FACULDADE DE ECONOMIA

UNIVERSIDADE NOVA DE LISBOA

2344-Marketing in a Dynamic World

ECTS credit units:7,5

Pre-experience Masters Programs

1st Semester- Academic Year 2010/2011

Instructor: Prof. Luís Filipe Lages

Short Biography:

Luis Filipe Lages (PhD, Warwick) is Associate Professor with “Agregação” at FEUNL. He held(s) visiting positions in several leading schools across the globe, including MIT-Sloan School of Management, Stanford-GSB, LondonBusinessSchool, MIT-EngineeringSchool. He has consultancy experience in both business and governmental forums. His fields of interest are marketing strategy, international marketing, innovation and technology-market transfer.

Contacts: ;

COURSE AIMS

Nowadays, when we talk about students, professionals, customers and markets, we speak in worldwide terms. This opens a huge door of opportunity to people and businesses enabling them to sell their products and services to anybody in virtually any country. This course reveals the way in which we as well as companies are expected to deal with different type of customers and competitors across dynamic global markets. It will be a very practical course which will explore the operational issues that help people and firms to effectively establish a dynamic long-term sustainable market position simultaneously across domestic and global markets. The final goal of this course is very clear: Provide you the mindset as well as the tools to deal with "Constant Change in a Dynamic World". As a warm up see this video:

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

On completion of this course a student should be able to:

A. Knowledge and Understanding about:

  • the value of interacting and working with people with mixed backgrounds from different nationalities
  • the value of the process of technology-market in highly dynamic markets
  • the value of matching product characteristics with stakeholders needs for competitive advantage

B. Subject-Specific Skills:

  • to tackle strategic marketing problems facing industries across markets
  • to deal with the marketing function in modern organizations

C. General Skills:

  • to learn tools and techniques required in a complex and ever changing global context
  • to learn how effectively establish a long-term sustainable market position across dynamic markets

TEACHING AND LEARNING METHODS

There are two classes per week. Each class is of 1h20m. The classes consist of discussions about both the theory and its applications. Classroom participation is expected and required. Through a teaching approach that mixes case studies, short videos, class discussions and presentations, you will learn the marketing theories and concepts with real-life examples. This will help you to develop strategic thinking and to develop relevant leadership and management skills for planning and conducting activities in dynamic markets. More specifically, this course includes short case studies that illustrate the complexities of real-time marketing management and invite students to apply their ideas in practical problem solving. The course uses short videos to present cases and to describe the market context background in which management strategies are developed.

Students are expected to be OPEN-MINDED when participating in this course. By open-minded, I mean to be able to accept that a given relationship in a dynamic market context, say between “A” and“B”, might be positive, negative, or non-significant depending on the context in which the relationship occurs.

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY BEHIND THIS COURSE

Hence … rather than hearing myself all the time , you will learn based on your:
“dramatic presentations” (e.g. by presenting your coursework),
“real experiences” (e.g. visiting, interacting, and interviewing companies/managers)
and “doing the real things” (e.g. by matching practice & theory to solve business problems)”.

ASSESSMENT

The final grade is based on the following components:

Component 1: Individual grade related to the final coursework (50% divided by):

  • 10% - Quality of the synopsis of a scientific article.
  • 30%- Preparation, presentation and defence of the theoretical coursework.
  • 10%- Two opposing arguments (of circa 6 pages) of the other two courseworks.

Component 2: Final exam - 50%

Observations:

  1. Component 2 will only be taken into account if the grade for Component 1 is 8/20 or more.
  2. Although Component 1 concerns group work, the final grade for each individual student can be different from others in the same group, since each individual contribution and work is evaluated. Adjustments of 2 points in the final grade (in either direction) can be made, based on other information available such as participation in class and contribution to the coursework.
  3. The final grade has to be superior to 10, although the minimum requirement for each Component is 8.
  4. In cases where a student has failed a course from the previous term but would like to transfer credits from Component 1 for this term, the professor and gradershould be informed via e-mail before the start of term. The e-mail should include name and number of student, year/term in which the course(s) was completed and the grade received.
  5. The general rules of the University apply in case of academic dishonesty and in any situation not foreseen in the above.

COURSE CONTENT

Main Topics
User-Led Businesses and Marketing in a Dynamic World
Managing Contingency Forces in Dynamic Environments
Strategic Market Planning for Market Growth
Creating Value through Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning
Using Market Research for Competitive Advantage
Bringing Marketing Strategy into Dynamic Markets:
How to create value through product & branding strategy?
How to capture value back through pricing?
How to manage the marketing channels to deliver value?
How to communicate value through marketing communications?
Getting a Career in a Dynamic World

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Please read the following books:

Thomas L. Friedman (2007), “The World is Flat: The Globalised World in the Twenty-First Century”, 2nd ed., Penguin Books

P. Doyle and P. Stern (2006), “Marketing Management and Strategy”, 4th ed, Financial-Times Prentice-Hall

Please see the following film:

Dead Poets Society (“O Clube dos Poetas Mortos”)

Supporting material

Several articles from the Journal of Marketing, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Product Innovation Management and Journal of International Marketing.

W. J. Keegan and M. C. Green (2007),“Global Marketing”,5thed, Pearson Prentice-Hall

Sally Dibb et al. (2006), “Marketing: Concepts and Strategies”, 5thed, Houghton Mifflin (Acad).

Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller (2005), “Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation, and Control”, 12th edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

RESOURCES

A course webpage will be used to disseminate information about the course. Some students like to have in advance the slides supporting the class. However, if I give you the slides in advance, I will be forced to follow them and will not be able to adjust to your rhythm/needs, discuss specific requests, and spend the time with you to discuss critical issues. As such, by providing the slides in advance I will have to follow a “production-oriented approach” (which I do not believe in) rather than a “customised & market-oriented approach”. The selection of the final slides for your class will depend on several factors, such as your specific needs, your requests, my current experiences, time-management, level of interaction, and the topics which I feel the class might be more interested in. In any case, you may download some of the slides that I will be using from (password “intern”). But please note that many of the final slides which I will use (or not) in the class are DIFFERENT and the order they are presented ALWAYS suffer changes. I will also present additional slides, which I cannot provide due to confidentiality reasons. Hence, please take notes during the classes and use later on your own filter to decide which slides are relevant for your personal career and for your coursework.

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