Digital Marketing Strategy

Course Number 1990

Professor John A. Deighton
Professor Sunil Gupta
Winter; Q3; Q4; 3 credits
20 Sessions
Paper

Career Focus

Consumer Marketing, Consulting, Entrepreneurship, General Management

Educational Objectives

Reduce the challenges posed by digital media and digital distribution for marketing and entrepreneurial firms.

Course Content and Organization

When the tools of marketing change, strategies change too. The focus of this course is on firms trying to navigate the transition from offline to online market-making and strategy development. Our concern is primarily with corporations that have products and services to sell, and secondarily with the challenges of developing the tools of digital marketing.

Digital media, and in particular social media like Youtube, Facebook, Blogs, and Twitter, represent radically new tools for reaching customers, collaborating with them, building relationships, and spreading ideas virally. Paid search advertising tools like Google's Adsense make "free to consumer" a strategic option. Digital distribution channels change the relationship between manufacturers and retailers, and destabilize entire industry ecosystems, This course examines how pioneering corporations are using these tools to build digital marketing and Web branding strategies for large companies and small, and the course identifies techniques and frameworks to generalize from these pioneering practices.

Before the Internet, marketing favored corporations with deep pockets because the tools of brand building, such as television and print advertising, were expensive to use and showed large returns to scale. Incumbent brands with large market shares could use their scale as a barrier to the insurgent efforts of smaller brands. Many new marketing tools such as social networks and mobile platforms do not have these scale economies. Customer acquisition by means of search engine marketing, and viral propagation of digital video advertising, for example, require no fixed investment. Consequently it can be argued that search engines and social networks tend to equalize the competition between new entrants and incumbents, or at least reduce the advantage of incumbents. The claim sometimes goes further and suggests that, in the manner of guerilla warfare, social networks do a better job of eroding entrenched positions than of creating value and building new positionings. Whatever the truth of these claims, there is little doubt that developments of the last decade have changed the practice of marketing more than at any time since the commercialization of television, and are creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and pioneers.

The career focus of students taking the course is likely to include both people with an interest in Web-based entrepreneurship, but also people interested in general consumer marketing and general management careers. Given the way marketing media are evolving and patterns of consumer engagement with media are changing, our goal as a class will be to anticipate trends that, while novel and relatively unexplored today, will be mainstream in the next decade.

Module 1:
Social Media: Opportunities for Insurgents and Challenges for Incumbents

Module 2:
Social Media: Challenges of Managing and Responding to Viral Propagation

Module 3:
Marketing to Fans and Communities

Module 4:
Pioneering Digital industries: Music, Interactive TV and Online Video

Module 5:
Mainstream industries: Adapting Business Models by Integrating Online and Offline Business Models