Strategic Marketing and Services Leadership Specialization

As a career, marketing is exciting, challenging, and encourages young executives to develop a strategic, senior management perspective early in their career.  Executives charged with developing a new product or service, communicating its positioning versus competitors, or winning a war for market share must understand the firm’s positioning, sources of competitive advantage, and strategic goals.  The strategic perspective that marketers must take early in their career has made marketing a strong career path to senior management positions.

The W. P. Carey Strategic Marketing and Services Leadership Specialization equips students with a strong, distinctive set of skills that are sought by a wide variety of firms spanning services, consulting, consumer products, and b-to-b industries.   Recognizing that sales,  profits, and employment in the services sector of advanced economies are growing faster than in manufacturing, the specialization provides students with a strong foundation of strategic marketing expertise plus what we call “the services edge” – distinctive expertise in services marketing and management that few other MBA programs can deliver.  The W. P. Carey Strategic Marketing Specialization is closely allied with the W. P. Carey Center for Services Leadership, the world’s leading source of expertise and executive education concerning services marketing and management.   From this partnership, Strategic Marketing and Services Leadership Specialization students gain several advantages.  First, their classes are taught by faculty who have literally defined the field of services marketing and management.  Second, our corporate partnerships provide students with the opportunity to work on applied projects with leading firms as part of their course work.  Finally, many of our partner firms have hired our graduates. 

However, the strengths of the Strategic Marketing and Services Leadership Specialization do not end with our expertise in services.   The W. P. Carey Marketing Department is a large, diverse group of distinguished faculty that includes experts in branding, new product development, customer relationship management, retailing, and database marketing.   As a result, our students can design a portfolio of courses that provide a strong background in brand management, new products, or market research while still gaining the special advantage of our services expertise. 

Requirements

To complete the Strategic Marketing and Services Leadership Specialization, students are required to complete 15 credits of required courses.  These required courses provide students with a strong set of frameworks and tools for strategic marketing management with a "servcies edge" focus.  Elective courses in marketing will be offered as enrollments and faculty availability allow.

Trimester 3

• MKT 591:  Service Marketing Management (should be taken in Trimester 3) (3 credits)

Trimester 4

• MKT 591:  New Product & Service Development (3 credits)

·         MKT 591:  Projects in Customer Relationship Measurement and Management (10 weeks + 5 weeks in Trimester 5) (3 credits – spans Trimester 4 and first half of Trimester 5)

Trimester 5

·         MKT 591:  Projects in Customer Relationship Measurement and Management (first 5 weeks of Trimester 5 only)

·         MKT 580:  Strategic Projects (2^nd 5 weeks of Trimester 5 plus all of Trimester 6) (3 credits)

·         MKT 591:  Marketing & Branding Strategy (3 credits)

Trimester 6

·         MKT 580:  Strategic Projects (a continuation of MKT 580 from Trimester 5)

Course Descriptions

Descriptions of marketing specialization courses are given below.

Strategic Marketing Management (MKT 502)

Faculty: Professor Morales

A required core course for all MBA students, the fundamentals of marketing are presented, including the development of marketing plans, managing the marketing mix, and strategies for managing customers.

Services Marketing & Management

Faculty: Professor Mary Jo Bitner

This is a required course that should be taken in trimester 3 of the first year.  Services dominate the US economy and are becoming critical for competitive advantage in companies across the globe and in all industry sectors.  For manufacturers like GE and IBM, services represent their primary growth and profitability strategies into the 21^st century.  Almost 40 percent of IBM’s current revenues and over 60 percent of GE’s current profits come from services.  Superior service quality drives the competitive advantage of excellent companies like Charles Schwab, Marriott Hotels, and FedEx – traditional service businesses.

In this course, you will learn critical skills and gain knowledge needed to implement quality service and services strategies for competitive advantage across industries.  This course is equally applicable to organizations whose core product is service (e.g., banks, transportation companies, hotels, hospitals, educational institutions, professional services, telecommunication, etc.) and to organizations that depend on service excellence for competitive advantage (e.g., high technology manufacturers, automotive, industrial products, etc.).

Students learn to:

·         Analyze and implement services excellence strategies through use of the strategic services gap model

·         Build strong customer relationships through services strategies

·         Integrate customer focus across functions in the firm

·         Analyze services using the services triangle framework

·         Develop and analyze service blueprints

·         Analyze and design service systems that meet customer needs

·         Cases, projects, guest speakers and exercises provide real contexts for analysis and application of the course concepts and tools.

Projects in Customer Relationship Measurement and Management

Faculty:  Professor James Ward

In this course, you will learn the tools, metrics, and systems used to measure and manage customer relationships.  Strong customer relationships are built on foundations of satisfaction and brand equity.  These perceptions in turn are leading indicators of customer loyalty and firm profitability.  Firms that exemplify best practices in acquiring, retaining, and growing loyal customers employ systems of measurement and tracking that integrate customer satisfaction and brand image surveys as well as CRM software systems.  The specific skills covered in the course include the following:

·         How to design and conduct marketing research surveys

·         How to use syndicated customer data services

·         How to build and update a CRM database

·         How to analyze survey and syndicated data to understand customer satisfaction, equity, and “one-to-one” marketing opportunities

·         Best practices for designing and using customer relationship management systems to retain and grow customers

·         How to function as effective market research consultants

Alumni in services marketing management positions, product management positions, and sports business careers commonly employ the specific skills learned in this course.  In addition, many students will use the market research and data analysis skills developed in this course in later applied projects and practicum courses.

In this course, we will learn by doing.  You will become, on a team basis, consultants to a client with vital interests in understanding and improving relations with present or prospective customers.  Your field project will provide wisdom about managing consulting relationships as well as collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data that only comes from doing a real world project from start to finish.

New Product and Service Development

Faculty:  Professor Rajiv Sinha

This course is designed to make students intimately familiar with the front end of the new product design process and will provide concrete tools for determining optimal strategies for developing new products and services based on input from customers.  While this customer-centric approach may not be appropriate for radical or disruptive technologies (customers may not know what they need, focusing on a few “lead users” may ignore the needs of the other market segments), it does work well for the “new and improved” class of products that represent over 90% of all new product introductions.  Specifically, students will learn a variety of techniques that are useful for:

·         Defining the market for a new product

·         Determining the market potential for a product category

·         Incorporating customer preferences in designing the new product attributes

·         Determining the “ideal” product for different market segments

·         Creating a product prototype that is positioned as close to this “ideal” product as possible

·         Developing an “optimal” pricing and advertising policy for the product

·         Forecasting the market share for the product and,

·         Test marketing the product and re-designing it prior to product launch

Markets and Branding

Faculty:  Professor Beth Walker

Increasingly, organizations worldwide are recognizing that comprehensive understanding of and responsiveness to their customer is critical to their long-term success.  With the evolution of computer and communications technology, customers don’t only respond to a firm’s sales and promotions strategies, but initiate the business transaction.  Rather than being at the end of the value chain, the customer is often at the beginning of the value chain.  Organizations must respond to this new reality by developing strategies that encourage customer relationships over the long-term.  Of course, within the firm, marketing assumes the dominant role in crafting mutually beneficial relationships with customer by defining, creating, and meeting their needs.  Thus, a clear understanding of the customer is essential for effectively building customer relationships, and more broadly, managing in the marketing function.

The purpose of this course is to provide an overview of the concepts that are fundamental to understanding and managing the customer.  Typically, we will adopt the perspective of the marketing manager who needs knowledge of customer behavior in order to develop, evaluate, and implement effective marketing strategies.  The course is organized around four important processes related to managing the customer: customer selection, customer acquisition, and customer retention and customer growth.  Because of its dominant role in the customer management process, special attention will be given to addressing the brand strategies that are used to acquire, retain and grow the customer base.  In addition, to complement your other more quantitatively-oriented courses in the marketing curriculum, this course will also introduce you to a variety of qualitative methodologies that are especially useful for attaining a deep understanding of the customer.

Strategic Projects (MKT 580)

Faculty:  Professor Steve Brown

In this capstone course for the Strategic Marketing and Services Leadership specialization, students work in consulting teams on substantive projects for real companies.  Project issues can encompass customer management, marketing planning, new service development, service delivery, and related topics.  MKT 591, Services Marketing & Management, is a pre-requisite for this class.  Through this experience, students will:

·         Demonstrate competence in integrating, extending and applying services marketing and management knowledge and skills in a “live” business context

·         Learn about and apply project management knowledge and skills

·         Exhibit and enhance practical consultative skills

·         Learn about and across distinctive service business contexts; and contribute valuable consultative information to a business