Content

Organizations’ reason of existence are the solutions they deliver in the form of services, products and even ideas. The success of an organization depends on the extent to which these solutions are tailored to the customer and thus create value for the customer. If not, the customer will go elsewhere. Without marketing activities, there is no organization, and so also no HR department, financial department, logistics, and so on. Marketing is about putting the customer at the heart of your organization and thus about integrating the customer’s view into the organization. Marketing is often narrowed down to advertising and commercials, but there is a lot more to it.

The general objective of this course is to introduce students to the different facets of the exiting marketing field so that, in the end, students have a clear idea of the insights and skills that marketers need to become successful today as well as in the future. After following this course, students are able to recognize, explain, and illustrate a lot of key marketing concepts as well as apply these to practice. In doing so, students will be encouraged to adopt a constructive yet critical attitude. After all, students are also customers of various organizations, even of our very own KU Leuven. This critical attitude also relates to the fact that students will, throughout this course, be encouraged to critically reflect upon the insights that are offered and will be challenged to look for possible linkages between the various concepts, theories and insights that are part of the various course modules.

This course consists of some building blocks and corresponding modules in which students not only become familiar with the fundamentals of marketing, but also and mainly with the most current and important trends and insights from an ever changing marketing context. The course content will mainly focus on:

• Fundamentals of marketing
• The future of marketing
• Marketing of services
• Customer experience
• Digital marketing
• Socially responsible marketing
• Leadership (skills) & marketing
• Branding
• Marketing in a network economy
• Retail & e-commerce

Course material

• No textbook is being used for this course.
• The study material is diverse, although in most of the modules online knowledge clips are being used. In such a clip, concepts, theories and insights are being explained by the lecturer or another expert/guest speaker, often illustrated by means of various examples. These knowledge clips are almost always recorded in a professional recording studio and are to be processed via an adaptive learning path (see ‘format: more information’) at your own pace.
• Knowledge clips are offered via Toledo, accompanied by slides, exercises, short assignments (not graded), cases, sample exam questions and/or some extra reading/viewing work (for example an academic paper, video clip, YouTube clip, blog or professional report).
• For the purpose of this course, also some podcasts were being developed by the lecturer.
• Study material is often based on academic research and thus scientific papers. These academic papers are most of the time explained in the online knowledge clips and can, if needed, be read as background information.
• In each module, it’s clear for students what they can expect from the module as well as what is expected from them.

Language of instruction: more information

Dutch

Remark: Take into account that study material can be in English. For instance, English is the language being used in almost all academic papers.

Format: more information

In the marketing course, online learning activities are combined with face-to-face learning activities. At the start of the course, it will be clearly communicated with classes are used for online learning activities and which for face-to-face learning activities.

A first format thus consists of online learning activities. These online learning activities relate to the various modules (see ‘content’) that are provided online via the Toledo platform. In such a module, an adaptive learning path is being used. This means that the various parts of module will be released step by step. Students will only be able to see the next part of a module once they have completed the previous part. Suppose, for example, that a module consists of several knowledge clips, then the second clip can only be viewed once the first clip has been watched. Students can process these adaptive learning paths at their own pace. During such an adaptive learning path, students can be asked to participate in an online discussion via the Toledo discussion forum.

A second format consists of face-to-face learning activities. These activities take place live, either on campus or online. At the start of the course, it will be clearly communicated which activities will take place online and which will take place on campus. These live face-to-face moments will be mainly used for guest lectures, but possibly also for reflection, questions, debate as well as the discussion of exercises, cases and sample exam questions. Students may be asked to prepare for this live interaction.

This course accounts for 3 credits. A credit is a unit used to express the study load of a course. By assigning credits to a course, the study hours the target student is expected to spend on the learning activities of this course becomes clear. Each credit represents 25 to 30 hours of study for the target student. Study refers to all learning activities, such as watching knowledge clips, reading a text or making exercises. Since the marketing course accounts for 3 credits, students are expected to spend 75 up to 90 hours in total. This study load was taken into account when designing the marketing course.