Marketing Strategy and Innovation

Marketing Strategy and Innovation

1. 2016 Entry
2. 2017 Entry

• Overview
• Course content
• Teaching staff
• Entry requirements
• Tuition fees and term dates
• Career opportunities
• News and events

Overview

You are keen on a career in marketing? Whether you are a fresh graduate or have gained some work experience already, the MSc in Marketing Strategy & Innovation is the course for you to acquire the most up-to-date knowledge and skills for starting a career as a marketing strategist, brand manager, innovation manager, or key account manager in a leading global firm. Or you can work as a marketing consultant or advertising creative. If you are considering starting your own business, our MSc in Marketing Strategy and Innovation provides you with the knowledge and skills to promote your product or service professionally.

Your fellow students will be smart and motivated people from around the world, with graduate degrees in arts, business, engineering, humanities, medicine, etc. – with and without some marketing experience. During your time together, you will learn what it needs to become leading marketers who skillfully analyse customers, markets, and social trends, invent new and manage existing brands, run on and offline media campaigns, and thus leverage the success of commercial and non-commercial organizations. When it comes to move on after the year at Cass, the credibility of you having a degree from our world-leading business school will be a powerful drop of fuel to get your career started.

What makes a Great Marketer?

Facts and figures

Intake: September only
Duration: 12 months full-time
Fees: £23,000 (full-time)
Financial support: Please see our Scholarships page
Application deadline: None - rolling admissions
Applications: Now open

Why Marketing Strategy & Innovation?

There are many great products and services out there. But if potential buyers do not know about them, these offerings will not be bought. Wouldn’t you agree that the most successful companies are those who create products that customers love, and create awareness about them? Would you like to be able to get people excited about the products, services, or ideas that you want to promote?

If you answer yes to the above questions, you have understand the importance of marketing and innovation. You understand that the marketers and innovators are those who create new products, services, and ideas, get people excited about them, and thus help to fulfill customer needs from having something healthy to eat, through outfitting their homes, to giving to a cause and finding a partner online.

And its not just about products or services. It is also about you! When you are in the lookout for a job, you become a product in the job market. And when you are searching for a person to spend you life with, you are competing in a dating market.

So, aren’t you a marketer already, somehow? Managing yourself as a brand indeed requires some marekting skill, but managing brands in professional organizations like Apple, AirBnB, or Amazon requires a set of very specific skills and expert knowledge that you can most efficiently acquire from experts. Join us at Cass Business School for the MSc in Marketing Strategy & Innovation and that’s what you’ll get!

Is this course right for you?

You hold a bachelor degree from fields such as arts, business, medicine, music, sociology, or even rocket science with none or only a few marketing modules? Whether you want to steer your career into marketing, start your own business, take over your family’s company, or just learn more about how to innovate new products and services and create buzz and excitement around them, this course is right for you.

Students who enroll in this program are from all around the world, typically in their 20s, and have the ability to lead high level conversations in English language. If you are excited to make friends with other brilliant individuals that are keen to learn more about marketing, and if you are a pro-active, curious, creative person, this course is definitely for you.

However, this course is NOT right for you if you have already studied an undergraduate course with a marketing specialisation, or are looking for a degree that deepens your advanced marketing knowledge with a specialised course. In these cases, our MBA programs may be more suitable for you.

Is Cass Business School the right school for you?

There are five elements to think about when choosing your business school:

1. The reputation of the institution: A school with a good reputation gives you the best career opportunities and gets you access to an exclusive network of high-achieving graduates. Cass ranks among a group of only 1% of all business schools worldwide with triple accreditation from AMBA, EQUIS and AACSB. It gives you the opportunity to achieve something extraordinary.
2. The reputation of the people you will be learning from: This is important because when you learn from the best, you can become the best. At Cass you will learn from lecturers who not only produce world-class research, but who have also worked for some of the best companies in the world. In addition, you will get lots of opportunities to learn from marketers that visit our classrooms from companies such as Barclays, Colgate, Interbrand, Pepsi, Unilever, Visa, and many more.
3. The course content: If you study the right and most up-to-date subjects at University, you will get yourself a head start in making a career in marketing. When studying our MSc in Marketing Strategy & Innovation, you’ll be exposed to the foundations of marketing and the right strategies that work in today’s economy. You will directly apply what you have learned in class to real marketing problems. So when you graduate you will be able to contribute right away to important marketing projects, or you can do your own publicity and promotion and get people excited about your product or cause.
4. Proximity. Being close to potential future employers can accelerate your career. Being close to where things happen gives you an idea of what’s coming next. Cass is located on the doorstep of the City of London, one of the most exciting and dynamic cities in the world. This location offers you access to the great players in the financial industry, leading consumer goods companies, the hottest IT start-ups, and many other thriving businesses. So, when you will have finished the course, you will already have built your own network of contacts that you can draw upon to help with your job search.
5. Your employability. Your reputation as a “product” is key to propel you to the right job. Having studied the MSc in Marketing Strategy & Innovation at Cass adds a powerful line to your CV. The great majority of our MSc graduates get the job they want within 6 months of graduation.

Because of these five (and many other) good reasons, Cass attracts high caliber students from across the world. And we invite you to become part of the Cass community!

Ok, this is right for me! But what do I study?

The MSc in Marketing Strategy & Innovation is about marketing AND innovation. So when you graduate you know how to INNOVATE with new products, services and ideas, and you will know how to best position these offerings in the market of your choice, and to create excitement among the right customers. Becoming a marketing STRATEGIST means that you won’t spend much time using Photoshop and designing ads or brochures, but spend most of your time analyzing markets, understanding customers and competitors, and creating the strategies behind innovative products and advertisements.

The MSc in Marketing Strategy & Innovation course provides you with a sound understanding of the principles and state-of-the art practices of marketing, including:

• Creativity, Innovation and Design
• Brand Management
• Advertising
• Digital Marketing and Social Media
• Segmentation and Targeting
• Market and Consumer Research

These concepts are brought to life through interactive lectures and case discussions with world-class academics, and guest lectures from leading London companies. For example, in term one you will work on a marketing plan for the introduction of a new product in the UK. In term two, you will undertake an integrated innovation project, putting your business idea out there and to the test. You will also play a marketing strategy simulation game that will enable you to see how all the different marketing decision you would have to take as a marketing manager play out in a competitive environment.

Because marketing is changing so quickly, you’ll always find new materials and extra-curricular activities that ensure you are equipped with the most recent knowledge and tools. This year, for example, we ran our first Fashion Brand Management elective and staged a two day video filming and cutting workshop.

Find out more Information Sessions

We hold a number of on-campus Information Sessions each year. The next session will be in the autumn of 2016. The date will be published here as soon as it is set.

Individual appointments

If you would like to arrange an individual appointment to discuss this course or have any questions please email Mrs Mahshid Fazaeli

Course content

Marketing is a fast moving field. Therefore, the skills and knowledge that you will acquire on the MSc in Marketing Strategy and Innovation course are continuously updated to include the latest theoretical developments (some of them authored by our very own lecturers) and the newest practical developments.

Consequently, there will be changes to the content and titles of the modules below. Electives are also frequently added or deleted (if they have become obsolete). Some electives in term three provide opportunities to study abroad.

Course Structure Term 1 Marketing Fundamentals

The aim of this module is to provide you with a sound understanding of the principles of marketing. In a nutshell, understanding marketing comes down to understanding your customers.

This module assumes no previous knowledge of marketing and will give you an overview of the basic marketing planning process including segmentation, branding, pricing, distribution, and promotion. These concepts are brought to life though interactive lectures and industry guest speakers. In addition, you will practically apply marketing theory in two ways.

• First, you will learn to apply theory to solve case studies.
• Second, you will work on a marketing plan for a real-life product throughout the course.

Marketing Strategy & Practice

The objective of the course is to enhance skills in strategic thinking in marketing and developing and presenting marketing plans. This will specifically require forming objectives, situation (SWOT) analysis, market research and forecasting, target market selection, market mix strategy formation, marketing tactics development, and control procedure formulation.

In addition, you will practically apply marketing theory. You will take part in a business simulation. In this simulated world, you and your team have been recruited as Marketing Managers for a division of a large diversified firm. Marketing strategy is your main area of responsibility, but you will also be concerned with financial matters, production planning, and R&D. You will have to integrate these various dimensions of business strategy into a long-term perspective in order to gain an edge on the competition. At the end, we can see how your decisions have affected your market share, your profitability, and your share price.

Creativity. Innovation. Design

Since design thinking is the new mantra in organisations, this course equips you with the conceptual and practical skills to enhance opportunity spotting and problem solving through creativity techniques, innovation processes and design thinking. Design is all about making the product or service you deliver useful, usable, efficient, effective and desirable.

You will get an understanding of the role of design via a series of activities and exercises in which you and your design team apply different creativity techniques to create your own new product and show what good design is and how firms can be better at design.

Essentials of Accounting & Finance

Regardless of your eventual job title or function, a sound understanding of monetary flows and financials within an organisation is important. This module provides an overview of the core principles of financial reporting and managerial accounting. There will be an emphasis on how financial statements are compiled and how they should be interpreted. In addition, you will also get a flavour of key areas for consideration when making investment decisions.

You will be introduced to the key concepts and frameworks via a series of in-class lectures. To apply this knowledge, you will then attend a number of PC-lab based sessions, where you will work on realistic accounting issues and financial statements.

Customer Insight & Market Research

This module introduces you to the techniques and processes of understanding markets and gaining consumer insights. The focus of this course will be on both quantitative, qualitative and interpretative approaches to studying markets and consumers and their value for innovations and marketing strategy.

This module also provides methodological tools that are fundamental to craft and management of research projects based on empirical (quantitative or qualitative) data. You will learn about traditional quantitative methods, such as surveys and field experiments, and more qualitative approaches, such as ethnography, interviews, focus groups, etc. The aim is to enable you to evaluate and buy market research from clients, and be able to understand and use research output for solving marketing problems.

Term 2

Across the term two modules in Consumer Behaviour, Brand Management and Communication Strategies and Digital Marketing & Social Media, Cass MSc in Marketing Strategy and Innovation students crowdfund an idea, start-up business, or social cause in 30 days, therein integrating learning and achieving a tangible outcome.

See what the class of 2014/15 accomplished!

Analytical Methods for Marketing

This module introduces some principal quantitative methods for analysing data related to various aspects of running a business. In many instances, the application of quantitative methods may improve the quality of business decisions, by grounding those decisions in analyses of available data rather than the gut feelings or preferences of decision makers.

The goal of the course is to familiarize students with the fundamentals Analytical Methods for answering marketing research questions. The module involves developing research questions, analyzing data and drawing inferences, with a view to making better marketing decisions. This module will introduce students to several key descriptive and inferential statistical methods and it provides a range of tools necessary to analyse data within the context of marketing-related questions.

Consumer Behaviour

You will learn why we behave the way we do as consumers because understanding your customer is at the core of marketing strategy. You will cover:

• how consumers react to marketing promotions and advertisements
• how they make choices in the supermarket between competitor brands or for fashion and luxury brands
• why they relate to retro design
• how they learn about your products and adopt innovations
• how they make decisions in groups and families
• how do hipsters differ from yuppies
• what about the luxury Chinese consumers

Via a series of lectures, case studies and in-class activities, you will be introduced to foundational psychological, sociological and cultural theories to understand behavior of individuals in the market. The goal to help you understand how to segment and target your market, and then, how to relate and foster a desirable behavior from your customers.

Brand Management & Communication

When you work as a marketer, your "brand" will be the focal point of all your thoughts and actions. Why? Because the brand gives the entire organisation purpose and direction. The brand guides your product and pricing decisions, store designs, advertising narratives, and many other decisions. You may think of a brand as a particular kind of person that behaves in certain ways and with whom customers build certain types of relationships.

In this course you will learn what brands are, how they work, and how to study and nurture them - because in digital times, brands cannot really be "managed" (even though our course title suggests so). You will take on practical branding challenges from London-based companies, and learn the most relevant approaches for market analysis, branding strategy, agency relations, media planning, and communication effectiveness measurement.

Digital Marketing & Social Media

Does the term "Facebook" sound familiar? Do you expect to use a mobile phone or the Internet in the future? Of course you do, and so do over 1 billion consumers globally - which is why this course is relevant for your future career in marketing.

In this course, you will explore digital marketing and social media alongside the innovative companies of Tech City located just outside Cass' front doors. Using real world examples and collaborative projects, you will learn about the theory and practice of digital marketing and social media that will enable you to execute social media branding, and be armed with the tools to make decisions about if, when and how to devise and execute a digital marketing strategy.

Term 3

All students complete two core modules (Product Innovation Management and Business Sustainability) in term three. They can then choose to take either three electives* or a Business Research Project.

Core Module 1: Product Innovation Management

This course teaches you that without continuously developing new and improved products organisations will be left behind by the market. You will see why product development is a risky business and why many new products fail as well as discuss the importance of innovation and the main issues in managing product development processes.

Through the use of practical exercise you will gain an understanding of effective ways to come up new product ideas, to test market...