At the heart of marketing lies a fundamental exchange process, in which firms create and deliver value for customers, and in exchange, receive and capture value from customers. The strategic marketing goal of a firm is to find a sustainable market position that allows the firm to create, deliver and capture more customer value than its competitors.
 
This course relates marketing activities to some of the key strategic decisions that are necessary in running a business: choosing customers, defining and creating value, delivering and appropriating value, and sustaining value against competitors. While the course acknowledges the importance of specific business contexts, it will focus on four key marketing challenges that all firms face: (i) how to manage customer heterogeneity, (ii) how to manage customer dynamics, (iii) how to build sustainable competitive advantage from brand, offering, and relationship equity, and (iv) how to optimally allocate limited financial resources. We will look at these four challenges in an integrated manner, and learn how the answers to a specific challenge help to successfully manage each of the other challenges.
 
In contrast to typical marketing management courses, we will rely on marketing analytics methods that are key to understanding, shaping, and predicting customer behavior, demand and market shares. We will emphasize applications of these methods using real and simulated datasets to the development of competitive marketing strategy.
 
By the end of the course, you will have acquired a certain savvy about developing and evaluating marketing strategy. This does not mean having memorized an arsenal of “rules”.
 
By training your sense of how to use data to understand what makes customers and competitors tick, the course aims to provide you with a competitive advantage: the ability to predict customer and competitor response to marketing action, and hence to create value by making more insightful marketing decisions in many different industries.
 

To attend the course / exercise, registration via e-learning platform OLAT is required. Registration is possible from September 6 to October 1, 2021. The students themselves are responsible for checking the creditability of the course to their course of study.

Direct link to OLAT course:

https://lms.uzh.ch/url/RepositoryEntry/17049190559

Palmatier, Robert W. and Sridhar, Shrihari (2021). Marketing Strategy: Based on First Principles and Data Analytics, Palgrave, second edition