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Strategic Marketing Management

Alexander Chernev 27 episodes Latest Aug 20, 2025

Unlock the power of strategic thinking with Alexander Chernev, Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Based on his textbooks Strategic Marketing Management and Marketing Management: Theory and Practice, this foundational course offers a structured, results-driven approach to marketing, positioning it as a value-creation process at the heart of every successful business. The course begins with a comprehensive framework for marketing management, introducing essential concepts such as marketing strategy, tactics, and actionable marketing planning. You’ll then explore the core pillars of strategy — defining target customers, creating compelling customer value propositions, and developing sustainable company value models. The course progresses into tactical execution, covering product and service development, brand building, pricing strategies, promotional campaigns, and distribution channel management. Finally, it focuses on long-term growth, including market expansion strategies, customer experience management, and building lasting customer equity backed by data-driven insights.

Episodes

Marketing as a Core Business Discipline: Beyond Sales and Advertising Aug 20, 2025 28:04 Explore marketing as a strategic discipline focused on creating customer value and driving business growth across all functions. This episode clarifies common misconceptions, distinguishing marketing from sales, advertising, and promotions. Learn how marketing begins before product development and extends beyond the sale, guiding product design, pricing, communication, and distribution. Discover h

Marketing Strategy and Tactics Aug 20, 2025 52:45 Discover how to build an effective marketing strategy by defining your target market, crafting a compelling value proposition, and applying the 3-V market value principle. This episode breaks down the core concepts of strategy and tactics in marketing, highlighting the importance of aligning your offering with customer needs, company objectives, and collaborator interests. Explore how the 5-C fram

The G-STIC Framework for Marketing Management Aug 20, 2025 35:53 Unlock the power of the G-STIC framework to develop and execute a successful marketing action plan. This episode walks through the five core components—Goal, Strategy, Tactics, Implementation, and Control—explaining how each step shapes a company’s ability to create value and adapt to market changes. Learn how to define clear business goals, craft a value-driven strategy, align your tactics, and e

Building a Marketing Action Plan That Drives Results Aug 20, 2025 29:30 Learn how to build an effective marketing plan with key principles, strategic frameworks, and execution tactics that drive business success. This episode outlines the purpose, structure, and essential elements of a marketing plan, emphasizing clarity, relevance, conciseness, and actionability. It explores the G-STIC framework—Goal, Strategy, Tactics, Implementation, and Control—offering detailed g

Strategic Targeting: How to Choose the Right Target Market Aug 20, 2025 43:49 Learn how to identify target customers with strategic and tactical targeting techniques that build competitive advantage and market value. This episode explains the essence of targeting in marketing, showing why selecting the right customer segment is crucial to designing meaningful value propositions. It explores the difference between strategic targeting—focused on customer needs and company val

Tactical Targeting: How to Effectively Reach Your Ideal Customers Aug 20, 2025 33:10 Explore tactical targeting strategies to connect customer value with observable profiles for effective marketing execution. This episode dives into the practical side of targeting—linking unobservable customer needs with demographic, geographic, behavioral, and psychographic traits. Learn how to avoid common pitfalls like shotgun targeting, build customer personas, and approach multiple customer s

Market Segmentation: How to Define Optimal Customer Segments Aug 20, 2025 16:46 Learn how to identify target customers using strategic and tactical segmentation, aligning market needs with business goals for effective targeting. This episode breaks down the essentials of customer segmentation, explaining how differentiation and agglomeration shape market segments. It introduces the distinction between strategic (value-based) and tactical (profile-based) segmentation, showing

Creating Customer Value: Crafting a Meaningful Value Proposition Aug 20, 2025 40:45 Discover how to create customer value through a compelling value proposition that drives competitive advantage and market success. This episode explores the core elements of a value proposition, emphasizing the fit between customer needs and product attributes. Learn the three dimensions of value—functional, psychological, and monetary—and how they influence consumer decisions. The discussion cove

Creating Customer Value: Developing a Winning Positioning Strategy Aug 20, 2025 46:03 Learn how to position your offering to highlight its key benefits and create lasting customer value in a competitive market. This episode explains the strategic role of positioning, showing how it focuses on primary benefits to craft a compelling message. Explore three core strategies—single-benefit, multi-benefit, and holistic positioning—and how each influences consumer perception. Dive into fun

Creating Company Value: The Profit Equation Aug 20, 2025 41:04 Explore how companies create value through strategic offerings, profit optimization, and collaborative partnerships that drive long-term growth. This episode breaks down the dual dimensions of company value—monetary and strategic—and explains how firms use pricing, cost control, and market expansion strategies to maximize profit. It also examines how strategic offerings like free products or loss-

Managing Products: Design, Packaging, and Life Cycle Aug 20, 2025 39:56 Discover how companies manage products to maximize customer value, from design and packaging to the product life cycle and planned obsolescence. This episode explains product management as a value-creation process, covering how product attributes translate into functional, psychological, and monetary benefits. It outlines critical decisions in functionality, aesthetics, guarantees, and packaging,

Managing Services: Value Delivery and Customer Satisfaction Aug 20, 2025 46:35 Learn how service management creates customer value, enhances loyalty, and drives company success through design, delivery, and employee performance. This episode covers how services differ from products and how managers define, guarantee, and deliver service functionality. It explores the importance of employee training, motivation, and empowerment in ensuring consistent service quality, and expl

How Brands Create Value: Brand Power, Brand Equity, and Customer Impact Aug 20, 2025 45:25 Explore how branding creates strategic and monetary value through customer perception, brand equity, and emotional connections. This episode explains how brands go beyond products to create unique mental images, deliver functional, psychological, and monetary benefits, and drive customer loyalty and collaborator partnerships. It highlights the distinction between brand image and reputation, and ho

Managing the Brand: Identity, Architecture, Extensions, and Cobranding Aug 20, 2025 40:21 Learn how to manage brand identity, extend brand value, and strategically grow portfolios through branding strategies like cobranding, repositioning, and extension. This episode explores brand design through identifiers and associations that shape customer perceptions. It covers brand portfolio strategies—umbrella branding, house-of-brands, and cobranding—and analyzes how each impacts visibility,

Managing the Price to Create Market Value Aug 20, 2025 40:18 Master the art of strategic pricing by learning how to create value, segment markets, and influence customer perception through pricing tactics. This episode reveals how price functions as a powerful tool for market value creation, aligning with company goals and customer expectations. It explains key pricing strategies based on the 5-Cs framework, and how price segmentation enables firms to targe

Managing the Price: Cost, Demand, and Competitive Response Aug 20, 2025 39:31 Unlock advanced pricing strategies that align cost structures, demand, and competition to drive long-term profitability and market success. This episode explores how fixed and variable costs, economies of scale and scope, and company goals shape pricing. It breaks down strategic models like penetration, skim, and loss-leader pricing, plus dynamic pricing methods like surge and reverse pricing. Lea

Managing Incentives: Customer Promotions, Trade Deals, and Employee Rewards Aug 20, 2025 01:00:10 Discover how strategic incentives drive sales, influence behavior, and create value for customers, collaborators, and employees. This episode explains how companies use monetary and nonmonetary incentives—from coupons and loyalty programs to volume discounts and employee bonuses—to increase perceived value and boost performance. It breaks down customer-focused promotions, trade incentives for part

Marketing Communication: Strategy, Targeting, and Messaging Aug 20, 2025 32:15 Learn how to manage marketing communication strategically using goal setting, audience targeting, and message design to drive awareness, preference, and action. This episode introduces communication as a value-creation process that supports product, price, and brand efforts. It applies the G-STIC framework—goal, strategy, tactics, implementation, control—to define campaign focus and performance be

Marketing Communication: Choosing the Right Media, Messaging, and Implementation Aug 20, 2025 32:58 Explore how to select media, design creative messaging, and measure the impact of communication campaigns using strategic marketing tools and AI. This episode outlines the four media types—paid, owned, earned, and inbound—highlighting their roles in reaching and engaging target audiences. It explains how to craft compelling creative executions by selecting the right message source, appeal, and com

Managing Distribution Channels: Strategy, Design, and Market Reach Aug 20, 2025 45:47 Learn how to design and manage distribution channels to deliver value, drive customer access, and gain a competitive edge. This episode explores distribution as a strategic tool aligned with product, price, brand, and service. It breaks down direct, indirect, and hybrid channel structures, plus the benefits and drawbacks of working with intermediaries. You'll discover how distribution coverage—exc

Gaining and Defending Market Position Aug 20, 2025 55:38 Explore the four core strategies companies use to strengthen their market position: stealing share, growing the market, penetrating existing markets, and creating entirely new ones. This episode breaks down how businesses can increase market share by attracting competitors’ customers, expanding overall demand, encouraging greater usage among current buyers, or launching new product categories. It

Driving Sales Growth: Optimizing the Adoption Funnel and Closing Usage Gaps Aug 20, 2025 44:28 Learn how to grow sales organically by boosting customer adoption and increasing usage with targeted strategies for sustainable revenue expansion. This episode covers two core approaches to sales growth—increasing new customer adoption and deepening existing customer usage. It introduces the adoption funnel (awareness, attractiveness, availability) and usage funnel (satisfaction, frequency, quanti

Developing New Products and Services: From Idea to Commercial Launch Aug 20, 2025 01:01:17 Discover how companies develop successful new products and services using structured frameworks, prototyping, and market validation. This episode outlines the stage-gate approach for minimizing risk—from idea generation and concept development to business model design, offering creation, and commercial deployment. It explains top-down vs. bottom-up idea generation, the role of realignments and piv

Managing Product Lines: Extensions, Platforms, and Cannibalization Aug 20, 2025 01:06:40 Learn how to manage product lines effectively by balancing growth, differentiation, and profitability across offerings, platforms, and markets. This episode explains how vertical and horizontal extensions, product platforms, and network platforms shape market value for customers, collaborators, and the company. It addresses challenges like customer confusion, rising costs, and product cannibalizat

Managing the Customer Experience: From Touchpoints to Loyalty Drivers Aug 20, 2025 49:45 Explore how to manage the customer experience by identifying key touchpoints, resolving pain points, and delivering consistent value across the journey. This episode defines customer experience as the sum of all interactions with a brand, shaped by functionality, psychological response, and emotional impact. It introduces the customer journey map to visualize stages from need recognition to post-p

Building Customer Equity: Managing Customer Relationships for Growth Aug 20, 2025 33:24 Learn how to build customer equity by fostering loyalty, increasing satisfaction, and managing relationships that create long-term business value. This episode explores the foundations of customer loyalty—psychological and behavioral—and how it translates into financial and strategic advantages. It explains key strategies like reward programs, switching costs, and brand communities to boost retent

Gathering Market Insights Aug 20, 2025 38:29 Discover how to gather valuable market insights using structured research methods to inform strategic decisions and understand customer needs. This episode explains the role of marketing research in reducing uncertainty and guiding product, pricing, and promotional strategies. It covers the three core research designs—exploratory, descriptive, and causal—and when to use each. You'll learn about pr

Strategic Marketing Management

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