Customers buy value, not products, services or features. They buy from the company that provides the most value. And they buy what is in their best interest. Consequently, a company should not market a product or service but a best value proposition to a most appropriate market. Especially through channel and brand management, marketing additionally leverages this value creation process. In this course, you learn how to set up value-based marketing strategies to target value-seeking customers across international markets. You develop an analytical framework to assess value-based marketing strategies as well as expand your capabilities of assessing and designing these strategies in a real-life managerial context. Complementary, you develop a wide range of skills to analyse marketing practice in a real-life context, including interviewing, team and time management, and managerial reporting.

This course elabourates the logical steps of value-based marketing. First, you learn how to identify the value expectations of target and future customers. Fitting these expectations to a firm’s market offerings, you learn how to formulate value propositions for business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets. The course further focuses on how marketing management may leverage the value proposition to the customer. You study how channel members enforce the value proposition mainly through supply coordination and increased customer connectedness. You learn how branding strategies may enhance value to the customer. Finally, we emphasize price setting of value popositions. Apart from challenging tutorial sessions, the most important learning environment is the value based marketing project you perform in a small group for a real-life enterprise.

State-of-the art literature published in the leading marketing journals. A detailed literature list will be available online (Eleum).

All students who are admitted to the Master of Science in International Business can follow this course.
This course assumes intermediate knowledge of marketing strategy and customer behaviour.