Digital Market Design

Catalog description

The skills needed to thrive in marketing careers, and the skills needed to practice marketing in startups, are evolving very fast, from discrete campaigns, executed by creative people, to continuous processes, certainly designed by creative people but now executed by smart machines. Marketing is changing because we have much more data, new ways to store and deploy the data, new machine learning capabilities, more social forms of media, shifts in how retailing is done, new platform business models, and, resisting these trends, a growing consumer concern for privacy. This course examines several topics in data-intensive marketing, such as direct-to-consumer marketing, digital advertising, and multi-sided platforms. We study the new institutions that support marketing, and that is important for several reasons. First, marketing managers need to decide who to partner with. They have to assemble a stack of marketing technology partners and suppliers. Second, the entrepreneurs who build these institutions need to know how they fit together into an ecosystem, how they collaborate and how they compete. Third there is a tension between the tech giants, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, that offer themselves as fully integrated systems for the practice of data-driven marketing, and the rest of the institutional space, which contains large specialized firms and smaller niche specialists that must be integrated by the marketing clients. Marketers and investors should have a point of view on whether, or to what extent, the future lies with the giants, or the more open system of data flows among the niches. In sum, the goal of the course is to introduce the marketing ecosystem within which students of today, both data scientists and managers, will make their careers. The course uses case studies and guests.