This module is designed to introduce students to the fundamental concepts of marketing that are relevant not just to marketers but to all business managers. This module aims to (i) introduce marketing strategy (market segmentation, targeting and positioning) and the simple quantitative methods that support it; (ii) introduce the elements of the marketing mix (product, pricing, promotion, and channels), and demonstrate how each is used in a strategic, as well as in a tactical manner; (iii) introduce the basic principles of marketing research and marketing math required to formulate marketing strategy and to plan the elements of the marketing mix; and (iv) improve students’ problem solving and decision-making abilities. Though the module will introduce students to various marketing theories, the emphasis will be on how to apply these theories to solve real-world marketing problems.

The module will use recent articles from the business press, case discussions and in-class examples as means to apply the principles learned during the lectures.

This module employs a combination of teaching methods, including lectures, cases, exercises, and projects. The pedagogical style adopted may vary by instructor.

After taking this module, students should be well prepared to formulate and communicate rigorous and practical solutions to commonly faced marketing problems across industries; and appreciate the role of marketing in an enterprise and its relationship with other functions of business.

Understanding and influencing consumer behaviour is essential to the development of marketing strategies. Most decisions involved in developing an effective marketing mix for a product or service require thorough understanding of the consumers. This module is designed to provide students with a comprehensive coverage of frameworks, concepts, tools, and techniques to understand consumers, with an emphasis on uncovering, generating, and interpreting business-relevant consumer insights. Theories from the related fields such as social sciences, behavioural economics, anthropology, and psychology will be discussed with the overarching goal of understanding the consumers and influencing their behaviour.

This module focuses on the consumer as an individual, starting with the question of who the consumer is, and systematically examining the buying process which a consumer takes from pre-purchase motivations and cognition to post-purchase consumption and satisfaction. Additionally, the nature and importance of consumer heterogeneity, social factors, and cultural differences in consumer behaviour will be emphasized. Specific topics and instructional approaches may vary from instructor to instructor.

By the end of this module, students are expected to have a better understanding of the psyche that goes into a consumer’s blackbox; and how marketing strategies can be effectively developed to tap on this psyche to influence their behaviour.

In today’s modern marketplace, advertising and promotions are fast-moving businesses that are constantly changing. Developing an integrated marketing communications programme is usually a complex and exciting process that involves various players and participants. This module will introduce students to the organisations that create the communications for end products that we experience on a day-to-day basis. Students will learn about the various types of promotional concepts, activities, and the processes that go on in the evolution of a promotional campaign. A range of topics, including the advertising management process, the role and tasks of an agency, setting ad objectives, managing creativity, media planning, direct marketing and sales promotions will be covered. Students will acquaint themselves with current and future advertising and promotion environments and developments as well as the processes that go on behind the scene in the management of promotions.

Students may also be required to develop promotional strategies for real-life businesses and to better understand the importance of creativity and the intricacies of executing promotional plans through hands-on projects. While the module will cover theories in integrated marketing communications, it is generally approached with a practical and applied orientation. Lectures and readings will be supplemented with cases, ad critiques, video clips, and talks. Pedagogical style may vary from instructor to instructor.

This module provides an in-depth appreciation and understanding of the unique challenges inherent in managing and delivering service excellence at a profit. Students will appreciate the differences between services and physical good and hence, draw marketing implications arising from these differences. Students will be introduced to and have the opportunity to work with tools and strategies that address these challenges.

While lecture is the predominant pedagogical tool, students are expected to be active participants. Cases and anecdotes may also be used; although this may vary by instructor.

By the end of this module, students will be exposed to the state-of-the-art in service management thinking and be able to develop a customer service-oriented mindset.

This module is about the marketing of products and the principles of branding; and how they apply to the management of organizations and product portfolios. The premise of branding is also examined together with what it constitutes to marketing within the context of an organization. The objective of this module is to inculcate in students a strategic level of analysis to the issues s/he may face as a brand manager. The topics covered include brand development, brand architecture, brand strategy, new product development and application across key areas including communications, people and organizational development.

A variety of teaching tools may be used such as cases (which give a strategic perspective), simulation as well as real live situations (which will enhance students’ understanding), and readings (that give an idea of the cutting-edge practices). Class discussion is critical to exchange experiences and enhance learning, through local, regional and global perspectives.

Marketing effort, far from being a homogeneous input, is a combination of the 4 Ps. In this module, a game-theoretic perspective is adopted to explore and understand traditional strategic marketing issues and learn how game theory can be applied to such issues as pricing and price promotions; product-development and product-improvement activities; promotional activities, and distribution and channel activities related to the availability of goods and servicing of orders.

Throughout this module, various pedagogies are drawn on to facilitate and enhance our learning objectives. These include the use of classroom games, case analyses, articles, videos as well as a final hands-on group project. Pedagogical tools may vary by instructor.

Upon completion of this module, students will gain an understanding of game theory and learn how to apply game theory to analyse strategic issues, particularly related to marketing. This module is suitable for those with an interest in thinking mathematically.

Pricing is a complex issue. While it is supposed to reflect the strategic steps a company took to bring the product to the consumer and convince him/her to buy, it also reflects what the consumer would get out of the product by paying that price to acquire it. Will there be a match between the two? Perhaps, and perhaps not. This dilemma makes it imperative for a marketer to understand and analyse the factors to arrive at an appropriate pricing strategy. Further, pricing does not operate in vacuum. It has to be married with other elements of the marketing strategy.  Thus, understanding the broader picture of the various elements of pricing, and building a systematic framework on pricing will be discussed in this module.

In today’s competitive business environment, the scarcest and most important asset is customers. Therefore, managing customer relationships and customer experience is critical to the company’s profitability and long-term success. This module looks at Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as an enterprise-wide effort that generates increased loyalty and higher margins. CRM focuses on acquiring, retaining, managing customer churn and winning back dormant customers. It highlights the need to move from merely satisfying customers to building strong bonds with them. It looks at segmentation techniques to ensure that the resources are properly allocated to the customer base.

The aims of this module are to (i) provide students with an understanding of the role and importance of CRM; (ii) provide students with an in-depth appreciation of managing customers, customer equity, and customer satisfaction audit; and (iii) understand through the best practices involving CRM and the tools and skills needed for customer relationship building.

By the end of this module, students are expected to know how to attract and retain profitable customers, what is most important to customers; how to keep current customers happy and loyal; and how to ensure that they do not switch to the competitors.

This module which relates primarily to fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) is designed to train students in the use of market knowledge for day-to-day marketing decisions. It bears strong emphasis on the application of market research and encompasses key marketing concepts, theories and models.

Marketing Analytics is primarily designed for marketing professionals to train them to use market knowledge for day-to-day marketing decisions. It will provide good understanding of many prevalent research techniques and their application.

The module is taught in an application-oriented fashion through lectures, class discussions, and case studies. Students will acquire critical analysis and decision making abilities to prepare them to tackle the marketing and business issues they are likely to confront in a career in marketing.

In almost any company in advanced economies, the process of creating a finished product – and getting it into the hands of an end-consumer – invariably involves multilayered commercial interactions between suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and resellers.

This results in a much larger overall volume of transactions compared to the volume of transactions involving consumers. Business-to-business marketing is thus a critical component in any strategy for driving growth and profitability.

This module is designed to provide students with an understanding of marketing as applied in the context of the business segment (broadly defined to span institutional/commercial entities, to governments.) It incorporates discussions on management strategies to understand, create, and deliver value to the business segment.

Active participation is essential for getting the most out of this module. There will be a heavy emphasis on discussion and project work involving real-life applications, with the objective of developing business leaders with critical analysis and problem-solving abilities.

This module aims to raise the understanding of the significance of Design Thinking to the business sector. Its objectives are to provide (i) insights on the cognitive issues of Design Thinking at the personal level; (ii) a broad review of the practice of Design Thinking as it applies to products with the customer journey in mind; and (iii) an experience of some of the processes and methodologies needed to take a creative idea all the way to market. It also incorporates the latest innovation methodologies on business model canvas and lean launchpad.

The module does these through a series of lectures, case studies, and an “innovation challenge” practicum through design studio. There will also be field visits to firms and consultancy firms active in design thinking and business innovations deployment.

By the end of this module, students will be able to apply the skills of design thinking and business innovations in corporate, entrepreneurial, and consulting settings.

Sales management is an art form based on science. This module systemically introduces sales management from the process and procedure perspective. It helps students develop a clear sales framework that contains account/channel planning, opportunity evaluation, sales team-building, in-depth relationship-building, and sales strategy execution. For those who aim to climb career summit from the sales ground, either starting by joining a MNC as career builder or starting their own business, this module offers practical and useful skills to build a strong foundation for sales management.

This module aims to (i) introduce sales management subject structure and practical methods/skills; (ii) help students understand the selling approach; (iii) provide a framework to understand key aspects of sales management; and (iv) focus on developing a solution-selling mindset to replace a product-selling mindset.

Topics covered include understanding the value proposition, learning how to categorize clients, and adopting appropriate people skills.

The Big Picture is an integrated Framework that helps marketers transform the way they analyse and solve the challenges and opportunities they face in their business.

The framework takes the form of a funnel, where each successive set of decisions brings increased focus to the strategy development and implementation planning process.

These four steps help the student in answering four critical questions:

1. What is the firm’s overall business objective?
2. What are the primary tenets of the firms’ strategy?
3. What is the firm’s executional plan?
4. How will the firm analyse and integrate results?

The digital landscape has changed the way marketers acquire and interact with their customers and community. The rise of search engines, social media, and the mobile revolution changed the landscape that marketers operate in. This course provides an intensive introduction to the new marketing concepts, and the broad spectrum of digital marketing. Topics covered include online customer journey, online market and competitive research, Web analytics and big data, online customer acquisition tools, and customer engagement platforms like social media, mobile, native apps, and emerging channels.

Also covered will be a digital strategy framework where the setting of digital goals and key performance indices (KPIs), multi-channel marketing, and reviewinug returns-on-investment (ROI) of digital marketing investments will be discussed.

As a practice-oriented course, students will appreciate the way digital revolution has changed and shaped customer behaviour; understand the online customer journey; learn how to research market demand, trends and competition in a fast, low-cost, and efficient manner; understand how to integrate acquisition and engagement tools to deliver an efficient digital marketing strategy; and gain a deeper insight into online/offline integration and multi-channel marketing

Behavioral Economics combines economic and psychological principles to explain economic behaviors that violate the rationality assumption and deviate from standard prediction. There are two streams of works in Behavioral Economics: Behavioral Decision Theory (BDT) and Behavioral Game Theory (BGT). BDT explains inconsistent choice behaviors in individual decision making. BGT explains boundedly rational actions in strategic decision making.

The goal of the course is to equip students with the theory and framework to understand the inconsistent choices and boundedly rational actions observed in experiments, to identify inconsistency in real life choices and actions, and to design nudges for behavioral change.