GBUS 729 Marketing

This course provides students with an introduction to consumer behavior and marketing analytics. Its goal is to expose students to difficult marketing issues that both U.S. and foreign companies face. Using cases, technical notes, and a large-scale interactive marketing simulation, the course challenges students to build a set of frameworks that will be useful for analyzing the wants and needs of potential customers, creating products and services that customers and potential customers value, and delivering those products and services to the marketplace at a profit.

Specifically, students will learn how to segment a market effectively and target groups within the broader market for intensive business-development efforts. They will learn how to price a product, both in consumer and business-to-business markets. Integral to the pricing decision will be the effective use of analytical tools to determine product margins, rates of cannibalization across products marketed by the same company, and break-even sales in the face of different price and cost scenarios. Students will also be exposed to basic marketing research and the interpretation of that research, methods for evaluating the efficacy of marketing communications, and methods for developing and evaluating an effective sales force. Students should finish this course with an enterprise-wide perspective of the marketing function and its value within an organization.