Description of the Course:
This course views marketing as both a general management responsibility and an orientation of an organization. Relatively less attention will be given to the specific activities of the marketing department, sales group, or advertising function in implementing strategic decisions.
This course will take the viewpoint of the general manager and the senior marketing executive to address the issues of:
- Formulating segmentation and focus strategies
- Understanding, attracting and keeping valuable customers
- Positioning the business to achieve an advantage over competitors
- Identifying and exploiting growth opportunities
- Allocating resources across businesses and segments
- Managing the channels for gaining access to the served markets
- Aligning the organization to changing market requirements.

Course Objectives, Expectations:
Your basic objective is to develop your own understanding and management skills. Specifically, this course will attempt to help you develop your knowledge and skills in the application of advanced frameworks, concepts, and methods for making strategic choices at the business unit level. At the end of the course, you should have a working knowledge of the approaches that organizations use to resolve market strategy issues.

Course Outline:
Topic1: Achieving competitive advantage
Topic2: Implementing marketing-mix strategies
Topic3: Managing marketing efforts

The Business College has a mission and objectives aimed at improving a variety of skills among our MBA students. These skills plus a few others include:
• Communication skills. In terms of written reports, a good report (1) covers the material of interest adequately, (2) differentiates between opinion, facts, empirical evidence, etc., (3) is accurate, and (4) is clear
• Project management skills, meaning your ability to develop, organize, and conduct your own project from start to end.
• Team work skills, reflected by team work and how you perform as a member of the team.
• Technology skills, e.g., working with data files, software programs, etc.