Marketing and Brand Communications are becoming two of the most 
important areas in the Marketing field.  Competition and 
technology have made it possible for companies to rapidly 
offset product-based competitive advantages.  As products 
become more homogeneous in the market place, companies attempt 
to influence consumers (or other businesses) to choose their 
products by effectively communicating their value proposition 
and by building strong brands.  In this course, we are going to 
focus on understanding theoretical and practical issues 
underlying marketing communications strategies.  At the end of 
the course, students should expect to understand the tactics 
underlying Marketing communications strategy and how to 
effectively communicate marketing messages across a variety of 
media outlets.

We will focus on four main areas of Marketing Communications:

•	Advertising Creative Strategy:
         Brand Equity, Persuasion and Positioning, Creative  
         Marketing Communications; Theoretical Frameworks 
         Creative Marketing Communications: Appeals and Message
         Strategies, Creative Marketing Communications:  
         Executional Frameworks

•	Promotions and Promotions Opportunity Analysis:
         Promotions (trade), Promotions (consumer)

•	Media Strategy
         Media Planning, Media Measures, Development Indices,  
         Business Experiments, Budgeting and Promotional 
         Analysis, Sales Response Functions

•	Current Issues and Trends in MarCom (e.g., digital 
        media, social media, guerrilla marketing)
         Digital and Social Media, Allocating Social Media 
         Budget, Non-traditional Marketing, Growing via Non- 
         traditional MarCom