Marketing Track

This course draws on a mix of concepts from economics, strategy, and technology to frame and understand issues relating to the management of digital products, services, and platforms. It is targeted at students who wish to pursue product management or similar roles in technology firms, or in firms that invest in technology companies. The course focuses on the interconnections between technology, business models, and user experience. Topics covered include the economics of digital products, innovation, platform architecture, design, monetization, and growth.

This course covers the emerging field of business analytics (BA) or ‘data mining’ and expands and develops the students’ analytical tool kit in analyzing massive data sets. Using case studies and hands-on data sets, students will learn advanced data query techniques, data cleaning and organization, explore various machine learning techniques including supervised and unsupervised classification schemes, text classification, clustering techniques as well as predictive analytics. Students will gain hands-on experience with a variety of software tools, including SQL, SAS, R, Tableau, and Weka – an open source platform for data mining.

The rise of social media has empowered customers in an unprecedented way. They are well connected with each other through platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and they can easily express and distribute their comments, criticisms, or endorsements publicly to large audiences in real time. This fundamental media revolution not only forces companies to actively manage their presence and engage with customers on social media platforms but also offers them a golden opportunity to extract intelligence from the vast amount of unstructured data. Technology and strategies are increasingly intertwined in this new frontier of innovation and competition. 

This course draws on a unique blend of social media strategies and the rapidly evolving information technologies supporting these strategies. We will discuss issues related to the monitoring and analyzing of social media for companies in different industries. The learning objectives of this course include: (1) gaining a deeper understanding of social media and its implications in the business world; (2) becoming comfortable with text data; and (3) being able to understand and apply several commonly used methods to analyze text data.

This course examines the major issues involved in marketing on the Internet. Among the topics studied are: new product opportunities on the Internet; the changed role of advertising; the Internet as a two-way communication medium with consumers; targeting individual consumers; word-of-mouth among consumers on the Internet; the Internet as a distribution channel; and marketing research on the Internet.

The focus of ENT 423 is learning how to prepare an effective business plan that will communicate the inherent value of the concept. Among the critical issues that will be addressed are: competitive conditions and industry trends, sustainable competitive advantages, management team, marketing plan, financial plan, exit possibilities, franchising, legal entities. The approach used is appropriate for start-ups and for corporate venturing. It is also suitable for both profit and for not-for-profit organizations. Also included is a social entrepreneurship module. At the same time plans are prepared, other entrepreneurial issues are studied, such as assembly resources, launching and building new ventures and harvesting results. Lectures, cases and guest speakers are utilized. The speakers will address a range of new venture topics from the development of management teams, marketing, finance, venture capitalists and legal issues. The completion of a business plan for a proposed new venture is required.

The course is subtitled “Bargaining for Value” because the notion of “bargaining” implies interaction and communication among self-interested players of diverse backgrounds and styles. “Bargaining for value” implies that the quantum of value extracted in a deal may vary within a range of potential values. “Negotiation” is a commonly-accepted term that captures the essence of these processes in a competitive or cooperative environment. This course surveys the theoretical and behavioral underpinnings of negotiation practices and develops skills that enhance the ability to capture value in cooperative and competitive bargaining scenarios.

Businesses now gather data on their customers, competitors, and marketplace on an unprecedented scale. Simultaneously, the adoption of machine learning has made the cost of estimating sophisticated predictive models cheaper than ever. As the cost of making predictions has decreased, the need for decision-makers who can critically examine these analyses has increased. This is because implementations of sophisticated machine learning methods can lead to dramatically incorrect decisions and inferences if decision-makers do not correctly link their statistical models to the business context and the problem at hand. 
This course is fundamentally about how to learn from data. We will demonstrate the stark differences in the goals and implementations of descriptive, predictive, and causal analysis. Students will be expanding their analytic toolkit in each of these areas and learning how to select the right tool for the job. Particular attention will be paid to the usage of these analysis to drive business decisions, and how to respond to data analytics questions in job interviews. 
This course emphasizes a hands-on approach. We will apply data analysis in six unique cases and four assignments which span a wide variety of topics and feature real world data. The course uses the R programming language and RStudio. While some background in R is helpful, materials are provided for those who are new to the language or need a refresher.
The ultimate objective of this class is to prepare you to be a producer and consumer of data analytics, and to enhance your ability to correctly utilize data when making business decisions. Whether working with data directly or communicating with people who do, these skills are essential for the more sophisticated and successful business decision-maker.

This course explores the tools available to marketers for the promotion of products and services. The integrated marketing communications philosophy is stressed, and principles of consumer behavior are discussed as the starting point for the analysis of promotion decisions. Advertising is the main focus of the class, and issues such as the setting of campaign objectives, segmentation and targeting, budgeting, media placement, message strategy, creative development, persuasion and measurement of advertising effectiveness are discussed. More specialized units consider Internet and global/cross-cultural advertising. Sales promotion techniques are also discussed, including consumer promotions (e.g., sampling, coupons, premiums, contests) and trade promotions (e.g., buying allowances, cooperative advertising). Other elements of promotion discussed include public relations, sponsorships and personal selling.

This course builds on MKT 414/STR 423 to equip students with the skills to make profitable pricing decisions in complex business environments. Topics include: pricing with constrained supply and uncertain demand; markdown management; advance selling; pricing on the internet; selling through auctions; pricing in markets with (direct and indirect) network effects; and psychological aspects of pricing.

The objective of this course is to prepare students with the intuition and tools to make pricing recommendations, and to meet the booming demand in pricing and consulting related careers. The course builds around applying stateof- the-art data analysis toolkit to data of historical sales to predict underlying consumer demand. We study analytical methods suitable for different types of data structure and different pricing objectives. Topics covered include pricing against competing products, product positioning and finding market segments.

Prerequisite: GBA 436 or CIS 417

The course teaches how to approach and solve a large range of organizational problems from an analytical-economic perspective that is grounded in agency theory. It discusses in detail the assignment of decision rights (including centralization vs. decentralization of decisions), performance measurement, and incentives and rewards. These are the three elements of “organizational architecture,” the central framework of the course. Applications range from job-level incentive problems to broader questions about organizational structure and the boundaries of the firm (e.g., vertical integration). Throughout, the course emphasizes the complementarity of organizational policies and the importance of alignment between a firm’s internal organization and its strategy.