Executive Education

Marketing Is More Than Advertising and Sales
As a non-marketing manager, your understanding of marketing concepts and the role marketing plays in your organization is critical to the success of both technical and product development projects.

Yet, many non-marketing managers do not have a working knowledge of marketing principles or the marketing strategies and tactics that are necessary to make good technical decisions.

The MIT Sloan School of Management is ideally placed to teach these skills to professionals like you. Much of the teaching and research of our award-winning Marketing Group focuses on issues that are relevant to the challenges facing non-marketing professionals. We offer a unique opportunity to understand the science of marketing and to make a more informed contribution to the role that marketing plays in the success of your organization.

Our two-day program, Strategic Marketing for the Technical Executive, provides a new perspective on the relationship between marketing and technology. It is drawn from our popular and highly-rated MBA course on strategic marketing and shows how you can leverage marketing concepts and research to better influence the outcomes of product development and project management.

Led by Professor Duncan Simester, the head of the MIT Sloan Marketing Group, you will take part in a series of interactive lectures, case examples and hands-on, small-team exercises that will help you to understand:

• how to anticipate and take advantage of surprising inconsistencies in the customer decision process
• how to evaluate market attractiveness and select target markets
• how to manage the tradeoff between risk and information in the product development process
• the keys to concept testing
• a structure for thinking about the design and management of distribution channels
• why pricing decisions are complex and how they get made
• how to manage an advertising campaign

About the MIT Sloan School Marketing Department
Marketing faculty at MIT Sloan are a dynamic team that studies and helps define market practices for businesses around the globe. They are widely renowned for their rigorous scientific approach to helping managers implement change. 

The research is inter-disciplinary, using methods drawn from economics, operations research and psychology. It has led to numerous awards and recognition, including a recent Nobel prize nomination.

The department's research program includes work on customer satisfaction, competitive pricing, optimal design of product decisions, channel relationships, customer incentives and competitive marketing strategy.

Who Should Attend
This program has been developed for general and technical executives and key members of their staff who are responsible for project management of new product design, development and distribution. This includes senior engineering, R&D, product development, project management, IT and manufacturing managers.

Learning Process
This program has been designed to take the mystery out of marketing for non-marketing managers. It provides a comprehensive roadmap of the science of marketing. By the end of the program you will better understand:

• Customers
• Marketing Strategy
• Product Development and Concept Testing
• Distribution Channel Management
• Pricing
• Advertising

Marketing is not just selling or advertising. It is a rigorous, disciplined science that applies a reasoned framework to the assessment of consumer needs, market segmentation, product design, branding, advertising, channel management and pricing. As a non-marketing manager in this program, you will learn to look at marketing problems through the lens of an analytical framework that will help you better understand:

• what information you can provide to improve marketing strategy, and tactics, and when your technical decisions should reflect marketing issues
• how to collect customer data to support the product development process
• how to communicate more effectively with the marketing team

Program Faculty
Duncan Simester is Associate Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the head of the Marketing Group at MIT Sloan and is an expert on how economic theory, statistics and operation research can contribute to the understanding and practice of marketing.

Professor Simester teaches the Strategic Marketing course at Sloan. This is among the the most popular and highly rated courses in the Sloan MBA program. Prior to joining MIT Professor Simester taught at the University of Chicago. He holds a PhD in Management Science from MIT. He also has a law degree and graduate and undergraduate degrees in commerce from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Professor Simester has published widely and has won several awards for his research. He is on the Editorial Board of Marketing Science and is an Area Editor at Management Science.