FlexiMasters in Marketing in a Digital World

Value Creation Through Effective Marketing

The first part of module will examine the fundamentals of marketing. The coverage of the fundamentals will allow professionals new to marketing to understand the discipline better. For seasoned marketers, it is a refresher on the fundamentals of effective marketing. In the second part of the module, participants will be exposed to current ideas (e.g., customer experience, digital transformation) relevant to the marketing discipline. After this course, participants will understand the role of marketing in driving value creation in any organisation. This module will also set the basics for the next 4 modules in this FlexiMasters.

Uncovering Consumer Insights

In today’s rapidly-changing business environment, understanding consumer insights is crucial for marketers to stay ahead of their game. This course will introduce participants to consumer behavior concepts and frameworks that help marketers build a deep understanding of their target consumers; this in turn enables them to distill useful consumer insights for business decision-making.

 After completing this course, you will understand the psychology of how consumers make decisions (i.e., how consumers think, feel, and choose between different alternatives such as brands, products, or services). You will also understand the influence of social and cultural environments (e.g., friends, family, and culture) on consumption patterns, and how marketers can adapt or improve their campaigns/strategies to more effectively reach and influence the consumers. 

Social Media Listening and Analytics

How can companies effectively leverage their social media engagement to achieve their marketing objectives? Social media listening enables companies to build timely consumer insights by using analytic tools to tap into different big social data. This social media listening course provides digital marketers with awareness of social media listening, knowledge of different analytic tools for Big Data from social interactions, as well as, experience of developing insights from their social media activities. Additionally, this course equips participants with the knowledge and skills to investigate existing business operational data to continually develop innovative marketing insights and new solutions for marketing decisions. Students will be exposed to various data modeling techniques using real-life business data that will allow them to provide useful predictions such as pricing, consumer trend analysis, and the likes. This course systematically introduces the process of developing a strong business analytic case starting from exploring the data context to finally obtaining the explanatory or predictive results, especially in the context of social media.

Omnichannel Communication

Consumers today are bombarded with many unwanted messages daily. As a result, consumers have become more skeptical, more fragmented and more difficult to reach than before. To effectively engage consumers, it is increasingly important for companies to develop an omnichannel communication strategy.

Omnichannel communication requires marketers to focus on developing an integrated marketing communication plan to reach consumers on all channels effectively and efficiently. To engage customers, companies take into account the platforms and devices their customers use. Information and insights developed are used to develop an integrated omnichannel customer experience by aligning the companies' objectives, design, and messages across all utilised channels.

In this course, students will learn about crafting effective messages and making efficient use of different channels (both traditional and digital channels). By the end of this course, students should not only be familiar with a large body of marketing communication knowledge but should also be able to apply this information to create effective omnichannel communication strategies.

Power of Branding

The brands that a firm has invested in and developed over time are typically their most valuable assets. Product designs, manufacturing processes and other business processes may be easily copied, but a strong brand is something that cannot be easily reproduced. Many Asian companies are coming to terms with the importance of branding and are putting more resources into building a strong brand. This is evident from the number of branding awards (e.g., Singapore Promising Brand Award, Readers’ Digest Most Trusted Brand Award etc.) being handed out in recent years. Companies are also paying top dollars for branding managers. This course aims to inform students about the current theories and findings on how firms manage brands.