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MSc - Advanced Marketing

Customer-centric Marketing: Consumer Culture Theory, Tribalism and the Ecosystem

Marketing is not just a profession; it is an art, too. Marketing combines creative and communicative skills and has strong roots in critical strategic and analytical thinking at the same time. This makes marketing interesting, but also complex.

The last two decades have changed marketing tasks significantly and marketers need to be up-to-date with their capabilities and knowledge. Consumers have become a market power. Concepts such as post-modern consumers, tribalism, but especially the technologisation of the marketing context have shaped a new and very different marketing agenda, which is addressed in the individual modules. In addition to these direct requirements the increasing request for respecting ethics and the environment, two of the attributes at the core of the request for sustainable (marketing) management, are permanently embedded in the taught content. This awareness adds to the Degree's objectives to offer students the highest standards in marketing knowledge.

The MSc - Advanced Marketing provides students with the latest knowledge on marketing for the physical place, e- and mobile marketing.

Degree Programme Objectives

The marketing discipline has seen most significant changes in the last two decades, but has not been fully able to meet these in the same speed. The mission of the course is to embrace the radical changes and to adopt the new market(ing) realities consequentially. This leads to a distanced and critical consideration contrasting old theory with new approaches, which are expected to have more power and relevance for students and graduates, who have to work and manage the new complexities.

The programme is designed and structured to build a sound understanding of the key areas of strategic, tactical and function-oriented best practice in the complex and challenging environment of global markets in the 21st century. Its vision is to provide the necessary backgrounds and future-oriented paths for managers and students, who are seeking their careers in the marketing function.

Key marketing skills and specific tools and techniques are taught, which support students in their management roles to improve the performance of both their organisations and employees in turbulent and hyper-competitive marketplaces. The course’s objective is to enable students of the MSc - Advanced Marketing to apply their knowledge gained to the specific market(ing) situations of organisations.

Benefits

Shared aims unite the modules in the MSc - Advanced Marketing. These common aims are:

Understand current practices and issues in Marketing and to apply this knowledge and understanding in practical terms.
Apply effectively analytical and critical evaluation skills.
Undertake the formulation and apply problem-solving skills for all levels of Marketing.
Critically understand the various philosophies and methods of research and selection of the most appropriate application to solve Marketing’s strategic, tactical and operational problems.
To develop the reflective manager engaged in a lifelong cycle of learning, who respects corporate responsibility and sustainability by high standards of moral actions and ethical behaviour.

Programme Content

Introduction

Loyalty is little more than a myth, customers and consumers have hyper-choice. Today marketing is faced with essential challenges in which turning away from an organisation-centric perspective is essential. As brands "belong to consumers", customers coordinate their needs and orientation on very different criteria than those organisations most times assume.

Customer-centric business models and their marketing have raised a very different type of organisations permanently outperforming traditional ones. What may have started with Faith Popcorn's concept of clanning in 1998, has become a strong movement. French SNCF has addressed the post-modern consumer by a most successful campaign based on tribalism. The global Consumer Culture Theory group of researchers comes to very different findings on how consumers make purchasing decisions than traditional marketing believes and technologisa- tion has a wide and broad impact on all marketing efforts, much beyond social networks.

This module addresses the post-modern consumer behaviour and condenses the first discussion on the ecosystem started in the prior module. Its purpose is to introduce students to those marketing drivers, which become increasingly signifi- cant. Drivers, which the very different behaviour the so-called Digital Natives pre- sent in professional and private purchasing.

Learning Outcomes

Students should be able to:

Apply the Consumer Culture Theory and concepts like tribalism to design and formulate customer-centred marketing strategies in hyper-choice mar- kets
Understand the impact of the technologisation of the market environment and adapt organisational marketing by an appropriate tactical choice
Identify and distinguish various extrinsic drivers for purchasing decisions within concepts like clanning and tribalism
Become a leading and guiding marketing force to transform organisations and facilitate the necessary change implementation; and situate practices of sustainable leadership within these new ideas of personal action

Set Texts

Pen~alosa, L., Toulouse, N. and Visconti, L.M. 2012. Marketing Management: A Cultural Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge.
Ekstro¨m, K. and Glans, K. 2012: Beyond the Consumption Bubble. 2nd ed Abing- don: Routledge.
Research papers from academic journals either published on the Course Website before the module start or disseminated by the lecturer during the module.