Sponsor a Marketing Lab Project

• Opportunity to interact with future marketing talent
• Data-driven analysis and recommendations, including:
• Regular interaction with student team
• Formal presentation of final recommendations to company managers
• Annotated PowerPoint deck containing results from all phases of the project
• Primary and secondary research findings, including quantitative survey results

Marketing in the new economy requires strategic and tactical decisions to be made with a high level of precision, at a more granular level and quicker than ever before. Decisions in various marketing functions (including advertising, promotions, pricing and even product design) are now made based on or with the help of data and analytic algorithms. 

In this class, students explore the use of such algorithmic tools in furthering a firm’s digital (and non-digital) marketing goals. In particular, students focus on methods to capture a consumer’s digital footprint and the algorithms used to use this data to tailor, improve and optimize the firm’s marketing investments.

Companies today expect their marketing professionals to understand what it takes to design, execute and manage digital marketing strategies and campaigns. In addition, marketing professionals, in both B2B and B2C environments, are expected to have an understanding of how to select, deploy and use a variety of marketing software platforms services, including advertising (AdTech), content marketing, marketing and sales automation, websites, social media, sales intelligence, and analytics dashboards. The best way to gain such expertise is for these professionals to actually build and execute specific digital marketing programs/strategies using various MarTech platforms in a lab environment.

This lab course takes students through the hands-on process of designing and executing specific digital marketing program components. 

Students work hands-on with a set of key MarTech platforms and tools, complemented by background reading materials that include papers on strategy and techniques, blogs, posts, articles, specific platform user-manuals, and other ‘how-to’ documents. In each session, students spend a third of the time on concepts, tools and techniques, and focus the rest of the session on working hands-on designing, building, measuring, optimizing, and evaluating various types of digital content and campaigns.

Marketing platforms and tools students work with include those for creating and managing:

• Digital presence
• Content and SEO
• Paid search and social media advertising
• Marketing sales funnel management
• Analytics

By the end of the course, students will learn how to utilize key MarTech platforms and tools to build out digital marketing programs, and by so doing, they will develop a deep understanding of what it really takes to design and execute digital marketing strategies and campaigns on their own.

In this course, students develop new products or service innovations for a particular category and target consumer. Types of projects suitable for the New Product Innovation Lab include:

• Mobile-app concepts
• New category entries
• Next-generation products/services
• Line extensions
• New service experiences

Each project consists of three phases:

1. Opportunity identification (using qualitative and secondary research)
2. Idea generation, screening, and new concept development
3. Concept testing (quantitative) and recommendations for top three new product/service concepts

A $5,000 donation covers program costs for quantitative research and faculty coach honorariums. Additional projects during the same academic year are $3,500 per project. Here are the steps to take to become a sponsor:

1. Company completes project charter for Marketing Research or New Product Development.
2. Kilts Center reviews project charter and discusses questions with company.
3. Company reviews project with faculty coach prior to start of the class.