Master's of Marketing (MBA) Program Outline

This non-credit orientation is a foundation-building experience that introduces and refreshes the skills necessary for success in your Master's Degree Program. You'll learn how to navigate ProQuest, Ashworth College's online library, and review the distinguishing characteristics of academic journals and other publications. Internet research skills are polished enabling you to identify credible and unbiased Web sites for your research. Emphasis is placed on submission requirements, project structures, and writing formats used throughout your coursework, and APA writing style. The final portion of this course provides you the opportunity to research and explore the various career fields in the world of Business Administration.

Plan for increased productivity. Learn about the organization, its structure, and its relationship to the economic, political, and social environments surrounding it. Examine theories and guidelines for dealing with geopolitical events, consumer trends, and new developments in information technology. You'll study a model of strategic management using the 'strategic audit' as an approach to addressing complex organization-wide issues.

Discover how marketing serves as a foundation for making critical decisions related to identifying customers, delineating which needs to satisfy, developing products and services that satisfy these needs, setting prices, using appropriate communications, staging sales promotions, managing the sales force, selecting channels of distribution, maintaining funding and coordinating partnerships. Concepts presented are directed to the marketplace realities of the 21st century, including global marketing.

Integrate accounting data into your decision-making process. Managerial accounting is an essential tool that enhances managers' abilities to make sound decisions. You'll examine concepts and procedures of managerial accounting from the user's viewpoint, how they are typically applied in real-world situations, and see the role they play in improving the decision-making process within all types of organizations. Also discussed are issues in cost basics, cost management systems, planning and control, and product costing.

Develop your leadership potential. Discover the qualities, talents, and vision that leaders need to survive and grow in a changing world. You'll examine how today's theories of leadership and motivation have evolved, and how leadership concepts and motivational techniques are applied in a wide variety of business environments. Case studies reveal how executives and other decision makers lead, motivate and succeed.

In this course you'll probe the psyche of consumers worldwide. Go beyond the "act of buying" by examining consumers' diverse attitudes and personalities and the experiences of buyers and owners. Find out how products, services and consumption activities contribute to the broader society. Discover how consumers as individuals, as decision-makers and as members of subcultures behave, develop opinions, act and react; and use this knowledge to formulate workable marketing strategies.

Use financial data to your advantage. Learn what financial disclosures contain and how they effect management decision-making, plus the principles and economic factors behind publicly reported disclosures, their limitations and constraints, and how to analyze them. You'll examine research methods and how they help you convert raw data into useful information that influences decisions about financial performance, wealth creation and economic valuation.

Learn the differences between exploratory and conclusive research; the advantages, limitations and sources of secondary data; and the methodologies and uses of qualitative and quantitative research and observational and experimental techniques. Discover how to design questionnaires, conduct sampling, analyze data, test hypotheses, perform regression equations, use multivariate techniques and present research results. Emphasis is placed on the effective use of technology in data analysis.

Discover how companies develop their image, identity and brands that create customer relationships, resulting in sales and profits. This course addresses integrated marketing communications and the challenges of our complex media environment, fragmented commercial message clutter and increasing competition; and explores effective solutions through illuminating case studies. The economic, legal and social influences involved in contemporary advertising practice are examined as well.

A close, in-depth exploration of practical strategies for building, measuring and managing brand equity. Based on the premise that brands are among a company's most valuable assets, this course focuses on concepts and techniques to improve the long-term profitability of brand strategies. Using an integrated marketing approach, current thinking from academia and industry is examined, providing insights to assist managers in day-to-day and long-term brand decisions. Case studies based on contemporary brands illuminate successful tactics and results from a consumer perspective.

Issues, practices and strategies of marketing a variety of services, based on a model that establishes strong customer relationships as the foundation for achieving a competitive advantage. Standard marketing topics are discussed in light of the characteristic intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability and perishability of services. Examine approaches to service measurement; quality; service recovery; performance measurement; customer coproduction; and integrating marketing with other functions.

Marketing globally presents exciting challenges due to its reliance on the marketing environment variances of foreign countries. This course focuses on the cultural dimensions that directly impact key marketing decisions. Theoretical foundations of market segmentation, competition and positioning are complemented with a close look at export options; licensing; research methods; emerging markets; global product and service standardization; and global pricing, distribution, advertising and e-commerce issues.

Use your business skills and knowledge in thought-provoking case studies. You'll begin by learning the fundamentals of economics - the study of the allocation of resources to satisfy both needs and wants. Then, you'll analyze case studies on a variety of businesses from a small company to an entire industry - set in the environments of local, national, and global economies. Conclude with a Capstone Project and Exam.