

• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the different multivariate data analysis methods most commonly used in business and marketing.
• Apply multivariate statistical techniques to conduct marketing research.
• Determine correct statistical methods for decision-making.
• Interpret the results of statistical analysis and present them in a rigorous, understandable, clear and concise manner.
• Argue the choice of statistical methods when analysing business or marketing case.