Marketing and Business Strategy (MBS)
The Department of Marketing and Business Strategy is responsible for the provision of teaching, research and knowledge transfer for every aspect of marketing and business strategy. By marketing, we mean everything from consumer research to identify and quantify consumers’ needs and wants, to the satisfaction of those needs through product development, branding, pricing, distribution, retail, online, and marketing communications including traditional and the latest in digital online interactive and mobile advertising and promotion. “Business strategy” encompasses business policy, strategy dynamics, future studies, scenario planning, sustainability, innovation, entrepreneurship, international business, global markets, and change implementation.
The Department consists of some 38 permanent staff and 30 visiting lecturers, all from a variety of backgrounds in terms of experience, education and geography. Recent recruits have joined us from Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan. Other countries represented by colleagues include Malaysia, Lithuania, South Africa, the USA, India, Thailand and Nigeria. Many marketing and strategy lecturers are former senior practitioners or consultants from a broad range of industries, and came into lecturing to “give back”. Other colleagues have impeccable academic credentials: we are a serendipitous mix of experience and theory.
Teaching
The Department is responsible for the MA/MSc Marketing Management, which grew out of the first ever postgraduate qualification in marketing in the UK, and the MA Marketing Communications, also one of the first such degrees in the UK. These two dynamic and constantly evolving courses attract students from all over the world.
We tutor post-experience students through Stage 1 of the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing.
All of these degrees were developed in close collaboration with the Chartered Institute of Marketing, and successful students gain appropriate exemptions from the CIM qualifications.
Last year three new undergraduate honours degrees in marketing were validated. These are:
In total, members of the department are collectively responsible for the delivery of some 500 weekly events and something like 15,000 hours of teaching over the course of the year. We supply over 30 general and specialist modules in the marketing and business strategy area to the School's postgraduate and undergraduate business studies programmes.
Undergraduates taking the marketing degrees, or just appropriate marketing modules in their final year and students taking the postgraduate degrees are entitled to exemptions from the Chartered Institute of Marketing qualifications. MA Marketing Communications students who take and pass the Direct Marketing module are eligible for the Certificate in Direct Marketing of the Institute of Direct Marketing, and are exempt from any further assessment apart from an examination set and marked by the IDM, which is held at Westminster Business School, in June each year.
Research
Many marketing and strategy lecturers here are former senior practitioners or consultants. As a result we have in the past placed greater emphasis on practitioner-led research and consultancy. Frank Auton, formerly Regional Vice President of the European Division of SB Pharmaceuticals, teaches consumer behaviour to undergrad marketing students, and on the MA Marketing Management and the MA Marketing Communications. Frank has published in Economic Affairs and the International Journal of Advertising on the direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. Richard West, who teaches Sales Promotion on the MA Marketing Communications, is a regular contributor to professional marketing magazines such as Marketing and Marketing Week. His interest in sales promotion and customer loyalty has led to a close working relationship with the Institute of Promotional Marketing. A market research event, funded by the IPM, was recently held at the School to study how shoppers react emotionally and ‘engage’ with particular known brand promotions, by monitoring and analysing viewer eye tracking, fixation and dilation. Linked to this an event was held for agencies and brands interested in understanding this evidence-based approach to promotional marketing. The project clearly has potential for practitioner research, knowledge transfer and academic publication. Neil Botten has published a number of strategic management teaching cases focusing on a variety of organisations and industries. His most recent publications include a case study on Ratners for the book Relationship Marketing - Strategy and Implementation, by Helen Peck, Adrian Payne, Martin Christopher and Moira Clark; Competitive Strategies for Service Organisations, Macmillan Press in 2000; and Management Accounting – Business Strategy, Elsevier, 2006, Business Strategy – CIMA Revision cards, Elsevier 2006 (the business strategy e-learning material to be found on the Elsevier web site), and Strategic Supply Chain Management, Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply, 2006.
A strong and growing nucleus of people concentrates on academic research in marketing and business strategy. Several staff are on editorial review panels for journals such as the Journal of Advertising Research, the Journal of Marketing Management, Marketing Education Review, the Asian Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Doing Business Across Borders. Members regularly review for the International Journal of Advertising, the International Journal of Management Education, the Journal of Marketing Education, the Journal of Direct and Interactive Marketing, Marketing Education SIG, the BMAF and for conferences such as the European Marketing Academy, the Academy of Marketing, and others.
Head of Department: Dr Jaafar El-Murad
Key research staff
Nigel Bradley: a Fellow of the Market Research Society, Nigel has published several articles on graphology and on marketing research, as well as several books and book chapters on marketing research
Dr Frances Ekwulugo: Cross-cultural branding, small business marketing, international marketing, particularly in developing countries.
Dr Jaafar El-Murad: Creativity in advertising.
Dr Toni Hilton: Services marketing with a particular emphasis on professional services. The development and application of service-dominant-logic to practice and particularly within the context of 'Technology-Based Self-Service' or 'Self-Service Technologies'.
Dr Donna Mai: Personality and psychological influences on consumers’ choices and consumptions.
Dr Wilson Ng: The development and growth of closely-held firms in Western Europe, East Asia, and South Asia.
Donald Nordberg: Corporate governance, managerial discretion, and institutional theory.
Professor Alison Rieple: The management of strategy within the creative industries such as music and design, the structuring of innovation and change, and the institutionalisation of corporate social responsibility, particularly in the fashion industry.
