MSc Business with Marketing

Technology has led to a proliferation of social media channels. These channels enable peer-to-peer communication as well as providing brands with many more ways to reach their customers, have relevant conversations with them, and listen to what matters to them. This module develops an understanding of how brand managers can access and use social media channels as part of their marketing strategy in order to build brand presence and maintain relevance in the life of their customers.

Through this module you will develop a greater understanding of the fast growing, changing world of social media channels and their relevance to customers, brands and the firm. The module aims to develop an appreciation of how the firm’s integrated marketing communications, brand management, and content management strategies are impacted by social media channels, and to examine the strategic opportunities and challenges these present.

Specific objectives of the module include:

• Understanding the role of social media in achieving the objectives of the firm's integrated marketing communications strategy.
• Understanding the significance of a content management strategy, including selecting and combining appropriate social media tools for stages of the customer journey.
• Linking social media into the marketing mix, including understanding their relevance in developing product, place, and service decisions.
• Understanding how to use social media as a tool for insight into changing customer needs
• Recognising the advantages and pitfalls of earned media including brand communities, viral marketing, and PR crises.

This module aims to provide an overview about how today's firms use digital marketing technologies to achieve their business objectives. Students will require theoretical and practical subject knowledge and understanding, cognitive and methodological skills (e.g. written assignment, critical reflections, discussions in seminars, hands-on excercises) and social/soft skills (e.g. leadership and team work).

To be effective in modern organisations requires an understanding of the dynamics of digital work. This module equips students with a broad understanding of the tools and organisational arrangements driving this shift towards digital working, and provides them with techniques and frameworks to operate effectively in this more dynamic and fluid work environment.

The module reviews major trends and changes in the workplace arising from the increased adoption of digital tools to support work practices in modern organisations. It reviews major drivers of adoption of these tools and the emergence of new dynamics of interactions and patterns of work.

This module introduces you to the ways in which economists and psychologists have used behavioural theories and experimental methods to provide extensions to, or alternatives to, the conventional economic wisdom described in the Fundamentals of Economic Behaviour module. It will examine recent cutting-edge research, and consider the implications of that research for individual decision making, the operation of markets and public sector policy making.

The aims of the module are to:

1) Introduce students to the principles, theories and research underlying the academic disciplines concerning the behaviour, leadership and management of people and organisations (Organisational Behaviour, OB and Human Resource Management, HRM) at four levels of analysis: individual, group, organisational and societal.

2) Develop a critical appreciation of the behavioural and social sciences as they relate to the study of behaviour in organisations.

3) Introduce students to a critical understanding of the practice of management, leadership and people management in particular.

4) Provide students with structured opportunities to practice applying OB and HRM principles, theories and research to analyse and solve organisational problems.

This module will cover a wide range of cutting edge research in Big Data Analytics, with a particular focus on the extensive value of data from the Internet, much of which is freely available if you have the skills to mine it.

This module involves learning to program in R, but no prior programming knowledge is required.

Module aims will include:

• Linking stock market movements to online data
• Measuring sentiment with online data
• Predicting consumer behaviour with online data
• Getting quicker measurements of key economic indicators with online data
• Measuring where people are and where they are going with mobile phone data and online data
• Predicting crime and epidemics
• Understanding social networks.

The module will also teach you the practical skills needed to work with online data.

You will learn:

• How to mine data on Google searches
• How to mine data on Wikipedia page views
• How to mine data on photographs uploaded to Flickr
• How to make data visualisations
• How to design and execute a small data science project of your own

As part of this, the module will teach you how to use R, an industry standard programming language for data analytics.

The main module aim is to build on your knowledge of the global economic and business environment and link this to strategies for managing in changing global contexts.  Key questions are:  How do changes in this environment affect the ways in which companies do business and managers manage across borders:  How should firms and individual managers respond (in theory)?  How can they respond (in practice)?

Topics will include: the drivers and processes of internationalisation, cross-cultural management challenges, the assessment of overseas investment opportunities and the specific challenges of emerging markets.

If you select the dissertation route you will work with an allocated academic supervisor and research a topic relating to Marketing. The module is assessed by a 6,000 word formal dissertation. You will be supervised and supported throughout, and the Term 2 compulsory module Research Methodology helps you prepare.

The Business in Practice module is the core capstone module for students who choose this route instead of the dissertation route. It will illustrate business theory in practice by combining academic lecture input with expert practitioner insights, and will also provide intensive personal work-skills development via the WBS CareersPlus team. The module is taught over two intensive weeks incorporating an innovative and exciting business simulation. 

If you select the dissertation route, Research Methodology becomes a compulsory module for you and it gives you the academic skills to confidently approach your dissertation topic. The focus is on epistemological foundations, the design of a research project, the preparation for and execution of valid and reliable business research (whether qualitative or quantitative), and on the writing up and presentation of research results.