Marketing Strategy Course This course will provide you with a comprehensive introduction to contemporary marketing theory & practice. During your studies, you will become familiar with the importance & the fundamental thinking of this core management function. You will use a wide range of concepts & techniques to analyse the external environment & to develop practical & creative strategies to meet its challenges. Senior managers operate in a complex environment of rapid change both within & outside their organisations. Organisational life is full of messy problems that cannot be neatly compartmentalised into one specific management function & decisions may need to be made at short notice with incomplete or even conflicting information. As a manager, the quality of your decision making will depend on your ability to select & combine the best & most appropriate ideas & techniques from a range of management functions & know how to use them. So whether you are a marketing manager or work in another function, such as finance or human resources, you will need to understand the language used by marketing practitioners & have a sound grasp of the concepts & approaches that marketing offers. This course will provide you with a toolbox of ideas & methods to help you make sense of your organisation's complexity. Through the six study units we build the basic principles & provide comprehensive coverage of the main theories of marketing set in the context of modern business practice. You will learn how to understand your customers' needs; how to focus scarce resources most effectively though marketing segmentation & targeting; brand building through the right marketing mix; as well as the development & implementation of marketing plans. This is reflected in the more specific unit objectives.