MSc Strategic Marketing
(online, part-time)

Pre-study modules are to be completed before the start of your programme via The Hub, our online virtual learning environment, to ensure you have the prerequisite knowledge needed to succeed and meet the demands of an ever-evolving labour market. These include primers in key areas including Maths, Data Analysis, Study Skills, Marketing Fundamentals and Plagiarism Awareness. These modules do not contribute to the calculation of the final award but are designed to provide students with a common base of knowledge before starting the programme. 

The programme induction week is one of only two periods of on-campus activity during your programme and allows you to fully immerse yourself in the Business School experience and meet your cohort. We strongly encourage you to attend on campus in London if at all possible.

The growth in collaborative business models, digital innovation and structural shifts in developing markets have accelerated in recent years. To succeed in today’s fast-changing global marketplace, marketing leaders need to deliver winning strategies that engage consumers, accelerate new market success, outperform competitors and embrace disruptive economic models.

This module will teach you the skills to understand shareholder interests and the levers available to drive growth and profit. You will be able to deliver outcomes using practical, applied techniques used by strategy and marketing consultants and industry professionals alike. By drawing on contemporary examples, you will gain the tools to solve a growth challenge. Bring on disruption – you will be ready for it.

When, why and how do people buy (or not buy) a product? When you stop to think about it, product decisions are made every day, some with or without much thought. Successful marketing leaders develop a core understanding of how their current and prospective customers are driven by psychological factors and react to marketing activities.

In this module, you will develop an in-depth understanding of consumer behaviour through the cutting-edge ideas that are gaining prominence in academia. You will apply these key concepts to develop and evaluate marketing strategies to ultimately predict and change consumer behaviour. Learn via case discussions, guest lectures, experimental demonstrations and projects.

Digital media and the Internet have had a huge impact on marketing practice in recent years, dramatically changing how marketers communicate and interact with consumers, as well as what consumers expect from their relationship with a company. As digital technologies continue to develop in terms of speed, availability and functionality, marketing strategies need to be integrated with digital and interactive tools and practices.

In this module, you will learn how to utilise the latest tools and technologies to identify new opportunities for strategic marketing and analyse online customer behaviour. Search optimisation, paid search, mobile marketing, social media, online advertising, email marketing and e-CRM– you will develop a firm grasp on all of these digital tools. Applying these skills to real examples, you will be able to integrate digital marketing into a communication and marketing plan and unlock a greater level of customer value.

For marketing practitioners to climb up the organisational hierarchy, they need to understand and influence key financial organisational decisions. This module deals with two key financial aspects: first, how to price products and services strategically, and second, understanding critical topics in financial management from a marketing point of view.

In the finance component of the module, you will look at the reasons why marketers need to understand key financial measures. The pricing part of the module will provide you with an overview of the factors that need to be considered when setting prices, and how to develop pricing alternatives. Effective financial management and integrating pricing decisions back into the marketing mix can support the strategic objectives of the organisation as a whole. You will be able to improve cross-function communication, maximise strategic influence within the firm, and become a more effective marketer and leader.

Today’s marketing is not just an art; it requires the use of data and quantitative approaches to support marketing strategies in rapidly changing offline and online environments. This module will equip you with the skills to evaluate marketing strategies by measuring effectiveness and profit generation. You will develop a complex understanding of how to derive insights from data using models and tools, including digital analytics tools for web and social media, and advertising and campaign metrics.

Taking a very hands-on approach with real datasets and cases, you will learn how best to apply these analytical techniques to effectively understand customer needs. The goal is not to be a statistician, but to equip you with analytical thinking and a set of applied quantitative marketing skills so that you are best prepared to succeed in the workplace.

Market research is vital to making informed decisions and formulating effective marketing plans. This module examines problem formulation, research design, data collection, data analysis, and interpretation of market research results. You will gain the practical skills to design, analyse, interpret and critically evaluate market research studies. This is an important skill for an integrated marketing strategy – market research complements marketing analytics and big data analytics to help solve business problems.

The profitability of a business increasingly depends on two factors: its ability to build and sustain strong relationships with customers and other key stakeholders, and the quality of the services it provides customers. Relationship management is critically important in any industry and is an essential skill for you to master as a marketing professional.

This module equips you with the skills to manage relationships for superior financial performance – focusing on relationships with external customers – consumers, buyers, agents – and internal customers – employees, colleagues, different functional areas and departments. You will gain powerful insights, best practices, and the latest ideas on how to manage relationships for profit, how to sustain trust and loyalty over time, and how to deliver outstanding customer service quality. Using CRM technology, you will discover best practices and innovations in loyalty and service management.

Firms are increasingly becoming aware that one of their most valuable assets is the brand associated with their products and services. Companies must create strong brands that deliver customer value and maintain and enhance the strengths of those brands over time. So, what is the magic formula behind a successful brand?

In this module you will identify the anatomy of strong brands. Using case studies, you will be able to build, measure and manage brands over time, and discover how to leverage elements of marketing communications to build and strengthen brand equity. This is not just relevant to you as a future marketing leader, but something that sits on the boundary between the firm and the external environment. Brand management is a management imperative – and you can lead the way. 

To excel as a senior level marketer, you must possess a clear understanding of the concepts needed to craft and execute strategy, along with sound knowledge of how to apply financial and operational principles. This module will introduce you to frameworks and real-world examples in marketing strategy, including future thinking, sustainable design, creation of new markets and the diffusion of innovation as key topics.  

Equipped with the skills to formulate and execute market-relevant and financially sound strategies for an organisation, you will be able to take an overall view of its future direction and the potential hurdles it faces. Case studies will help to sharpen your skills in identifying strategic challenges for a range of different companies, and to evaluate the options open to senior marketing managers in these contexts. 

In this new era of marketing, your brand is defined by those who experience it. Firms are increasingly becoming aware that one of their most valuable assets is the brand associated with their products and services, and that they need to manage the entire brand experience to obtain a competitive advantage.

This module is concerned with building, measuring and managing brand experiences over time. You will learn how to leverage advertising and the other elements of the marketing communications mix to build and strengthen the brand experience. Through learning key theories and concepts pertaining to the brand experience design and management, you will develop the tools to apply a strategic approach to the design, management, and measurement of brand experiences.

Managers are faced with a wealth of data. This module is about turning that data into actionable insights, leading to well-informed decisions for complex business problems.

We show how to build a model of the business situation that recognises its essential features and takes account of uncertainty. These models can be used first to understand what is happening, second to predict what will happen, and finally to make good management decisions, that take into account risks arising from management actions.

Throughout the module we will use Excel spreadsheets– so that you will build your skills in this area. The applications are multi-disciplinary with links to finance, marketing and operations.

Customers are the most valuable assets of a firm. Many firms have a staggering amount of data on their customers' browsing and buying behaviour, but only few of them have the expertise to use such information and guide their customer engagement strategies. Blending theory with practical examples and case studies, this module aims to (i) provide an overview of key areas in customer engagement and (ii) deliver a set of analytical tools for effective customer management. Students will learn how to use a series of marketing frameworks and data analytics to make informed decisions and influence customers hearts, minds and sales.

This elective will be available for the September 2022 intake of students on MSc Strategic Marketing (online, part-time).

The module prepares students to visualise and analyse data, and to use analytical and data-driven approaches to make sound management decisions. The module introduces several tools for data manipulation and visualisation, including Excel, Tableau and SQL, with an emphasis on how to ask insightful business questions and analyse data interactively.

When we hear “crisis management,” we think of global scandals, business disruptions and tragedies. Leaders need to be prepared for those acute incidents, but also for serial challenges, chronic issues, and for smaller, but still significant, threats to brand reputation, employee morale, and shareholder value. This is not just a concern for an organisation’s PR function, no matter where you work in your future career, you will have to effectively manage a crisis at work.

This module will develop the skills to explain, evaluate, describe and appraise crisis management through the temporal phases of crisis: before, during, and after. Learning from the common mistakes in real case studies, you will develop the best crisis management practices, as well learn the financial considerations and realities when in crisis.

The business world is evolving rapidly through the use of digital marketing, mobile and social media to reach target audiences. Emerging technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and the “Internet of Things” offer businesses the unique opportunity to differentiate in a highly competitive brand market by creating immersive experiences for their customers.

In this module, you will get an understanding of the trends and technologies that are likely to disrupt the marketing world and business at large. Delve into tools and techniques that can be used to utilise new technologies within the core development of strategic marketing of businesses.

Digital technology and the rapidly growing number of media types are not only transforming how brands can interact and communicate with their stakeholders. They are also reducing the effectiveness of many traditional one-way communication methods and media which expose consumers and clients to a plethora of marketing messages. While brands used to be influential cultural engineers, social media has enabled consumers to be the dominant cultural innovators. This requires brands to rethink their marketing communications strategies, including the mix of push and pull communications.

This module will give you a solid understanding of the role of and mix of integrated marketing communications and corresponding challenges. You will apply knowledge learned in your core modules to navigate the complex and challenging task of creating integrated marketing communications.

As data has become one of the most important forces shaping all the business fields now, firms are increasingly seeking marketing experts with sufficient technical background to make effective data-driven marketing decisions. This module takes a very hands-on approach with real data sets and cases, exposing you to a range of digital marketing problems dealt with various analytical tools, including machine learning. The goal is to equip you with analytical thinking and a set of applied quantitative marketing skills so that you are best prepared to succeed in the workplace. The module is practically focussed, and the extensive use of case studies will help you understand the big-picture of marketing analytics.

This module exposes students to the evidence of how brands grow (and decline) and reveals the metrics that matter when aiming to build bigger and more profitable brands. Over fifty years of research based on buying behaviour data has been sourced from over 170 categories of goods and services from across the world which includes over 3,000 brands. This has revealed ‘law like’ patterns in customers’ buying behaviour that apply to both B2C and B2B businesses and from products to services. These law like patterns also apply to start-ups and new entrants into established categories.

Students will learn to look for these patterns in data (which may not be obvious); learn what these ‘law like’ patterns are and why they are important; which marketing metrics they give rise to, and what the strategic implications are for brands and for businesses as a whole. 

Great marketing requires great innovation and innovation is a skill that can be taught. This module explores fundamental and cutting-edge innovation concepts, principles, ideas and theories. You will be exposed to and explore the latest thinking in service design and innovation tools, as well as effective innovation management strategies.

Learn how solutions can be designed and brought to market for products and digital services, as well as develop the skills to appraise a business’ future market orientation, willingness to cannibalise, asymmetric incentives and management of risk. Learn this by examining case studies of marketing innovation efforts that have failed vs succeeded.

Sustainability is not just a buzzword. It is a rapidly evolving concept beyond the financial performance of firms. It emphasises marketing’s role in the welfare of the world’s other stakeholders and institutions. More specifically, sustainable marketing is a major area of social marketing – marketing for the public good.

This module develops a general management viewpoint in planning and evaluating sustainable marketing decisions, from both strategic and tactical perspectives. By appraising the global challenges for sustainable products and corporate actions, you will develop the skills to create and launch a sustainability marketing plan.

The Work-Based Project will help widen your strategic portfolio and demonstrate your marketing expertise by applying problem-solving techniques to a complex strategic marketing challenge. You will develop your skills by addressing a real strategic marketing project from inception to completion. The Work-Based Project can be completed at your current organisation or you can work as a consultant for another company.  

This is the perfect opportunity to draw upon the knowledge and skills you have learned in other modules on the programme. You can elect to do the project for your current organisation, or as a consultant for another company. You will create an evidence-based and action-focused set of recommendations which the client organisation can implement in its future strategies. 

This elective can be taken as an alternative to the Work Based Project and allows you to identify a company facing a current strategic marketing challenge and provide a background to that organisation. You will present and discuss the marketing issue at hand, and outline alternative courses of action, drawing on primary and secondary data and relevant marketing concepts and tools covered in the entire programme. 

The Applied Strategic Marketing Report is a 5,000-word unsupervised report on a relevant strategic marketing topic. You will be able to choose from a number of report titles which reflect marketing issues and trends discussed throughout the programme. 

Students wishing to study a doctoral programme may take a doubly weighted Individual Research Report, with approval from the Academic Directors. This constitutes a small piece of research, with an analytical focus, that presents a major opportunity for you to revise and integrate what you have learned on the MSc programme so far. It will also allow you to demonstrate that you can apply your theoretical knowledge to a real-world context. 

 You will need to secure a relevant supervisor to be considered. 

The optional Global Exchanges programme allows you to increase your international exposure and build your network by taking advantage of specialised electives at one of our partner schools.

Please note, this module will require you to pay additional costs.