Marketing Strategy (GRAV036)

Marketing Strategy is an advanced graduate course that examines marketing strategy as the market-facing expression of business strategy. Rather than treating marketing as promotion or communications, the course focuses on how firms translate strategic intent into choices about customers, value creation, positioning, and go-to-market design. Building on prior knowledge of organization and strategy analysis, competitive advantage, and market analysis, students learn to connect firm capabilities with market opportunities and competitive realities.

The course develops students’ ability to make strategic customer and market choices under conditions of uncertainty and resource constraints. Students analyze how firms decide where to play, which customers to prioritize, how to build customer-relevant advantage, and how to design coherent market systems through brand, pricing, channels, communication, and customer experience. Emphasis is placed on trade-offs: focus versus scale, premium versus mass positioning, short-term opportunity versus long-term defensibility, and uniqueness versus relevance.

By the end of the course, students will be able to diagnose whether a company’s marketing strategy is coherent, defensible, and aligned with its broader business ambition. Through cases, practical exercises, and three assessed assignments, students will develop the analytical skills required to make evidence-based recommendations about target-customer selection, positioning, value propositions, and go-to-market architecture. These skills are integrated and demonstrated in the individual strategy portfolio.