COURSE NUMBER: EWMBA 299M-1

COURSE TITLE: Marketing Strategy

UNITS OF CREDIT: 3 Units

INSTRUCTOR: Miguel Villas-Boas

E-MAIL ADDRESS: villas@haas.berkeley.edu

CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATION (HTTP URL): http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/zskatona/teaching.html

MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: Thursday, 6:00pm-9:30pm

PREREQUISITE(S): Core

CLASS FORMAT: Case discussions, Lectures, and the MARKSTRAT simulation

REQUIRED READINGS: Text,Case packet

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: Class project, In-class participation, Strategy Simulation

ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES:
This course looks at strategic decision-making in markets, requiring a broad understanding of methods for creating advantage at both the industry and the firm level, of the cross-functional impacts of strategic decisions, and of appropriate investment and performance management frameworks. The course covers material that would be in an extended version of the core, brings together concepts introduced in marketing, strategy, and micro in the core courses (with also elements of finance, and organization behavior), and presents an in-depth look at strategic decisions at the top management level. The material is presented with case studies, lectures, computer simulation, and guest speakers.

Topics covered in the course include industry analysis, R&D decisions, product development, strategic pricing, product line management, resource allocation decisions, market planning, market diagnostics, competitive strategies, managing customer loyalty and customer relationships. The course provides a framework for analyzing the strategies of companies, identifying strategic synergies, and understanding a company’s core strengths. The course is designed to be essential for students interested in careers in strategic management consulting, as marketing or brand managers, or in mergers & acquisitions.

One important component of the course is the MARKSTRAT simulation. MARKSTRAT is the ultimate strategy simulation where each team manages all dimensions of a firm strategy decisions in a competitive market, with short and long-term implications. It shows how to use everything learned in different courses in running an actual company. The simulation involves the processing of rich amounts of market and competitive intelligence, and decisions on targeting of selected market segments, positioning of products, R&D decisions on the design and development of new products, launching, improving, or withdrawing existing products, interface with the production department and production planning, pricing, advertising message, expenditures, and allocation, management of distribution channels, decision of the size and priorities of the sales force, order market research, etc. Overall, you’ll feel like you are running an actual company, formulating and implementing its long-term strategy. Top managers that have gone through MARKSTRAT have felt that they are back at running their company. Students going through MARKSTRAT have found it to be one of their most vivid memories of the MBA experience.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:
Zsolt Katona is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Haas School of Business. Before joining UC Berkeley, he received his PhD in Management (with specialization in Marketing) from INSEAD. Prior to that, he had studied mathematics and he completed a PhD in Computer Science in his country of origin, Hungary.

Zsolt's current research focuses on Internet advertising and social networks and how these technologies transform marketing. He studies how web sites link to each other via advertising and how this effects their position in the network of the WWW. Furthermore, he analyses the way web sites compete for sponsored links on search engines. He also works on problems related to the interaction between quality choice and advertising in vertically differentiated markets. His research has been published in Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Applied Probabilty.