Contributing Scholar - Kate Mackie, Red McCombs School of Business and University of Texas at Austin

3 Semester Credit Hours

Course Description

This course provides an overview of marketing concepts, with an emphasis on technical industrial products. It is designed for technical professionals who require a basic understanding of marketing and its relationship to the successful management of engineering organizations.

Managers everywhere are regularly challenged with a variety of tough business decisions, often in the face of incomplete information and rapidly changing markets. A significant number of these decisions deal with marketing issues in one form or another. For example, managers are faced daily with questions such as: “How do we continue to grow profitably in a rapidly changing environment?” and “How will we respond if our customers shift to a competitor’s product or service?” Like other business disciplines, marketing seeks to answer the question: “How do we most effectively manage resources to achieve our organizational goals?” 

A central role of marketing is to develop strategies that drive profitability.  These can be termed primary marketing strategies and supporting marketing strategies. The primary marketing strategies include choosing a market segment to target, deciding upon how you are going to differentiate your products/services from the competition, and the resulting position you want your product/service to occupy in the target’s mind. The supporting strategies, often called the marketing mix, involve designing products and deciding how to price, distribute, and promote them in a way that is consistent with the selected target and positioning.

Prerequisites

• Students without Financial Accounting Course work should have completed NMBA 6170 OR need to purchase and successfully complete Financial Accounting: A Management Perspective, 15th Edition, 2004, Robert N. Holt, Ivy Software, http://www.ivysoftware.com.  The instructor will assume you have these basics and will not review this content in the course.  You should plan to spend 12-18 hours to complete this review.

Course Objectives

• Apply the principles of persuasion to influence stakeholders and customers
• Explain the place and roles of marketing in the process of managing technical products/services
• Evaluate the likely effectiveness of alternate courses of marketing action in seizing and/or sustaining competitive advantage
• Develop skills/gain experience in formulating marketing strategy
  – Assessing the environment
  – Monitoring performance
  – Developing strategy based on performance and environment
• Develop understanding of how marketing links up with other areas of the firm, including finance and operations
• Improve written communications skills

The following topics will be covered in the order given.