Marketing Concepts

California State University, Long Beach

College of Business Administration

Marketing Concepts – MKTG 500 –

Fall 2015 - MBA

Professor: Scott W. Flexo, Ph.D.        Office: CBA 339

EMAIL: Scott.Flexo@csulb.edu        Office Hours: TBD

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Course Objectives

The course introduces graduate students to marketing principles with a focus on hands-on, practical issues facing marketing professionals in a culturally and ethnically diverse business environment. Topics covered in the course investigate marketing from a managerial perspective, including the critical analysis of functions of marketing, opportunity assessment, marketing planning, marketing implementation, and evaluation of marketing efforts. The major objective of this course is to give the student a solid foundation to appreciate the significance of marketing in an organization and to implement successful marketing strategies in order to create maximum company and customer values.

Catalog Description:

Overview of the decision process in marketing. Consideration of functional areas and their interaction with the total operations of the firm. Introduction to the development of marketing strategy and planning.

Course Learning Objectives:

Learning goals – Critical Thinking: Students will demonstrate conceptual learning, critical thinking, and problem solving skills of marketing. They will demonstrate this set of skills by analyzing the various steps that consumers and organizations go through in the decision making process, segmentation, targeting, and positioning strategies, and marketing mix strategies and integrating all this information into a set of marketing strategies for firms.

Learning goals – Marketing Functions: Students will demonstrate understanding of all marketing functions, practices, and related theories and be able to integrate this functional knowledge in order to address marketing problems. Students will demonstrate their proficiency in the fundamental facts related to the marketing functions and practices for the marketing mix (product, price, place, and promotion); marketing research, e-commerce/Internet marketing and explain how marketing decisions are made using the basic business functions in a marketing context.

Learning goals – Quantitative and Technical Skills: Students will demonstrate that they possess quantitative and technological skills enabling them to improve marketing decisions. They will achieve this through making decisions based on quantitative analysis using performance metrics and analyzing financial performance including a pro forma analysis and their performance in two examinations which involve quantitative analysis of marketing issues.

In Class and Online Course

50% of the class activities will be conducted in-class and 50% will be online. In-Class we will discuss materials and case studies, work on marketing plan project and take examinations. Online work will be asynchronous (not time dependent including lectures, quizzes and learning activities) and synchronous sessions (time specific setup by students or professor).

Course content is managed via BeachBoard. At this site students have access to a variety of learning materials including PowerPoint lecture notes with audio voiceover, links to videos and audio files, online study aids, case study readings, articles from marketing journals and business publications, online quizzes, learning activities and materials for the group course project. They will also have access to online discussion “rooms” to discuss materials with each other, and in synchronous sessions with the each other and professor.