Strategic marketing & Servitisation

This track takes you straight to the heart of doing business in an international, high-tech context where service provision through digital technologies (i.e. servitisation) is equally important as the delivering goods. While many Business Administration specializations zoom in on a single, often internal aspect of running a company – such as finance, IT, or human resources – the SMS track gives you a broad overview of both internal and external aspects of running a successful company in an ever increasing digitalised world. This will make a you true boundary spanner: you will be skilled in analysing the needs and wants of the market as well as in converting the outcomes into effective plans for creating and delivering value through servitisation strategies and smart business models. Throughout the programme, you will develop the knowledge, skills and confidence it takes to point the way forward for businesses to drive and thrive in smart industrial context.

Many marketing programmes focus on business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, with a strong emphasis on disciplines such as psychology and communication, and on the knowledge and skills it takes to sell things to consumers. In this track, the focus is on business development in B2B context for service firms and manufacturers. . You will learn to analyse the whole range of – often highly interdependent – factors involved in making strategic decisions, from internal business aspects to external market developments and supply chain issues. You will also be able to tap into – and participate in – important research conducted at our university in several key areas. Think, for example, of smart industry, prediction, servitization, e-strategizing and digitalization, or the emerging field of neuromarketing, with neuroscience-based technologies enabling us to analyse customer value at ever deeper levels. This track will solidly equip you to look at Business strategies from an academically grounded, 21^st century point of view.

The SMS track, like all of our Business Administration specializations, is small in scale. We view students as co-researchers, offering an informal atmosphere, an open-door policy, and more intensive personal guidance from staff than you will find elsewhere. On top of that, there is a lot of space for you in this programme to pursue personal interests, for example by combining different elective courses, or in selecting a topic for your Master’s thesis. One option within the SMS track is to follow our Marketing for Digital Businesses line, which ties in with the UT’s Communication Science Master’s. This programme will equip you to understand and adapt swiftly in a changing, tech-enabled marketing environment, to identify opportunities in a highly competitive global marketplace, and to be creative in the way you approach and communicate with customers.