Business Management: Marketing Principles and Practice

Week 1: The role of marketing

Marketing tools and methods can be applied in a diverse range of businesses and organisations, including commercial, not-for-profits and government departments. Week 1 encourages you to consider the wide application of the concepts (both digital and non-digital) that this course will cover and how these can be applied to marketing plans.

Week 2: Marketing in a complex world – external factors

You will develop your competence in the methods you can use to understand and interpret key economic, social, technological and political trends in order to inform marketing decisions.

Week 3: Understanding and influencing consumer behaviour and decision making

You will develop essential skills in understanding customer motivations, specifying decision making processes that include digital and non-digital resources, and identifying the personal and social influences on the choices that customers make.

Week 4: Gathering and interpreting data to inform marketing decisions

Effective marketing decision making is underpinned with effective use of marketing research. You will develop proficiency in asking the right questions and interpreting the ensuing answers. The contexts will include interviews, focus groups, projective techniques, digital sources and surveys. By the end of the week you will be able to assess insights from both qualitative and quantitative data sources.

Week 5: Choosing your customers – targeting, segmentation, positioning and differentiation

You will master the tools necessary to assess how you can focus on people with whom the most mutually beneficial exchanges can be undertaken. You will also learn how to position your offering in relation to competitors, so that potential customers can best appreciate what makes you special.

Week 6: Creating winning propositions for customers

By the end of this week you will have a toolkit that can be used to design products and services that meet customer needs, differentiate your offer from those of competitors, and overcome customers’ perceptions of risk. You’ll focus particularly on the ways in which customers can be empowered to add meanings and value to your offering, especially in a digital context, while at the same time helping manage your costs.

Week 7: Delivering value to customers and the role of digital marketing

How can you best work with industry partners to deliver value to your customer? This week you will master the key frameworks and tools that you can use in order to identify the different functions your organisation can perform in the digital and non-digital value delivery process. You will discover how these can be most effectively complemented by your channel partners in order to deliver maximum value to your final customer as well as mutual benefits for everyone in the delivery process.

Week 8: Persuasive communications and social media

How and what we communicate depends on context. In previous weeks you will have been introduced to the methods you can use in order to better understand the specific managerial challenges that you face. This week we will provide you will the skills necessary to understand your communication needs, and then how you can design persuasive communications in both digital and non-digital contexts.

Week 9: Pricing strategies

You will be able to move beyond the simple mechanics of setting prices, to gain an ability to use proven methods for influencing how customers perceive your prices as ones that they would be happy and willing to pay. You will also master the methods that can be used to encourage different customers to pay different prices for the same offering. Our coverage will also deal with situations where there are no obvious prices to be charged; and embedded throughout will be considerations of ethics and fairness.

Week 10: Marketing planning and effective relationships

A key feature of this course is to remove references to lazy prescriptions. A focus on relationships can be fashionable, but we provide you will the tools necessary to understand when and how relationships may be effective and when alternative methods of undertaking exchanges will be more valuable for both you and those who you deal with.