Marketing
Curriculum
HBS First Year Marketing, Fall 2008
Course Overview
Professors: Deighton, Gourville, Gupta, Keinan, Norton, Ofek, Riis, Rotemberg, and Weaver
Marketing, as we'll use the word in this course, refers to whatever it takes to grow a business by fostering exchanges between the organization and its customers. In general terms, marketing creates value for the firm's chosen customers and extracts a share of the value for the firm. The skill of marketing is the skill to monitor and understand customers, competitors, and collaborators, and to find in each domain a better way to design and deploy the firm's limited resources to serve its customers at a profit. In this way marketing helps to set a firm's strategic direction.
Marketing, thus defined, is a broad general management responsibility and not something to be delegated to marketing specialists. Its skills are required of all careers concerned with the strategy of organizations of every kind. This course therefore deals with marketing in a variety of settings: in the old and new economy, service firms, industrial manufacturing companies, as well as manufacturers and retailers of consumer products.
Each session of the course will tackle and resolve a problem in marketing. Generalizations about marketing will be found in the assigned readings. We will use the classroom sessions to fit generalizations to concrete situations, to sharpen skills in problem diagnosis, and to assemble a framework for making sense of marketing's complexity. To benefit from this format, you must be willing to prepare every case from the general management perspective, and come to each class confident that you know the problem and know how you would solve it.
Course Objectives
- To develop effective marketing strategies in organizations of all kinds.
- To illustrate the functional responsibilities of marketing and sales managers.
- To refine decision-making and analytical skills and be able to express the results of marketing and sales analysis orally and in writing.
Structure of the Course
This marketing course has nine modules:
- Module 1: Creating and Capturing Value
- Module 2: Understanding Consumers
- Module 3: Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning
- Modules 4 - 7: The Four P's of Marketing
- Module 4: Product Policy
- Module 5: Place (Distribution)
- Module 6: Pricing Policy
- Module 7: Promotion/Communication
- Module 8: Managing Customers Over Time
- Module 9: Managing Brands Over Time
To learn more about the MBA Program please see the MBA Program home page.