Careers in Strategic Marketing and Services Leadership

Careers in marketing often encourage and require executives to think strategically early in their careers. Managing a product or service brand, or developing a new brand, requires those involved to understand issues that include how the market is segmented, the firm's differentiating advantages versus competitors, and a broad variety of marketplace trends that will impact the brand's future success. Thus, marketing careers demand that executives understand competitive strategy, be able to integrate a broad variety of data in the planning process, be creative (and sometimes daring), and enjoy the challenge of coordinating and motivating diverse parties inside and outside the firm in implementing the strategy. Marketers are often in “front line positions. Their success directly and obviously impacts the organization's sales and profits. Moreover, their strategies are likely to be contested by competitors. In sum, marketing careers are highly challenging, dynamic, creative, and potentially very rewarding.

The Strategic Marketing specialization provides students with a distinctive advantage in their careers. The W. P. Carey Schools Marketing Department includes the world's leading center devoted to the study of services marketing and management, the Center for Services Leadership. Since services are a growing, and increasingly predominant, economic sector in advanced countries, the service marketing and management expertise integrated into our course work provides students with valuable, distinctive skills that will help advance their careers.

Strategic Marketing students can select a variety of career paths that correspond to their interest in services management, brand management, sales management, research, or consulting. Fields where graduates find initial jobs include the following:

• Services marketing and management: developing and managing a service/brand portfolio
  
• Customer relationship management: satisfying, retaining, and growing a customer base
  
• Brand management: developing and managing a product/brand portfolio
  
• Market research: performing the research design, data collection, and data analysis to deepen understanding of customers, and inform strategy creation
  
• Sales: finding and growing customer relationships, often in business-to-business contexts
  
• New product/service development: performing the customer research, competitive analysis, and development necessary to bring new products or service to market
  
• Nonprofit marketing: helping non-profits develop and execute marketing plans
  
• Consulting: helping firms develop better strategies, often through the performance of market research or broader business analysis

The career paths available to Strategic Marketing graduates are not limited to those listed above. If you browse a sampling of positions held by our alumni (click here), you will see the diversity of rewarding career paths taken by our graduates. More than preparing students to take specific starting positions, the Strategic Marketing specialization prepares students for challenging future roles by helping them become problem solvers. When you have completed your W. P. Carey MBA with a Strategic Marketing specialization, you should be able to help your firm address questions including the following:

• What are the frameworks and data sources necessary to develop a marketing plan?
• How can a firm successfully differentiate and position a product or service brand in the market?
• How can firms measure and manage their “brand equity?
• How can firms who market intangible, difficult to try services communicate quality and value to customers?
• What are the frameworks and tools necessary for developing an effective integrated marketing communications plan?
• How should a firm develop a strategy for influencing a complex buying centers decision in favor of the firm?
• How does a firm develop and implement a successful, technologically enabled, program for customer relationship management?
• How can a firm retain and grow the value of its customers?
• How does a firm analyze the value of its customer portfolio and choose to develop customers that are the most profitable?
• What are the methods and data necessary to implement a successful customer satisfaction measurement system?
• What are the frameworks, tools, and data necessary for optimal pricing, especially in services industries where costs are difficult to determine and price may be inextricably intertwined with perceptions of quality?
• How can the firm use conjoint analysis and other research methods to develop and price new products and services?
• How can the firm design and test new services effectively when the service is essentially an intangible process?
• How can the firm market more efficiently “one-to-one to large numbers of customers using mathematical modeling and technology
• How can the balance between standardization and personalization be determined to maximize the efficiency of the organization and the satisfaction of its customers?
• How can service quality be measured and improved when the product is intangible and non-standardized?
• How can the firm best motivate and select service employees who, because the service is delivered in real time, become a critical part of the product itself?
• How can the organization ensure the delivery of consistent quality service when both the organization's employees and the customers themselves can affect the service outcome?