Marketing Strategy
What We Cover
 Donald R. Lehmann George E. Warren Professor of Business |
This course emphasizes the role of marketing in creating value for customers, which in turn leads to value for other stakeholders in a firm (e.g., owners, shareholders, employees, and society at large). It also covers such issues as value of products, customers and brands, methods for analyzing customers and competitors, customer segmentation, product positioning and the role of new technology.
Why It Matters
Marketing has evolved to have a much more customer-centric focus. Our emphasis on value to the customer, customer satisfaction and customer lifetime value suggest it is not just good to provide quality goods and services to customers, but good business sense as well.
What Students Learn
Tradeoffs exist when considering what to sell, how to sell it, who to sell it to and what customers do with it once they have it. Truth in advertising, use of customer information, and pricing and price discrimination (e.g., on the basis of ability to pay for pharmaceuticals) are all issues of how to (or not to) sell. The central concepts of segmentation and targeting directly address the question of who to sell to. Thus, almost all marketing decisions have a tradeoff associated with them. Our job is to make sure students are aware of the tradeoffs being made in terms of impact on not only the business but on a broader set of stakeholders as well.