Masters in Marketing (Consumer Marketing)

This module is designed to provide students with an understanding of the psychological and social factors that influence consumer behaviour before, during and after purchase and consumption in contemporary consumer markets. The purpose of the module is to explore and apply current consumer behaviour theories and models, which have been developed to identify and measure the purchase and consumption process.

• Consumer drive and motivation
• Consumer response to marketing actions
• Consumer decision-making process
• Consumer demographics and psychographics
• Sociological and cultural influences
• Relational consumption

Generating a deep understanding of contemporary consumers is a challenge for every organisation and marketing professional because of the constant evolution of consumer behaviour. This module aims to provide a theoretical basis and practical tools to help modern marketers to better understand contemporary consumers. Moving from a macro view of consumer behaviour, this module will discuss contemporary approaches to understand group and relational consumption, social processes and communication. ‘Word of Mouth’ influence and social marketing metrics will be examined in light of this sociological evolution of the connected consumer. Additionally, the impact of digital technology and its impact on consumer behaviour will be discussed. Using such technologies in social media has created a virtual space where consumers can meet up and discuss their needs and wants (ultimately about goods and services) without space and time boundaries. Consumers are continuously, interacting with each other and with brands/organizations on different devices and with different media. Forward looking companies and contemporary marketing professionals need to be able understand contemporary social phenomena and tap into these (digital) discussions to generate a critical understanding of the connected consumer and to engage with them in an agile and meaningful way.

This module aims to introduce students to the core concepts and models underlying contemporary strategic management, their theoretical and empirical foundations, their limitations, the arguments surrounding them and their practical application to real issues facing real companies. This module provides students with an understanding of the conceptual and analytical tools of strategic management and economics.

• Theories, frameworks and introduction
• Internal resources and competencies of firms
• External environment in which firms operate
• The process of internationalisation
• Globalisation and regional integration
• Collaborative behaviour and strategic alliances
• Integration/responsiveness framework and strategy

Academic authors

Professor Rajneesh Narula

Dr Jong Min Lee

This module enables students to conduct an original piece of academic research within the marketing discipline (digital, international or consumer), at master’s level, and report upon that research effectively. The research should include the identification of a suitable research objective, critical evaluation of pertinent academic marketing literature, appropriate evaluation and use of research methodologies and the application of relevant data analysis to enable conclusions to be drawn.

This module provides students with the skills needed to understand how market research is used as a tool for generating business insights and informing business decisions. Businesses increasingly rely on a range of research methods to provide answers to key business problems. This module is designed to acquaint the students with commonly used methods of data collection and analysis, as well as issues around reliability, validity and research ethics.

The pressure to measure marketing performance is as high as never before, reported by a number of practitioner and academic sources. The more senior roles in marketing, such as Marketing Manager, Marketing Director and CMO, would in one way or another require to deal with measuring marketing performance. Yet marketers are struggling to justify their value for a number of reasons.

Measuring marketing performance has in fact been a daunting task to both practitioners and academics alike and remains so still. More efforts are needed to tackle this problem and prepare for the jobs in marketing.

This module provides the essentials of what someone in a role of a marketing manager or similar needs to know and, importantly, be able to do, about measuring marketing performance.

The module considers fundamentals underlying contemporary marketing, focusing both on theories and practices of marketing. The module deals with marketing on a strategic level.

Academic authors

Professor Peter Scott

The module provides intensive experiential learning . The Marketing Applied Challenge provides an integrative module for the MSc Marketing programmes. It exposes students in a holistic manner to a marketing challenge to which they will apply previously acquired theoretical knowledge. Students will engage in preliminary research related to the study, which will provide formative assessment prior to the visit, and a basis for subsequent investigative activity during the visit. The module will seek to work with a business that is planning to develop a marketing opportunity and the challenge will be to provide managerially useful, and theoretically underpinned advice. As an example, in a previous year, this module worked with a local clothing entrepreneur that sought to identify opportunities for opening a “pop-up” shop in Paris, using social media to drive sales. Further specific details of the study visit offered within this module will be available to students before registering for it.

The module assists to create a network of active young specialists who think globally and act locally to make business action happen.

Branding is a fascinating topic that receives much attention in the popular press. The lectures explore and discuss theories and business practices related to building and managing strong brands. The module in particular focuses on how to manage brands in practice. The module deals with brands and discusses the following:

• why brands are important;

• what brands represent to companies;

• what brands represent to customers;

• how strong brands drive superior financial results;

• what organisations should do to manage their brands effectively etc.

Aims:
This module is concerned with how business intelligence and data mining techniques can be used for managerial decision-making. It aims to provide students with the essential data mining and knowledge representation techniques used to transform data into business intelligence. Application areas covered in this module include marketing, customer relationship management, risk management, personalisation, etc.

Outline content:

• Concepts of business intelligence and data mining
• Overview of various data mining techniques
• Types of data, data cleaning, data integration and transformation, data reduction
• Classification and predictive modelling
• Cluster analysis for generating patterns of data and structuring business intelligence
• Association rule mining and market-basket analysis
• Business intelligence implementation, integration and emerging trends

This module aims to introduce students to digital marketing and the increasingly important role of technology in both marketing practice and society. By the end of the module students should be able to apply a range of skills to implement digital marketing approaches and understand the key strategic drivers behind the growth of the digital economy.

This module aims to provide students with an understanding of marketing strategies and practices as they apply in a global context. This will be achieved by analysing the global marketing environment, marketing opportunities and strategy options, and the global marketing mix. As such, the module tackles both the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of global marketing management.

• Theoretical issues relating to the rationale for global marketing and the internationalisation process
• An analysis of the global marketing environment and factors influencing buyer behaviour
• Planning global marketing strategy and its evolution over time
• Factors affecting global product, pricing, distribution and communication programmes
• Standardisation versus adaptation

This module extends knowledge gained during the programme by critically reviewing theories of marketing in the context of modern day challenges in the business and social environment. It allows consideration of emerging issues in marketing and encourages an integrative, cross-disciplinary perspective. Each session will focus on a topic and reference will be made to leading edge thinking in academic and practitioner journals.

This module examines organisations that are engaged in creative or cultural activities. Students are required to define the parameters of the creative or cultural industries; to identify the management challenges faced by organisations in these sectors; and examine strategies for addressing them.

The module considers a variety of marketing communications theories and practices to equip students with the knowledge and skill to develop and communicate an effective marketing communications plan.

Social and environmental issues and challenges have led to the growth of marketing tools being applied with a sustainable purpose. As a result, organisations and governments are gradually starting to use marketing techniques in order to influence stakeholder behaviour towards pro-sustainable outcomes. It is also increasingly recognised that sustainable marketing can be good for business, leading to competitive advantage, cost savings and brand enhancement. This module is designed to provide knowledge of the link between marketing and sustainability and how to evaluate and implement marketing strategies that promote sustainable products, services and behaviours. This includes the design of a marketing campaign focused on social/environmental issues, including selection of behavioural goals. This module also covers aspects related to the evaluation and monitoring of campaigns and their social and environmental impact.