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MSc - Advanced Marketing

Marketing Research Methods

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

This module gives students the opportunity to learn about effective and efficient marketing research. Market research, sourcing and sourcing models, methods of evaluation and assessment by underpinned data gathered through a sound de- sign and structure of business research and executed by informed research strategies are essential core elements of the learning achievements.

Based on this learning students will also be guided towards the design of a research project for their dissertation. Students will have to conduct a critical review on various research methods, reflect on advantages and disadvantages of particular research strategies, analyse the tasks involved in the research process, and deploy their understanding of research methods to develop a dissertation research proposal (practice-oriented, applied research) with tutors' support.

Learning Outcomes

Students should be able to:

  • Show their understanding of the need for a defensible fit between the nature of practice-oriented problems in marketing research and methods of inquiry de- signed to address those problems and of means for securing that fit
  • Be able to appraise alternating designs for addressing marketing issues, mind- ful of central distinctions in data collection, analysis & reporting
  • Be capable of applying tests of quality, appropriateness and sensitivity to the information needs of differing stakeholders to different research proposals and designs
  • Demonstrate an awareness of research programs and their potential impact on the reception afforded to research efforts

Set Texts

  • Malhotra, N., Birks, D. and Wills, P. 2012. Marketing Research: An Applied Approach. London: Pearson Education.