Mk 4900 Course Information - Marketing Problems

MK 4900 Course Information Document

Spring Semester 2011

This is a CTW (Critical Thinking Through Writing) Course. MK 4900, Marketing Problems, is the capstone course in the Marketing major. The role of the course is to hone your marketing decision-making skills and to further your indoctrination as a marketing professional. It is often said that "Marketing is easy to understand but hard to do." An important goal of this course is to provide you with an opportunity to make marketing management decisions and fully appreciate that marketing is, in fact, hard to do. Case analysis is the dominant pedagogy used in the course and it is probably the best teaching tool for business because it provides actual marketing decision-making experience. Originally introduced at Harvard Business School almost a hundred years ago, case analysis requires critical thinking. Case analysis demands that you make marketing decisions by using the same information that the actual decision-makers had to work with. Cases have a lot of information in them. What must you focus on? What, if anything, can you afford to ignore? Not all the information needed for a sound case analysis will be in the text of the case itself. Critically important information will be in tables, graphs, charts, etc. in the case. Or it may not be there at all. You may have to create it. Analysis and synthesis will be necessary. You may have to combine information from different parts of the case to gain the insights you need. You might need to be creative. New options, not explicitly mentioned in the case, may need to be created and evaluated. Assumptions will need to be made. Cases do a great job of demonstrating that the real world is complex, messy and ambiguous. But all is not lost. There are ways to structure the messiness and impose order on the apparent chaos. There are ways to address the ambiguity. Critical thinking and creative problem solving and the use of templates and tools from other courses will all come into play. You will need to apply the concepts and tools that you have been exposed to in other classes when appropriate. Education should be cumulative. Bring whatever tools you know of to bear on the case assignments. Form study groups with your classmates. Meet regularly in the study groups to discuss the cases and to kick ideas around. But remember that the actual write-up of the case assignments must be your own work.

Written case assignments will be a significant component of your grade. The case studies used in the course are detailed (typically 10 -12 pages including tables, graphs, charts, etc.). All the cases we will analyze describe real marketing decision situation that actually occurred. Each case contains the exact information that the actual decision-maker had available to them in making their decision. No fictitious cases will be used in this class.