COURSE NUMBER: MBA299M.1

COURSE TITLE: Marketing Strategy

UNITS OF CREDIT: 3

INSTRUCTOR: Miguel Villas-Boas

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

MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: Monday/Wednesday, 11:00AM – 12:30PM

PREREQUISITE(S): MBA Core

CLASS FORMAT: Lecture + Strategy Simulation + Cases + In-Class Presentations + Guest Speakers

CLASS WEBSITE: http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/villas/MBA299M/

REQUIRED READINGS: Text + Case packet /Reader

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, Guest speakers come from strategic management consulting companies, consumer products companies, and from the merger & acquisition divisions of investment banks.

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.

[MARKSTRAT will require for eight weeks an additional one hour and a half per week outside class for group meetings on Wednesdays, typically, from 12:30-2:00PM.]

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:

Miguel Villas-Boas is the Marketing Group Chair and the J.Gary Shansby Professor of Marketing Strategy at the Haas School of Business, UC-Berkeley, where he has been since 1991 after getting his Ph.D. at M.I.T. Before that he did an MBA at INSEAD, France and M.Sc. in Economics at the New University of Lisbon, Portugal. Professor Villas-Boas has published extensively in the areas of marketing strategy, organization design, and customer relationship management. He has been involved in consulting projects in banking and in telecommunications. Professor Villas-Boas has been nominated for, or has won, the Cheit Best teaching Award for several years, and has won the 2009 ISMS Long-Term Impact Award among other research awards. He has published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, RAND Journal of Economics, Management Science, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, Journal of Business, and in other top journals in management. Professor Villas-Boas is a Department Editor for Management Science and an Associate Editor for Marketing Science and Quantitative Marketing and Economics, is in the Editorial Board for the Journal of Marketing Research, and the International Journal of Research in Marketing, and is a founding member of SICS-Summer Institute in Competitive Strategy.

Website: http://groups.haas.berkeley.edu/marketing/profiles/profs/villas.html