Marketing

The Top Class Marketing is especially developed for start-up ventures and entrepreneurs that like to refresh or enhance their knowledge about marketing from a modern perspective. This Top Class goes beyond traditional conceptions of marketing, by incorporating different perspectives on the marketing environment, competition, customer segments, value appropriation and –generation, and the practice of marketing.

The Top Class resolves around five building blocks.

The first is marketing introduction, in which the marketing environment is viewed through a societal, institutional and network lens allowing the participant to understand markets from different point of views. Equipped with such perspectives, the student is capable to identify the possibilities of strategic alliances, breaking with institutionalized patterns of current exchanges, and understand firms as embedded in networks, rather than conceiving markets as competitive arenas.

In the second block, we discuss the processes of segmentation, targeting, and positioning by emphasizing the meaning of your business capabilities and customer value as starting points. Participants learn that customer segments can be created and sustained through co-creation, in which customer problems are translated into sustainable solutions, rather than being “discovered out there” which was commonly assumed by traditional marketing conceptions.

In the third building block, the students learn the implications of marketing in practice. While 4 and 7 p’s are still valid frameworks, they are rather static. Therefore, in this block, the emphasis is on the enactment of a well-defined marketing mix and their dynamics in practice over time. We also give attention to the role of social media to understand such dynamics.

The fourth and fifth building blocks are important elaborations on understanding customer values from a requirement perspective and why and how social media can be fruitfully deployed as means to develop and sustain your venture.

After the Top Class Marketing you will be able to understand and analyze your market from different perspectives which helps you to enrich your strategic choices. Furthermore, you are able to (re)define your market segments in terms of customer value, target markets, and resources/capabilities. Finally, you will be able to develop a consistent marketing mix and identify the resources necessary to co-create a value offer in the market with your customers.