MSc Strategic Marketing

Before the start of your programme you will be expected to complete online pre-study modules which are delivered via The Hub, our bespoke virtual learning environment. These include primers in key areas including Maths, Data Analysis, Accounting, Study Skills, and Marketing Fundamentals as well as Plagiarism Awareness. These modules do not contribute to the calculation of the final award but are designed to provide students with a common base of knowledge before starting the programme.

Your MSc Strategic Marketing induction will be spent at our vibrant South Kensington campus in London. You will be invited to a welcome event where you can meet and network with your fellow students, distinguished faculty and dedicated programme staff, forging new connections and getting a taste of life at Imperial. 

The growth in collaborative business models, digital innovation and structural shifts in developing markets have accelerated in recent years. To succeed in today’s fast-changing global marketplace, marketing leaders need to deliver winning strategies that engage consumers, accelerate new market success, outperform competitors and embrace disruptive economic models.

This module will teach you the skills to understand shareholder interests and the levers available to drive growth and profit. You will be able to deliver outcomes using practical, applied techniques used by strategy and marketing consultants and industry professionals alike. By drawing on contemporary examples, you will gain the tools to solve a growth challenge. Bring on disruption – you will be ready for it.

In this module, you will develop an in-depth understanding of consumer behaviour through the cutting-edge ideas that are gaining prominence in academia. You will apply these key concepts to develop and evaluate marketing strategies– to ultimately – predict and change consumer behaviour. Learn via case discussions, guest lectures, experimental demonstrations and projects.

Digital media and the Internet have had a huge impact on marketing practice in recent years, dramatically changing how marketers communicate and interact with consumers, as well as what consumers expect from their relationship with a company. As digital technologies continue to develop in terms of speed, availability and functionality, marketing strategies need to be integrated with digital and interactive tools and practices.

In this module, you will learn how to utilise the latest tools and technologies to identify new opportunities for strategic marketing and analyse online customer behaviour. Search optimisation, paid search, mobile marketing, social media, online advertising, email marketing and e-CRM– you will develop a firm grasp on all of these digital tools. Applying these skills to real examples, you will be able to integrate digital marketing into a communication and marketing plan and unlock a greater level of customer value.

This module deals with two key financial aspects: first, how to price products and services strategically, and second, understanding critical topics in financial management from a marketing point of view. The module will equip you with the pricing and financial skills required to become effective marketers and future business leaders, improve cross-functional role and communication skills, and maximise strategic influence within the firm.

Market research is vital to making informed decisions and formulating effective marketing plans. This module examines problem formulation, research design, data collection, data analysis, and interpretation of market research results. You will gain the practical skills to design, analyse, interpret and critically evaluate market research studies. This is an important skill for an integrated marketing strategy – market research complements marketing analytics and big data analytics to help solve business problems.

Today’s marketing is not just an art; it requires the use of data and quantitative approaches to support marketing strategies in rapidly changing offline and online environments. This module will equip you with the skills to evaluate marketing strategies by measuring effectiveness and profit generation. You will develop a complex understanding of how to derive insights from data using models and tools, including digital analytics tools for web and social media, and advertising and campaign metrics.

Taking a very hands-on approach with real datasets and cases, you will learn how best to apply these analytical techniques to effectively understand customer needs. The goal is not to be a statistician, but to equip you with analytical thinking and a set of applied quantitative marketing skills so that you are best prepared to succeed in the workplace.

The profitability of a business increasingly depends on two factors: its ability to build and sustain strong relationships with customers and other key stakeholders, and the quality of the services it provides customers. Relationship management is critically important in any industry and is an essential skill for you to master as a marketing professional.

This module equips you with the skills to manage relationships for superior financial performance – focusing on relationships with external customers – consumers, buyers, agents – and internal customers – employees, colleagues, different functional areas and departments. You will gain powerful insights, best practices, and the latest ideas on how to manage relationships for profit, how to sustain trust and loyalty over time, and how to deliver outstanding customer service quality. Using CRM technology, you will discover best practices and innovations in loyalty and service management.

How do brands create value for customers and for the organisations that manage them? This module covers building, measuring and managing elements of the marketing mix to build brand equity.

To excel as a senior level marketer, you must possess a clear understanding of the concepts needed to craft and execute strategy, along with sound knowledge of how to apply financial and operational principles. This module will introduce you to frameworks and real-world examples in marketing strategy, including future thinking, sustainable design, creation of new markets and the diffusion of innovation as key topics.  

Equipped with the skills to formulate and execute market-relevant and financially sound strategies for an organisation, you will be able to take an overall view of its future direction and the potential hurdles it faces. Case studies will help to sharpen your skills in identifying strategic challenges for a range of different companies, and to evaluate the options open to senior marketing managers in these contexts. 

The goal of this module is to enhance your ability to perform transparent, rigorous, and convincing data analytics. You will learn advanced marketing analytic methods with a focus on "big data" methods and experimentation and causal inference through A/B testing. Based on these methods, you will learn how to select the best empirical strategy for solving a specific business challenge.

Customers are the most valuable assets of a firm. Many firms have a staggering amount of data on their customers' browsing and buying behaviour, but only few of them have the expertise to use such information and guide their customer engagement strategies. Blending theory with practical examples and case studies, this module aims to (i) provide an overview of key areas in customer engagement and (ii) deliver a set of analytical tools for effective customer management. Students will learn how to use a series of marketing frameworks and data analytics to make informed decisions and influence customers hearts, minds and sales.

When we hear “crisis management,” we think of global scandals, business disruptions and tragedies. Leaders need to be prepared for those acute incidents, but also for serial challenges, chronic issues, and for smaller, but still significant, threats to brand reputation, employee morale, and shareholder value. This is not just a concern for an organisation’s PR function, no matter where you work in your future career, you will have to effectively manage a crisis at work.

This module will develop the skills to explain, evaluate, describe and appraise crisis management through the temporal phases of crisis: before, during, and after. Learning from the common mistakes in real case studies, you will develop the best crisis management practices, as well learn the financial considerations and realities when in crisis.

Emerging technologies such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things offer businesses the unique opportunity to differentiate in a highly competitive brand market by creating immersive experiences for their customers and becoming influencer in their industry. This module will give an overview of the current trends and technologies that are likely to affect the marketing world and delve into tools and techniques that can be used to utilise them within the core development of strategic marketing of the business.

Business is a global workplace – if you want to operate successfully in this environment, you have to be international. This module deals with the major issues faced by companies in international business and marketing. A central theme is a continuing need to balance the competing dimensions of local adaptation and global integration, which means that international managers can neither fully adapt to the demands of local markets nor fully apply globally standardised models.

The challenge in international business is how to reconcile local and global demands from both inside and outside the company. You will develop the skills needed to navigate the dilemma of recognising international differences in culture and behaviour while avoiding stereotyping. Special attention will be paid to strategies for and from emerging markets.

The study of leadership is about how to better manage the challenges we face motivating and inspiring people. At its most basic, it’s about making things happen in an organisation in a constructive way. It’s not about wasting our energy trying to change who we are. Instead, it’s about finding new and better ways of ‘being ourselves’ through enhanced insight and new skills.

In order to make you more effective as a leader, this module will help you become aware of your personality and other traits in order to make you more effective through diagnosis (questionnaire assessment exercises), insight (introspection and reflection of one’s traits, habits, and behaviours) and self-development (plans to adapt and change to tackle future challenges), as well as introduce you to new skills useful in dealing with common leadership challenges and dilemmas.

As data has become one of the most important forces shaping all the business fields now, firms are increasingly seeking marketing experts with sufficient technical background to make effective data-driven marketing decisions. This module takes a very hands-on approach with real data sets and cases, exposing you to a range of digital marketing problems dealt with various analytical tools, including machine learning. The goal is to equip you with analytical thinking and a set of applied quantitative marketing skills so that you are best prepared to succeed in the workplace. The module is practically focussed, and the extensive use of case studies will help you understand the big-picture of marketing analytics.

This module will focus on the key strategic marketing issues facing organisations. Through this module, you will refresh and deepen your awareness of key marketing tenets, acquire an advanced knowledge of strategic marketing, develop analytical skills, be able to think critically about strategic marketing, and be able to make strategic decisions to deal with specific business situations. 

This module exposes students to the evidence of how brands grow (and decline) and reveals the metrics that matter when aiming to build bigger and more profitable brands. Over fifty years of research based on buying behaviour data has been sourced from over 170 categories of goods and services from across the world which includes over 3,000 brands. This has revealed ‘law like’ patterns in customers’ buying behaviour that apply to both B2C and B2B businesses and from products to services. These law like patterns also apply to start-ups and new entrants into established categories.

Students will learn to look for these patterns in data (which may not be obvious); learn what these ‘law like’ patterns are and why they are important; which marketing metrics they give rise to, and what the strategic implications are for brands and for businesses as a whole. 

Great marketing requires great innovation and innovation is a skill that can be taught. This module explores fundamental and cutting-edge innovation concepts, principles, ideas and theories. You will be exposed to and explore the latest thinking in service design and innovation tools, as well as effective innovation management strategies.

Learn how solutions can be designed and brought to market for products and digital services, as well as develop the skills to appraise a business’ future market orientation, willingness to cannibalise, asymmetric incentives and management of risk. Learn this by examining case studies of marketing innovation efforts that have failed vs succeeded.

Sustainability is not just a buzzword. It is a rapidly evolving concept beyond the financial performance of firms. It emphasises marketing’s role in the welfare of the world’s other stakeholders and institutions. More specifically, sustainable marketing is a major area of social marketing – marketing for the public good.

This module develops a general management viewpoint in planning and evaluating sustainable marketing decisions, from both strategic and tactical perspectives. By appraising the global challenges for sustainable products and corporate actions, you will develop the skills to create and launch a sustainability marketing plan.

The Applied Strategic Marketing Report is a 5,000-word unsupervised report on a relevant strategic marketing topic. You will be able to choose from a number of report titles that reflect marketing issues and trends discussed throughout the programme.

The Case Study module aims to contribute to the development of managerial potential by applying problem-solving techniques to complex and challenging marketing problems. The emphasis is on developing skills in addressing a real marketing case study, drawing on the knowledge and skills achieved in the entire programme.  

Students are required to analyse a company or brand of their choice using the tools, concepts and theories covered in the MSc modules. This requires identifying a range of marketing issues and analysing them using relevant data and theory. 

This module offers you the opportunity to apply, integrate, and extend your entire knowledge and skills gained from all previous modules by developing a detailed go-to-market strategy for a new offering (product and/or service) of your choice. 

Students wishing to study a doctoral programme after this programme may undertake a research project, with approval from the Academic Director. This constitutes a small piece of research, with an analytical focus, that presents a major opportunity for you to revise and integrate what you have learned on the MSc programme so far. It will also allow you to demonstrate that you can apply your theoretical knowledge to a real-world context.

You will act in a consulting capacity, applying your knowledge developed throughout the programme to the solution of a real business issue. You will work with a corporate sponsor who will present a challenge facing their business and they will provide feedback on your proposed solutions. 

Some of the companies that our students have worked with on a consulting project include: 

Barclaycard 

eBay 

Givenchy 

Jaguar Land Rover 

Johnson & Johnson 

Unilever 

Virgin Media 

Yahoo 

This module aims to contribute to the development of your managerial potential by applying problem solving techniques to a challenging business situation in which you are fully immersed. The focus is on developing your skills in managing real business and executing marketing tasks in one specific business context, drawing on the knowledge and skills achieved in other modules of the MSc Strategic Marketing programme. The module will give you the opportunity to experience and operate in a real-world corporate situation.

If you opt to take the Work Placement module you will need to find your own placement. The work placement should be for one month or longer and can be held at a UK-based or international company or organisation.

The optional Global Exchanges programme allows you to increase your international exposure and build your network by taking advantage of specialised electives at one of our partner schools.

Please note, this module will require you to pay additional costs.