Course Descriptions

BUS 510 Building an Innovative and Sustainable Business

An introductory course that focuses on the fundamentals of doing business in an increasingly interconnected world where rapid information flows, environmental degradation and societal challenges (e.g., poverty, ethics) can be viewed as both threats and opportunities facing for-profit enterprises. Students will be exposed to the basics of starting, growing and running a profitable business, and also learn how to do so in an environmentally and socially sustainable fashion. They will learn how companies create and capture value and how to analyze the business environment including, industry, competitors and customers. They will be introduced to corporate, business and functional strategy and learn about different business functions (accounting, finance, operations, marketing and information management). Students will be introduced to the critical challenges of global sustainability and will explore, through case studies, how leading companies are implementing triple-bottom-line accounting, sustainable growth and stakeholder value creation strategies. Finally, they will develop a business idea to start a brand new company that has sustainable growth in its mission statement. Prerequisite: None.

BUS 550 Business Analytics for Competitive Advantage

This course covers statistics, optimization, and simulation, tools that are critical for managers in enabling their firms to have a competitive advantage. Topics include: probability, sampling, estimation, hypothesis testing, linear regression, goodness-of-fit tests, linear optimization models, nonlinear optimization models and managerial decision making under uncertainty. The models address problems in finance, marketing and operations and include such applications as media selection, capital budgeting, portfolio selection, advertising effectiveness, facility location, distribution planning and production planning. The focus of the course is on using business analytics to build models and using software to aid in decision-making. Prerequisite: None.

BUS 590 Business Innovation in the Next Economy

This is a forward-looking, experiential course that presents the "big-picture" view of how small, medium and large companies need to compete in the Next Economy, where integrative and creative problem solving is vital. The course integrates the key lessons from the MBA, MS EMS and MS MAC programs to enable students to solve the real-world problems that actual companies face. The course is heavily project based: cross-disciplinary teams of students will act as management consultants to companies to identify and solve problems taking a holistic and integrative perspective. There will be lectures on various aspects of business strategy, sustainability, systems thinking, execution, innovation and team effectiveness from faculty members and industry experts. Student teams will present their findings to fellow students, faculty members and client companies. Prerequisite: Students should have successfully completed all of their respective program core courses.

MAC 501 Insights into the Next Economy Markets

This course teaches students how to analyze B2C and B2B customers in the emerging global business environment. Understanding the demographics and psychographics of target audiences is essential to building effective marketing communication strategies. From data to information to insightful strategic marketing, this course covers what's important to know in making more effective marketing decisions. Social, cultural, psychological and attitudinal factors are explored with particular attention to motivation, how attitudes are shaped and altered, how information is processed, and the role of learning in the formation of purchasing decisions. Students will examine theories and models of consumer behavior that can help them develop incisive insights into consumer behavior that can be used to build strong brands. In addition to customer behavior, the course also covers tools and techniques to identify and analyze competitors and their strengths and weaknesses. Students will also learn a framework to analyze the relative attractiveness of industries and the techniques to analyze threats and opportunities in the macro environment. Prerequisite: None.

MAC 502 Spreadsheet Modeling

Spreadsheets are a popular model-building environment for managers. Add-ins and enhancements to Excel have made powerful decision-making tools available to the manager. This course covers how to use the spreadsheet to develop and utilize some of these decision-making aids. Topics include: forecasting (both regression and time series), decision-making under uncertainty and decision trees, optimization, and probabilistic simulation using. Prerequisite: None.

MAC 503 Marketing Research & Engineering

This course tracks the three key aspects of the market research process: problem definition and research design, development of appropriate primary research tools (primarily survey design and implementation) and analysis and presentation. Marketing engineering focuses on specific data-driven marketing tools: regression, cluster analysis, conjoint, etc. and their application to specific marketing problems (segmentation and targeting, new product design and forecasting). Prerequisite: MAC 501.

MAC 504 Creating, Communicating and Delivering Customer Value

This course provides an introduction to the Marketing practice and strategy. Marketing activities are those processes and functions that enable managers and policy makers to identify and serve the values and needs of a customer given the capacities of the company, activities of competitors, and inherent constraints in the business environment. Marketers typically refer to these concepts as “the four Cs.” Based on their understanding of the “four Cs”, students will then learn how to implement strategy by applying the levers of the marketing mix. These elements are known as the "four Ps" (product, price, place/channels of distribution, and promotion). Our treatment of marketing constraints and the marketing mix will be motivated by essential foundations from economics, sociology and consumer behavior. Prerequisite: BUS 510; MAC 501.

MAC 505 Strategic Marketing Management

This course emphasizes both Marketing Strategy formulation and execution and management of the marketing function, including the integration of marketing mix decisions and the longer-term effects of marketing mix decisions and changes in the mix over time. Topics include: price policy, value-in-use, price discrimination, product line breadth and variety, product life cycle choices, channel design and control, communications, customer loyalty and brand equity. This course emphasizes market segmentation, positioning to meet the needs of the market segment, sustaining an ‘integrated’ marketing mix over the product life cycle, and ‘Strategic Business Unit' organization. In addition, the course covers creation of Marketing Plan that includes the economic / financial analysis of the costs and potential profits of the strategy and an implementation plan. Half of the course will be a Team Consulting Project for an external client. Prerequisites: MAC 504.

Electives

MAC 511
Integrated Marketing Communication Strategy
Students will learn how to identify and evaluate the full gamut of competitive strategic alternatives in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing using a wide variety of analytic tools to develop and synthesize consumer insights. Based on this analysis, the major elements of a communication plan can be put in place: media, message, target audiences, testable objectives, and budgets. Students learn to measure consumer and business target audiences by their demographic, psychographic and attitudinal characteristics and to analyze the style and appeal of messages within campaigns. Students also learn how to develop a balanced marketing communication plan utilizing the multitude of vehicles available to reach a target audience using the latest technological tools and media. Prerequisite: MAC 501.

MAC 512
Customer Touch Points
This course focuses on the massive transformations spurred by new technologies in today's communication environment and the wide variety of consumer contact points these technologies generate. Students will develop an understanding of how the industry is organized and how marketing communications flow from the source company to the target audience. The course examines the major aspects of developing and evaluating media plans, beginning with the development of media strategies that flow from overall marketing communication goals. The course analyzes various media from the perspectives of cost, targeting, audience characteristics, and the nature of product/service. Prerequisite: MAC 521.

MAC 513
Managing Sustainable Brands
This is a traditional brand management course applied to green or sustainable brands, which are becoming increasingly important in the global economy. The most valuable assets that a company has are the brands that it has developed and invested in over time. Students will explore the components of a brand, its equity and emotional benefits and an understanding of how to develop a meaningful brand relationship with the customer or prospect to optimize the brand or brand portfolio. The class will also explore the steps required to champion a new product / service from development to launch. Students will address positioning, channel strategies, trade promotion, budgeting, new product development, packaging and merchandising and the management of agency relationships. Prerequisite: MAC 501.

MAC 514
Customer Relationship Management
In a world where it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing relationship, companies are learning that they must manage those current customer relationships in order to survive. Around this insight, a new discipline has emerged, using some of the tools of database management and some of the tactics of digital communication to reduce attrition and maximize the lifetime value of a customer. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has made fundamental changes in the way companies operate. This course engages the student in the diagnosis of CRM issues, the building of CRM plans, the measurement of their effectiveness, and the new tools available to get all these things done economically, in Internet time. Prerequisite: MAC 501.

MAC 515
Database & Direct Marketing
This course introduces the students to the critical nature of information gathered in real-time directly from important constituencies or third-party sources. It explores the ability of data-based marketing to match consumers with products based on behaviors. Students learn to access and analyze database information, as well as develop programs to elicit a direct and immediate response using a variety of direct-to-consumer/direct-to-business tools including electronic marketing. Prerequisite: MAC 501.

MAC 516
Social Media Marketing Strategy
Online marketing continues to develop at a rapid pace. Social media (including tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, websites, e-mail etc.) is no longer a passing fad, but an essential component of the marketing mix. As the platforms evolve and expand, so do the strategies required to leverage them properly. The increased demand for this specialized knowledge creates abundant opportunities for career development, heightened visibility and market leadership. Companies that fail to capitalize on social media to attract quality people, penetrate new markets and engage with customers on a meaningful level will most certainly be left out in the cold. This class explores the core strategies used by companies today to leverage the marketing power of social media to grow their businesses. You will learn what makes each platform unique and how they contribute to an overall social media campaign. Prerequisite: MAC 501.
(3-0-3)

MAC 521
Qualitative & Survey Research Methods in Business
This is an introductory course in qualitative and survey methods relevant to basic and applied research problems in business (with a focus on marketing). Although this is an introductory course, students should be prepared to engage seriously in how qualitative research is conceived, conducted, implemented, and interpreted in business contexts. We do not emphasize statistical methods in this course and the ability to quickly acquire working knowledge of basic statistics is assumed. Students will also require a good understanding of substantive business contexts. In short, while the course accomplishes several objectives, it will focus on the skills required to design and conduct research studies using qualitative and/or survey methods. Prerequisite: BUS 550.

MAC 522
Predictive Analytics
The digital enterprise captures significantly more data about customers, suppliers, and partners. The challenge, however, is to transform this vast data repository into actionable business intelligence. Both the structure and content of information from databases and data warehouses will be studied. Basic skills for designing and retrieving information from a database (e.g., MS ACCESS) will be mastered. Data mining and predictive analytics can provide valuable business insights. A leading data mining tool (e.g., IBM/SPSS Modeler) will be used to investigate hypotheses and discover patterns in enterprise data repositories. Analysis tools include decision trees, neural networks, market basket analysis, time series, and discriminant analysis. Applications of data mining in a variety of industries will be discussed. Software exercises, case studies and a major project will prepare you to use these tools effectively during your career. Prerequisite: MAC 502.

MAC 523
Social Media Marketing Analytics
The pervasive adoption of Internet technology has created an enormous opportunity to capture and analyze digital content exchanges from social media within and external to organizations. These analyses can provide valuable insights for improving sales; customer service and loyalty; product quality, branding and development; employee satisfaction; and supply chain partner effectiveness. Data mining methods and analyses for websites, search engine results, and social media, e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and blogs will be addressed. Text mining, GIS, speech analytics, and sentiment analyses will be studied. Both desktop and mobile device tools will be used to conduct these analyses. Prerequisite: MAC 521

MAC 595
Special Topics in Marketing Analytics & Communication
This course covers contemporary or cutting edge topics in the MAC field offered on an irregular basis typically in a seminar style. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

MAC 597
Independent Study in Marketing Analytics & Communication
Students can conduct in-depth research, usually on an independent and solo basis, under the guidance of a full-time faculty member. Typically student signs up with a faculty member who is willing to supervise his/her independent research on a particular MAC-related topic. The student must complete an independent study form, develop a one-page proposal outlining the purpose, process and product (expected outcomes) of the independent research project, obtain the faculty member’s approval and submit it to the Program Director for approval and registration. Prerequisite: Instructor and Program Director Approval.

Last modified: 04/20/2012 10:11:43