Overview
Course overview
Marketing is no longer just a communications function. It is a core driver of commercial strategy. This short course gives managers and marketing professionals a rigorous grounding in strategic marketing, covering the frameworks and concepts that underpin effective market positioning and growth. Topics include consumer insight, market segmentation, competitive differentiation, brand strategy, pricing, digital marketing integration and marketing performance measurement. Learners develop the ability to think about marketing strategically, connect it to business objectives and make decisions that create real commercial value.
What you will study
Establish the strategic foundations of marketing, covering the evolution of marketing thinking, the relationship between marketing and competitive strategy, and the core frameworks that define how organisations create, communicate and capture value in their chosen markets.
Apply strategic marketing frameworks to your own organisation's market context. Assess your current marketing positioning, identify the strategic gaps and develop a clearer view of where marketing can most effectively drive competitive advantage and commercial growth.
Examine the marketing strategies of organisations that have achieved enduring competitive advantage, analysing the insight, positioning choices and execution disciplines that made them effective and extracting lessons applicable to your own context.
Master the analytical tools used in strategic marketing: the marketing mix, SWOT and PESTEL analysis, the Ansoff growth matrix, the BCG portfolio matrix and brand equity frameworks. Learn how to deploy each tool in a way that informs rather than mechanically drives decisions.
Build a strategic marketing plan for your organisation or a specific product and market. Define your target segments, positioning strategy, channel mix, key messages and the metrics you will use to evaluate whether the strategy is working.
Develop the ability to measure marketing effectiveness and communicate its commercial impact. Learn how to design marketing measurement frameworks, evaluate channel performance and present marketing ROI in terms that are credible to senior leadership and finance.
Learn how to segment markets rigorously and select the segments where your organisation has the strongest right to win. Covers demographic, psychographic, behavioural and needs-based segmentation approaches and how to choose the segmentation that best drives strategic clarity.
Develop a clear, defensible competitive position: a deliberate choice about who you serve, what you offer and why you are meaningfully different from alternatives. Learn how to test your positioning for credibility and relevance and how to communicate it consistently.
Learn how to design integrated marketing campaigns that connect strategic objectives to specific customer actions. Covers campaign architecture, channel selection, message hierarchy, timing, budget allocation and the metrics that define campaign success.
Build a practical framework for measuring marketing return on investment across channels and campaigns. Covers attribution models, marketing mix modelling, customer lifetime value analysis and how to present marketing effectiveness data in a way that drives better investment decisions.
Who is this for?
Marketing professionals seeking to move into strategic roles, managers with responsibility for commercial growth and business leaders who want a stronger grasp of how marketing creates and sustains competitive advantage.
Learning outcome
Learners leave with a strategic marketing framework, the ability to develop and evaluate marketing strategies for specific markets and audiences, and the commercial vocabulary to contribute to senior business discussions.
Assessment and delivery style
Teaching is designed to be interactive, applied and professionally relevant. Activities may include case discussion, guided exercises, workplace examples, short presentations, reflective planning and tutor-led feedback.
