Marketing, Leadership
and Advanced Strategy

This session reviews how marketing is most usefully conceptualized as an overarching philosophy that should permeate the whole organization. Following topics will be addressed:

• Overcoming Resistance to Marketing and addressing Common Misconceptions
• Redefining Customer-centricity
• Building on Brand and Customer Equities

The “STP” process (segmentation, targeting and positioning) lies at the heart of marketing strategizing. As management thinker Ted Levitt once said: “If you are not thinking segments, you are not thinking”. This session will go over these steps to clarify pitfalls and help students realize that the STP process is both art and science. During this session, we will:

•  Study the different segmentation schemes
•  Differentiate between tactical and strategic positioning
•  Examine breakaway positioning strategies

Brands are essential to win the consumer’s heart and brain, and are more and more becoming an integrated part of any sound marketing strategy. In this session, we will:

• Understand the dynamics of “Power Brands”, capable of owning a non-substitutable place in consumers’ hearts and minds.
• Understand the new challenges and opportunities for brands in a digitally connected world, where newcomers can emerge faster.
• Cover the concept of brand architecture looking at different corporate approaches to manage a portfolio of brands.

Major global luxury brands are capable of building an irresistible appeal by leveraging creation and communication strategies that challenge conventional marketing wisdom. We’ll look at how these techniques are harnessed by non-luxury goods, such as Apple, Nespresso and Mini, and will answer the following questions:

• What are the underlying emotional dynamics of prestige purchases that we should focus on?
• How can you create goods and services that will generate immediate luxury appeal while conveying a feeling of timeless value?
• How can you build a prestige status for a brand through communication, so it can stand above its competitors’ crowd?

Pricing is a topic that, both in management practice and in a lot of marketing course curricula, typically receives little attention. Yet studies by consulting agencies have shown that better pricing is actually the single most promising driver for profit.

Strategic pricing management introduces frameworks, approaches, and ideas to solve the most pressing contemporary pricing problems. The course takes a multi-disciplinary approach, combining insights from marketing, economics and psychology.

Formulating and implementing corporate strategy is one of the critical responsibilities of senior management. All too often though, the analysis and evaluation of such corporate strategy decisions get obscured by the widespread confusion between the dimensions along which firms can expand – or focus – their activities and the alternative modes of growth that are available to them.

This session will allow us to identify what it takes to “think strategically” in a sound way and, more importantly, how an appropriate strategy making process can be implemented within top management teams.

The main objective of the course is to provide students with a complete understanding of the whole process of a deal in mergers and acquisitions, covering:

• The strategic rationale for mergers and acquisitions (scale economies, synergies with existing businesses, shareholder value creation).
• The process of financial evaluation.
• The essential elements of the negotiation phase including: bidding strategies, due diligence, contract negotiation, financing packages, etc.
• The challenges of post-merger integration.