As a career-switcher moving from psychology to marketing, Booth’s marketing coursework has been important for giving me the knowledge and skills I need to transition successfully to a new career. Although I have enjoyed many of my courses at Booth, I want to highlight my favorite courses here (in no particular order).
Developing New Products and Services with Professor Art Middlebrooks
Developing New Products and Services instilled in me a passion for innovation. In this lab course, groups of 5 students work on real-world, company-sponsored projects, all under the guidance of Professor Middlebrooks, the Executive Director of the Kilts Center for Marketing. Specifically, students work to identify innovation opportunities, generate ideas for innovation, develop new product or service concepts, test those concepts with consumers, generate forecasts for concepts, and present a business case to the client. This process of discovering an unmet need in the market and developing a product to meet that need was thrilling to me. I felt like we had discovered something that no one else knew about. I also liked the idea that the product that my team created might actually generate revenue for the client.
This class was my first opportunity to manage a client relationship as part of a team. We had some successes and some bumps in the road, but it was a great situation in which to learn my role on teams. In addition, I learned when to take control and when to relax both with my team and with a client. This class taught me just as much about teamwork as it did about developing new products.
Pricing Strategies with Professor Jean-Pierre Dubé
The course description for Pricing Strategies reads, “This course combines cases and homework to teach students how to design and execute pricing strategies.” That sounds simple enough, right? I thought so, but, as it turns out, pricing is a complicated issue that many firms get wrong. Without this course, I could never have imagined all of the factors that need to be considered when setting a price. Luckily, Professor Dubé is very skilled at explaining how to think about pricing strategies. I must admit that, at times, I struggled with the course material, which requires a firm understanding of both microeconomics and statistics. However, I worked closely with my classmates to understand the concepts, which are now much clearer to me. In fact, I recently held my own in a conversation with my brother-in-law who works in pricing!
Data Driven Marketing with Professor Günter Hitsch
Data Driven Marketing was the most useful course in preparing me for my internship. During the course, I learned about important sources of marketing data and how to use data to answer marketing questions. Assignments typically required the use of regression analysis to answer questions like “By how much do promotional activities in retail stores boost sales?” Or, “Is it possible to reduce customer churn through targeted incentives?” As a bonus, Professor Hitsch frequently incorporated funny anecdotes on topics such as chocolate and vodka into the course material.
When I arrived at my brand management internship over the summer, I was asked to analyze the brand development of V8 juice nationally. I went immediately to my Data Driven Marketing notes and developed a plan of attack. My manager was impressed by both my knowledge of the marketing concepts and my analytical approach.
