Marketing

This capstone course is focused on creating and implementing a successful marketing strategy in a competitive marketplace. Students develop strategies to minimize problems and/or capitalize on current opportunities in the marketplace. Because this is an advanced experiential course, students also create a strategic marketing plan for a real-life client project.

Marketing research is simply an organized way of developing and providing information for decision-making purposes. The quality of information depends on the care exercised at each step of the research process. In this course, students learn how to formulate a research problem, determine a research design, and evaluate methods and develop instruments for data collection. They then analyze the data and recommend the appropriate action to management.

This course introduces the benefits of using a systematic and analytical approach to marketing decision-making and integrates marketing concepts with practice. Students “learn by doing” as they explore the relationships and patterns in customer and marketing data. Advanced analytical software is used to perform predictive analysis techniques that are applied in the marketing field.

The Digital Analytics course is intended to develop students’ skills across a variety of analytics practices that are now being widely adopted in the area of digital marketing and in the development of better digital consumer experiences. There are three primary tools utilized in the course, and each aligns with a different section and major assignment:

1. Brandwatch Analytics is a platform that provides students instant access to hundreds of thousands of different digitally-sourced data resources (e.g. social media platforms, blogs, forums, articles, news, videos, etc.) that contain different types of consumer dialogue;
2. Google Analytics 4 is a platform that runs a number of different web analytic techniques on visitors to ecommerce sites;
3. Spreadsheet tools (Google or MS Excel) which perform a variety of different digital marketing campaign measurement analyses.

Retailers represent the consumer-end of the supply chain, providing a connection between the general public and suppliers. Retail management is more than just running a commercial business; it requires real estate investments, staff and stakeholder management, and general decision making. This course focuses on experiential learning, as you take the theoretical ideas into the real world.

This course introduces students to the complexities of integrated sustainability from a managerial perspective. Today's sustainability issues are all encompassing and include strategies for managing structural injustice challenges, and ecological integrity concerns throughout the entire ideation to go-to-market process. Firms must make thoughtful investment and resource decisions and marketers must learn to adapt their marketing strategies to sustainable products and services.

How do customers learn about and choose one product or service over another? The answer is social media and advertising. In this course, students learn how to effectively communicate to target segment(s) across social media platforms and how to coordinate social media with an overall advertising strategy. This course first explores online consumer behavior and microtargeting, then discusses content and creative strategy planning. Students then examine how to apply these strategies to social media platforms, while integrating with traditional media.

This interdisciplinary course draws on research from sociology, psychology, strategy and economics, focusing on the factors that shape consumer needs and influence buying behavior. Students explore how individual behavioral variables and group influences affect the consumer decision-making process, and learn how to analyze marketing programs to improve consumer satisfaction.

The purpose of this course is to understand the nature and functions of marketing in a global context, specifically marketing to multiple countries simultaneously. Students are exposed to different cultures and environments, analyze global market opportunities, and develop global marketing strategies that leverage experience, knowledge and investments across multiple countries.