Confused about which section to take? My sections are fitting for all, but best suitable for those with quantitative inclinations. However, as a behavioral economist, the class will be infused with psychological insights taken quantitatively into account. So if you have broad interests – join us!
Course Overview
Marketing is the field concerned with delivering your products and services to your consumers. What do your consumers need? What should you offer? And how to make your products actually sell? To answer these questions, the goals of this course are as follows:
- To provide a framework to think and solve marketing problems. We will look at the four tactical P’s — price, promotion, product, and place (distribution) — through the structural lens of the three C’s — customer, competition, and company with particular focus on the customer.
- To provide a theoretical basis and data-driven techniques for analyzing the success or failure of marketing actions, with a particular focus on making causal inferences.
- To familiarize you with practices that marketing consulting firms typically employ. As a manager, you will be responsible for contracting with external firms who will promise you the world in jargon-filled Powerpoint decks. This class aims to help you sort through jargon, allowing you to make well-informed decisions based on knowing which techniques are applicable given the situation.
- To incorporate, in a disciplined way, the humanity of consumers into the firm’s decision making process.
Marketing differentiates itself from other fields you will study here at Booth in part because of its focus on consumer heterogeneity. We will take seriously the idea that one size does not fit all and that value creation involves understanding and catering to different consumer types. Thus, Marketing Strategy provides a natural complement to your microeconomics and competitive strategy courses.
Because the goal of this class is to help you develop skills for analyzing problems rather than rote memorization of facts and cases, we will often use examples from rapidly evolving industries that present new and interesting challenges.
My class differs from other sections of Marketing Strategy in being more integrative between the standard and behavioral approaches to consumer, and firms, behavior. While the style of the framework we will use is very quantitative and econ-y, my view of consumers is rooted in psychology. When discussing the various topics, we will discuss if, when, and to what extent, behavioral biases and non-rational consumer behavior matters.
A second component that I try to emphasize is the relevance of the framework in “real” decisions. You will investigate and we will discuss together what marketing strategy actions real companies take. I aim to bring as many guest speakers from industry as possible (it will probably be just a few though).
