COURSE NUMBER:   MBA267.1

COURSE TITLE:   Business to Business Marketing

UNITS OF CREDIT:  3

INSTRUCTOR:   Zsolt Katona

E-MAIL ADDRESS:  zsolt.katona@insead.edu (zskatona@haas.berkeley.edu beginning in July)

MEETING DAY(S)/TIME:   Tuesday, 2:00-5:00 PM

PREREQUISITE(S): Core (MBA206)

CLASS FORMAT: Mixture of case discussions, lectures, and the INDUSTRAT simulation.

REQUIRED READINGS: cases, articles

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: mixture of class participation, simulation participation, and a project

ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES: When people say “marketing”, names like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Marlboro come to mind. Yet most of GNP comes from the marketing of industrial products.  Likewise, the majority of investments, consulting projects and business challenges focus on industrial goods and services. Consequently, it is important to become familiar with industrial marketing and the unique and unusual issues which one encounters when marketing to organizations rather than to households or individual consumers. Industrial markets are characterized by organizational decision-making, products with heavy technical content, high levels of service and complex financial arrangements. Therefore, business to business marketing frequently requires the direct involvement of other functional areas within the firm and careful management of relationship with other firms (clients, suppliers, competitors).

This course allows you to experience the application and value of B2B concepts and techniques in a complex industrial marketing environment.  Through this experience, you will learn (1) the strengths and weaknesses of the marketing tools with which you are already familiar, and (2) new tools specific to this context.

One important component of the course is "INDUSTRAT": The Strategic Industrial Marketing Simulation", a tool that was developed at INSEAD for  MBA and executive courses. Many business schools in North America (Wharton, Stanford, Columbia and others) and Europe have adopted INDUSTRAT for their MBA and senior executive programs. Several Fortune 500 corporations use the simulation for the training of their top management, including members of the executive boards, adapting the parameters of the simulation to enable them to simulate "scenarios" specific to their industry.

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 Applied Probabilty, and Random Structures and Algorithms.