Introduction
To succeed in today's markets a manager needs the ability to explore updated analytical and theoretical market knowledge. This knowledge ensures the company's ability to exploit its market potential. Challenging and complex customer value demands, aggressive competition and turbulent markets, rapid technological and digital development and global expansion strategies characterize such markets. Central to this is marketersÂ’ responsibility for making strategic marketing decisions that identifies and creates insight into market mechanisms and competition opportunities. Marketers are experts in understanding customer value perceptions, ability to act within ethical and social norms, promote innovation culture and processes, as well as establish and run organizational processes for value creation.
Marketing as a discipline has evolved to include a comprehensive and overall responsibility for corporate value creation. The main focus of this program in new perspectives on market leadership reflects this by concentrating on three decision areas. In the program participants will learn to ( 1 ) organize for market solutions by being trained in how to organize a company to produce customer value , (2 ) explore market opportunities in that they are trained to make decisions that capture and exploit changing markets and ( 3) meet market challenges in that they are trained on how to differentiate and protect products and brands in a market.
Organizing for market solutions: Throughout this program participants will learn how to make decisions that create companies whose purpose is to develop organizations that are supremely good at providing market-based solutions. The ability to consciously make the whole company as co-responsible for the value production is essential in this context.
Exploring market opportunities: In the second part of the program, participants will learn to make decisions with the purpose to exploit market opportunities. Both consumers and business customers expect seamless digital solutions that simplify the interaction with a company. Today's marketers are experiencing a major transformation that requires high level of expertise in marketing innovations, social media, mobile platforms, the ability to explain and assure the quality of market data, the spread of omni-channel distribution, to name a few. This part of the program will add value to marketing managers who want to learn how to ask the critical right questions in today's markets where the aim is to capture, interpret and act on trends and developments in the markets, manage digital communication strategies, and which can assure the quality of empirical, visual and graphical analysis of analysis to make market decisions.
Meet Market Challenges: In the third main part of this program, students learn to make decisions that contribute to a company ability to differentiate itself with the purpose to meet market challenges. Differentiation requires a thorough marketing strategy that specifies customer audiences, brand positioning and brand associations as well as make decisions about appropriate exposure in the market. These decisions are based on knowledge of the customers' perception of value. Based on the understanding that different customer groups have different needs to be covered, participants will learn how to develop a marketing plan that specifies the main selling points for the various customer segments, calculate the profitability analysis of the various segments, knowledge about the brand and its products can be built and strengthened, and knowledge of how a deliberate pricing strategy affects earnings.
The importance of strategic management for a market oriented company's profitability is illustrated by the fact that customer-driven organizations achieve success in a variety of markets and competition situations. Superior customer value, utilization of unique competitive advantage and understanding of the rate of market challenges are all demanding management tasks which require effective marketing strategies that exploit and develop the companies' strategic competitive advantage.
The target audience for this program is middle managers and/or marketing managers in companies that operate in both the corporate and product and service industry. The program will also be a good fit for those working in small and medium-sized businesses, the public sector and those working in the consulting industry.