Flexible MBA Specialization in Marketing
Add a specialization in marketing.
The digital economy has entered a new era of unprecedented challenges and opportunities for marketers to engage with consumers in real-time, requiring marketers to equip themselves with new marketing skills and practices. Whether starting your own business, helping an established company to serve consumers or create a new market, or taking a marketing job in an entrepreneurial company, you need to routinely engage in the act of addressing customer needs and creating market.
The Marketing specialization is designed to meet the demands of professionals in the changing field of marketing. The curriculum provides students with a strong foundation in marketing knowledge as well as skills in analytics. Most courses have a strong “hands on” component with in-class examples and group projects. Students are supplied with cutting-edge marketing techniques to identify, understand, and cultivate relationships with customers in the digital environment. This program also equips both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs who have a passion for innovation and business. Completing this specialization should enable you to use an unusually deep reservoir of market insights and successfully build your business and marketing operations.
Marketing curriculum highlights
Required courses to earn the specialization
BU.420.710 Consumer Behavior (2 Credits)
This course provides you with a solid foundation in consumer decision making based on theoretical and empirical findings from the fields of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Topics include consumers’ knowledge and involvement, attention, comprehension, learning, attitude, and purchase intention. Emphasis on cognitive learning, social influence and persuasion, and behavioral science provides an overview of the various methods used to drive behavioral change and social impact in the marketing of products, services and social issues. Also explored is the practical impact of consumer behavior analysis on marketing mix strategies, market segmentation/positioning, brand loyalty, persuasion process, and promotion.
BU.450.710 Marketing Strategy (2 Credits)
This course provides an in-depth understanding of marketing strategy. It is designed to help students experience the role of senior business executives in formulating, implementing, and evaluating marketing strategies for a variety of complex, real-world business scenarios. Students will analyze and learn the key factors underlying the successful and lackluster marketing strategies of both major corporations and smaller firms across different industries, across different tiers of brands and products (luxury versus mass-market), and across the globe. Topics covered include industry and market analyses, dynamics of competition, value creation, branding, segmentation, targeting, positioning, product development, pricing, distribution, and promotion. Through case analyses, in-class discussions, course assignments, and a research project, students will develop skills in devising, executing, and evaluating marketing strategies, as well as working in teams on complex business projects.
Electives (must take at least three to earn the Marketing specialization)
BU.420.730 Advanced Behavioral Marketing (2 Credits)
From determining consumer needs to ensuring customer satisfaction, marketing begins and ends with the consumer. In this advanced behavioral marketing course, explore classic as well as the most recent scientific research in marketing, psychology, and behavioral economics on judgment and decision making. Readings include primary empirical research articles, business journal articles, and research reviews. Develop your ability to understand and influence what people want, how people decide what and when to buy, and whether people will be satisfied or dissatisfied with their decisions. These psychological insights not only are particularly useful for marketing management decision making such as target marketing, brand positioning, and marketing communication, but also shed light on common decision biases beyond marketing. In addition, examine the methodology of behavioral research to build the tools you will need to interpret scientific findings and base decisions on them.
BU.430.710 Branding and Marketing Communications (2 Credits)
A brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, or design — or a combination of these — intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers, and to differentiate those of the competition. The essence of formulating competitive strategy is relating a brand to its environment. Although the relevant environment is very broad, encompassing social and economic forces, the key aspect of the brand’s environment is the industry (or industries) in which it competes. Therefore, the goal of competitive strategy for a brand is to find a position in the industry where the brand can articulate a compelling value proposition, defend itself against competitive forces, and leverage communication resources to sell the brand message and build brand equity. In this course, examine how a favorable brand and memorable brand experiences can influence a firm’s ability to withstand competitive pressures and thrive in dynamic market conditions. Study brand management from the consumer perspective to highlight the importance of customer perceptions in bringing brands to life and the role of brand knowledge in building brand equity. Become acquainted with cutting-edge frameworks, concepts, and tools that have been adopted across industries and around the globe to build lucrative brand franchises. And consider the role of marketing communication vehicles and platforms in effective brand management.
BU.460.710 Business-to-Business Marketing and Channel Strategy (2 Credits)
This course provides a managerial introduction to the strategic and tactical aspects of business marketing decisions and marketing channel strategy. Examine the strategic concepts and tools that guide market selection, successful differentiation in business markets, and supply chain management. A mixture of lectures, discussions, cases, videos, and readings are used to examine how product and service decisions are designed to deliver the B2B value proposition, how pricing captures customer value, how value is communicated to and among customers, and how marketing channels are used to make this value accessible to target customers. Compare and contrast how the strategic and tactical processes of developing and managing value-generating relationships differ between B2B and B2C markets. You will also gain understanding of how to manage channel power, conflict, and relationships.
BU.450.760 Customer Analytics (2 Credits)
Immerse yourself in the modern practice of customer analytics. And learn how marketers and business analysts can improve decision making by leveraging scientific approaches in the analysis of big data. Leading analytical techniques and data structures are illustrated in the context of their most prominent applications – for example, predicting customer responses to marketing campaigns and managing customer churn. The class has a strong hands-on component, enabled by several in-class examples and group assignments (implemented on Microsoft Excel and the statistical language “R”). You are not expected to become expert programmers or statisticians, but you will acquire basic skills and knowledge to orchestrate an effective analytics strategy.
BU.420.720 Customer Relationship Management (2 Credits)
You will investigate the critical role and impact that customer relationship management (CRM) plays in marketing and business decision making. Topics include CRM history and evolution, database marketing, big data, customer lifetime value, predictive modeling, analytics, key performance indicators (KPIs), multichannel customer management, and CRM platform systems. Course content begins with the definition and overview of CRM, and then proceeds to detail the evolutionary trend from database management to the current use of big data and analytics in the multichannel environment. You will learn how to leverage data to quantify marketing results, forecast marketing goals, and realize marketing objectives. The course in divided into three sections: customer centricity and data evolution, leveraging and quantifying data, and CRM management.
BU.460.700 Integrated Digital Marketing (2 Credits)
Integrated Digital Marketing is designed to give you an understanding of the digital marketing environment and how it functions. Exploring the complexities and nuances of the digital world, you will gain the foundational skill sets that translate into business value. The course will cover a wide spectrum of topics, including the history of the Internet, new and emerging digital trends, website design and development best practices, digital marketing campaign design, digital analytics, channel decision making, e-marketing research, digital positioning and branding, social network management, and digital messaging/creative best practices. Lectures, readings, case discussions, and project assignments will offer perspectives on both digital agency management and the end-user experience. Timely case studies, relevant text materials, digital marketing tools, and group projects are used to augment the lectures and gain hands-on experience in the digital space.
BU.410.601 Marketing Research (2 Credits)
This course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, processes, and techniques in marketing research. The goal is to enable students to apply these tools to solve business problems and to differentiate good research from bad. The topics in this course cover the entire process from defining research problems and selecting appropriate research designs and research methods to conducting data analysis to making strategic recommendations. The course will also build on the foundations of statistics and introduce more advanced statistical tools relevant to marketing decision making.
BU.460.730 New Product Development (2 Credits)
While developing new products and services is vital to the growth of any company, it is also one of the most risky business decisions. This course examines the strategies and processes used by leading companies for successful new product development. It starts by identifying consumers' pain points, then practical techniques are introduced to navigate the processes of ideation, market analysis, new product development, and commercialization. Real-world examples are presented to showcase the applications of these concepts and techniques.
BU.430.720 Pricing Analysis (2 Credits)
Pricing is one of the most important and least understood business decisions. This course aims to equip students with proven concepts, techniques, and frameworks for assessing and formulating pricing strategies. The objective is to prepare you to address strategic and tactical pricing issues and identifying profit-boosting changes in pricing practices across a range of professional contexts — as product/service managers, business unit managers, management consultants, entrepreneurs, and merger and acquisition advisors.
BU.450.740 Retail Analytics (2 Credits)
The retail and service sector is the largest of all economic activities and evolving rapidly in the age of big data and Artificial Intelligence. This course will leverage data-driven tools and theoretical models to analyze decisions of retail firms. We will cover a wide range of topics in strategic decisions in retailing: pricing, location, franchising, and omni-channel retailing. Using the real data in retailing, we will demonstrate and implement a wide range of statistical methods in econometrics and machine learning: single and multi-variate linear regressions, logistic regressions, classification trees, random forest, and multi-layer neural network. The focus is on predicting the effects of marketing decisions on profitability, although we will touch on causality as well. This class is practical and hands-on. All strategic decisions in business require a quantitative assessment of cause and effect. Each week we will introduce a new data set and data-driven tool that is valuable in the context of data scientists in retailing. You will learn how to perform convincing data analyses to answer specific questions. We will use R and ArcGIS for analyzing data. We do not assume that you have used R or ArcGIS, software for statistical and geographical analyses, respectively, in a previous class. For potential overlaps with other courses, we will cover them at a faster pace and emphasize techniques that are not covered in other courses.
BU.430.740 Sales Force Management (2 Credits)
Sales is changing rapidly. In 2011, customers completed 57% of the buying process before engaging a sales professional. Today, this proportion has passed 70%. In the face of well informed and digital-enabled customers, it is critical to engage them and to lead the sales process both during the 70% portion (i.e., digital-world sales process), and the 30% portion (i.e., physical-world sales process). A modern and well-staffed sales function and full knowledge of sales force management thus is vital for business success. This course takes a close examination into sales force management strategies with a hands-on approach through simulation, role playing, case studies, readings, and interaction with marketing professionals who are engaged in the dynamics of modern sales force management.
BU.450.765 Social Media Analytics (2 Credits)
The rapid growth of social media has given mass consumers a powerful tool to create knowledge and propagate opinions. At the same time, social media has created an unprecedented opportunity for companies to engage in real-time interactions with consumers. In addition, the size and richness of social media data have provided companies an unusually deep reservoir of consumer insight to transform their business and marketing operations. The social media analytics course will enable students to grasp the analytics tools to leverage social media data. The course will introduce tools such as engagement analytics, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, social network analysis, identification of influencers, and evaluation of social media strategy. It will involve many hands-on exercises.
BU.450.750 Strategic Market Intelligence (2 Credits)
This course is focused on understanding advanced issues in marketing strategy and processes that determine marketing competitiveness in dynamic consumer and organizational markets. Learn to anticipate your competitors’ next marketing moves and incorporate them when setting your own marketing strategies. You will learn to apply game-theoretic tools in various marketing contexts to understand the strategic implications of your competitors’ as well as your own marketing decisions. And learn the strategies to make effective decisions when lacking important information and facing an uncertain market environment.