·       Strategic decisions: Nature of strategy, the marketing strategy interface, difference between marketing planning and strategic planning

·       Identifying the market: The five C framework-customer, company, collaborator, competitor, context

·        The 7 tactics of Marketing mix: Product, service, brand, price, incentives, communication and distribution

·       Business Model and Strategic Marketing Planning: Meaning, Role of Business models in marketing management, Strategies for developing a business models: top-down business model generation, bottom up business model generation, The G-STIC frame work for marketing planning: Goal-Strategy-Tactics-Implementation-control

·       Identifying Target Customers: Factors to be considered while targeting, targeting strategies-One for all strategy, one for each strategy, Strategic Targeting criteria: target attractiveness, target compatibility

·       Essential strategic assets for target compatibility: business infrastructure, collaborator networks, human capital, intellectual property, strong brands, established customer base, synergistic offerings, access to scarce resources and capital.

·       Creating Customer Value through Positioning: Role of strategic positioning, strategic positioning options: The quality option, value option, the pioneer, a narrow product focus, target segment focus; strategies for creating superior customer value.

·       Creating Company Value: Understanding Company Value: Monetary, functional and psychological value; strategically managing profits–increasing sales revenue-through volume, optimizing price, lowering costs

·       Creating Collaborator Value: Meaning of collaborators, collaboration as business process, advantages and drawbacks of collaboration, levels of strategic collaboration: explicit, implicit; alternatives to collaboration: horizontal and vertical integration, managing collaborator relations; gaining collaborator power: offering differentiation; collaborator size, strategic importance, switching costs

·       Managing New Products: Forecasting new product demand using Primary Data and secondary data: offering specific forecasting, forecasting by analogy, category based forecasting.

·       New product adoption: Understanding new product adoption, factors influencing diffusion of new offering, new product development process, managing risk in new products- market risk and technological risk, Moore’s Model of adoption of new technologies, managing product life cycle at various stages, extending Product lifecycle.

·       Managing Product Lines: Managing vertical, upscale, downscale, horizontal product-Line Extensions, Managing Product Line Cannibalization, Managing Product lines to gain and defend market position-The Fighting Brand Strategy, The sandwich strategy, The Good-better-best strategy

·       Brand Tactics: Brand: Meaning, brand identity, brand as value creation process brand hierarchy-Individual and umbrella branding, brand extension: vertical and horizontal, brand equity and brand power, measuring brand equity-cost based approach, market based approach and financial based approach.

·       Managing Promotions and incentives: Promotion mix strategy, Factors affecting strategic decisions in promotion mix, Promotion expenditure strategy, Methods to determine promotion expenditure-Breakdown Method, Buildup Method, Push and Pull promotions.

Managing incentives as a value creation process, Goals of using customer incentives, Monetary incentives for customers, Non monetary incentives for customers.

Collaborator incentives meaning, monetary incentives-slotting allowance, stocking allowance, cooperative advertising allowance, market development allowance, display allowance, spiffs

·       Managing distribution: Distribution as value creation process, distribution channel design process- Channel structure: Direct, indirect and hybrid channel; channel coordination- common ownership, contractual relationship, implicit channel coordination; channel type, channel coverage, channel exclusivity

·       Strategic Growth Management: Gaining market position: strategies to gain market position: steal share strategy, market growth strategy, market innovation strategy; Pioneering new markets: Meaning, Types of Pioneers: technology, product, business model, markets; benefits and drawbacks of being a Pioneer.

·       Defending market position: Strategies to defend market position- ignoring competitors’ action, repositioning the existing offer- repositioning to increase value for current customers, repositioning to attract new customers.