MKT5610 Marketing Strategy & Planning

How MKT5610 is assessed

The syllabus lists these five components and they total 100%. Two things are worth knowing before you plan your effort.

First, the appendix to the same syllabus restates two of the weights differently, putting in-class activities at 25% and the innovative idea component at 25%, which would total 105%. The table above follows the assessment table, because that is the one carrying an explicit total of 100%, and you should confirm the current split on Canvas before allocating effort between the two.

Second, attendance is a pass condition and not only a share of the participation mark. A minimum attendance rate of 70% is required to pass the course, and students must also pass the coursework components to be awarded a pass; the numeric threshold for that second condition is not stated in the course materials. Confirm both on the course Canvas page. No per-component hurdle is stated anywhere in the course materials, so the hurdle flag above appears only on the row the syllabus attaches the attendance requirement to. Submission formats and deadlines for both group components are announced through Canvas and in class.

Current MKT5610 dates

Dates are as published in the submission points on the course site for this offering. Confirm exact deadlines and submission settings in the live LMS.

What MKT5610 covers

Thirteen chapters follow the published class schedule through its five lettered sections, from the fundamentals of marketing strategy and case analysis, through competitor, industry and customer analysis, segmentation, targeting and positioning, and the program decisions of product, brand, price, communication and channel, to customer experience management.

Its published objectives run from acquiring advanced knowledge of marketing philosophy and principles, through assessing market opportunities by analysing customers, competitors and a company's own strengths and weaknesses, to designing and implementing an effective marketing plan and applying marketing ethics in real business encounters.

Four of the six objectives are verbs about deciding, and the assessment matches: none of it is a written paper. You are marked on what you contribute in class, on a competition run against a clock, on a business presentation, on a store your group actually operates, and on a reflection about how you decided.

How the thirteen topics are arranged

The class schedule runs twelve classes across five lettered sections.

Section A introduces the fundamentals of marketing strategy. Section B analyses the market through competitive analysis, industrial and company analysis, and customer analysis. Section C formulates strategy through market segmentation and targeting and then competitive positioning.

Section D designs the marketing program and carries six of the thirteen topics: product, brand, pricing, communication, channel and sales management. Section E closes on customer experience management and a course summary.

The instructor reserves the right to adjust the schedule, so treat the order as reliable and any particular class number as provisional.

Where the difficulty actually sits

Not in the frameworks. Most of them are a page each and none is hard to state.

The difficulty is that this course is assessed on decisions taken under time pressure with incomplete information, and the two group components are sequenced rather than parallel: an idea has to clear a validation step before implementation begins, and the store then needs roughly two months of operation to produce anything worth reporting. A group that settles its idea late does not lose marks on the idea.

It loses them on the implementation report, because there is nothing to report.

The pass conditions sit outside the assessment table

A minimum attendance rate of 70% is required to pass the course, and students must also pass the coursework components to be awarded a pass; the numeric threshold for that second condition is not stated in the course materials. Confirm both on the course Canvas page.

Neither condition is a hurdle on any single component, and no exemption mechanism is published, so treat the attendance figure as a floor to stay well clear of rather than a target to approach.

Note also that Zoom and online attendance are not available for this course.

Two things to set up in the first fortnight

A decision log, because the self-reflection is organised around options considered, evidence that changed a decision, verifiable individual contributions and transferable methods, and all four are easy to write from notes taken at the time and close to impossible to reconstruct honestly at the end.

And a habit of attaching a number to every claim, because the criterion that separates a strong presentation from an adequate one is whether the group can say what its plan assumes and how wrong that assumption can be before the plan fails.

Worked example · free

Decide a line extension on incremental profit

Key terms

Marketing Program

The set of product, brand, price, communication and channel decisions that deliver a chosen strategy. It is assessed on whether the pieces reinforce each other, which is a separate question from whether the strategy behind them is sound.

Strategic Group

A cluster of firms inside one industry whose strategies resemble each other. Rankings inside a group say nothing about whether the group itself is gaining or losing against the industry around it.

Alternative

A product or service with a different form and a different function that serves the same purpose, in the way a cinema and a restaurant both answer the question of what to do with an evening. Losing buyers to one shrinks the industry rather than moving share within it.

Value Curve

A brand's profile drawn across the factors an industry competes on. A curve that sits above a rival at every point describes a company competing harder rather than differently.

Non-Customer Tier

One of three groups not currently buying: those on the edge of the market, those who have consciously refused it, and those in distant markets who have never considered it. The first tier is the cheapest to convert and gives the most reliable reasons.

Customer Lifetime Value

The margin on each purchase multiplied by purchase frequency and by the length of the relationship, less the cost of acquisition. Three of those four inputs multiply and only the last is subtracted once.

Proxy Variable

Something observable at the moment of an offer that correlates with the unobservable need a segmentation is built on. Every workable segmentation in practice runs on one, and an imperfect proxy is more useful than a perfect segment nobody can address.

Weighted Attribute Score

A brand's rating on each benefit multiplied by that benefit's importance weight, summed across benefits. Its value lies in decomposing the gap to the leader rather than in the ranking it produces.

Incremental Profit

The difference a decision makes between two worlds: new contribution, less contribution destroyed elsewhere, less the fixed cost the decision causes. Anything unchanged between the two worlds is irrelevant however large it is.

User Contribution System

A method, usually internet-based, that aggregates what people supply and converts it into something useful to other people with little or no company intervention. If a person approves each item, the thing scales with staff rather than with participation.

Bilateral Governance

A relationship organised through joint planning, overlapping roles and mutual adjustment, enforced by mutuality of interest rather than by authority or by the legal system. It is a distinct form and not a midpoint between market and hierarchy.

MKT5610 FAQ

Questions students ask in each MKT5610 chapter

What is the difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan?

A strategy is the choice of who to serve and on what basis to beat the alternatives they are weighing. A plan is a document that commits to a strategy, sets out the program that delivers it, allocates resources and names who does what by when. You can hold a strategy without a plan, and many student submissions produce a plan with no strategy inside it, which reads as a list of activities with no reason why those activities rather than others. Chapter 01 · Fundamentals of Marketing Strategy and Case Analysis

How do I tell a substitute from an alternative, and does it matter?

A substitute differs in form but performs the same function, so a buyer choosing between them is solving the same problem a different way. An alternative differs in form and in function while serving the same underlying purpose. It matters because the two show up differently in your data: a buyer lost to a substitute appears as share moving inside the industry, while a buyer lost to an alternative appears as the industry getting smaller, and only the second is invisible in a share report. Chapter 02 · Competitive and Industry Analysis

Do I have to work through all six paths for every business?

No, and trying to is the common way the tool wastes an afternoon. Each path asks a different question and most return nothing for any given business. Two are usually live. The productive approach is to read the six, notice which one makes you think of something specific about your own case, and pursue that one properly rather than producing a shallow paragraph against each heading. Chapter 03 · Reconstructing Market Boundaries

Why does a customer value calculation matter if the number will be wrong?

Because it is not a forecast. It answers a bounded question: is this acquisition worth making, and up to what ceiling. A figure that is wrong by thirty per cent still settles that question in most cases, and the ranking of the four inputs it produces is robust to far larger errors than the figure itself. State the retention assumption alongside the number and it survives scrutiny. Chapter 04 · Customer Analysis and Customer Equity

Why not just segment on something I can actually see, like year of study?

Because the groups you get will be reachable and internally mixed, so the offer aimed at each has to be broad enough to suit everybody in it, and broad offers are what segmentation was meant to escape. Keep the basis that predicts behaviour and hunt for something observable that tracks it. That hunt is most of the practical work and it is the part a plan usually leaves out entirely. Chapter 05 · Market Segmentation and Targeting

Why does one product need more than one position?

Because a position is relative to what a segment is comparing you against, and different segments compare you against different things. The same bakery is the fresh option to someone weighing it against a supermarket and the expensive option to someone weighing it against a convenience store. Nothing about the product changed. This is why the exercise asks for positions per group rather than one position for the product. Chapter 06 · Competitive Positioning and Perceptual Mapping

Why is revenue not part of this calculation?

Because revenue is not money the company keeps, and the decision turns on what is left after the variable cost of producing each unit. Revenue is also the largest and most prominent number in a problem of this shape, which is exactly why it is the most common wrong starting point. Begin from unit contribution instead and the four quantities that matter fall out in order. Chapter 07 · Product Strategy and Line Extension Economics

How do I tell which component of brand equity is the weak one?

Ask what would happen if the name were removed from the packaging and everything else stayed the same. A brand whose sales would be unaffected has awareness and nothing more. A brand whose price would have to fall has perceived quality. A brand whose next launch would suddenly need a full introduction has associations. A brand whose buyers would simply take the nearest alternative has no loyalty, whatever its repeat rate suggests. Chapter 08 · Brand Equity and Brand Strategy

Why is asking customers what they would pay a bad way to set a price?

Because a price considered on its own makes people far more price-focused than they are in a real purchase, where they weigh what the price buys against what the product offers. The question changes the thing it is trying to measure. A choice-based approach that embeds price inside whole product profiles preserves the trade-off, and the value of each attribute is then derived from the pattern of choices rather than stated directly. Chapter 09 · Pricing Strategy and Competitive Price Dynamics

What separates a user contribution system from an ordinary feedback form?

Whether the output is aggregated and made useful to other people without someone approving each item. A feedback form sends information to the company and stops. A contribution system converts what one user supplies into something a different user benefits from, in real time. The company keeps control of the design and may change it, but it does not stand in the path of each individual contribution. Chapter 10 · Communication Strategy and User Contribution Systems

Is bilateral governance just a friendlier version of a contract?

No, and the reading is explicit that treating it as a midpoint between market and hierarchy is the error the typology exists to prevent. It runs on a different mechanism: obligations are upheld because the relationship is worth more to each party than the gain from defecting, not because an authority can compel compliance or a court can enforce a clause. That is a distinct machine, and it requires different setup work. Chapter 11 · Channel Governance and Sales Force Control

If our satisfaction score is good, why would customers still be leaving?

Because a good average is compatible with most of your customers being merely satisfied, and merely satisfied customers leave as soon as something easier appears. The relationship between satisfaction and staying is nearly flat across the middle of the scale and steep only at the top, so the group that predicts retention is the one scoring at the very top, and a mean tells you nothing about how large that group is. Chapter 12 · Customer Experience and Retention Economics

Why do the comparator rules matter so much if the tool does the collecting?

Because the tool cannot repair a badly chosen set. If a comparator differs from the focal brand in category, in size and in authenticity at once, then any difference the analysis later finds is confounded with all three and can be attributed to none of them. The rules exist to hold everything constant except the thing being compared, and that is the only part of the task where your judgement changes the result. Chapter 13 · Marketing Intelligence from Platform Data

How to prepare for the assessments

Carry one business you can actually observe through every chapter, and answer that chapter's question about it before reading the chapter's own answer. A shop on campus works better than a large company, because you can check what you conclude. Then practise the two moves the whole assessment is built on.

Write your recommendation in one line, write underneath it the strongest alternative and the condition under which that alternative would have won, and write the one number that, if wrong by a stated amount, would reverse you.

Twenty minutes on paper doing that is worth more than a second pass through the readings, because it is the only exercise that rehearses what a graded class hour, a business presentation and a self-reflection all ask for.

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