Curriculum  

During your first year you will attend three courses. The fall semester is devoted to the course XL and the spring semester is divided between two parallel courses: Media Management and Strategic Marketing & Business Development.

XL

XL is a full-semester course in creative business development, brand management, and marketing communications. It creates leaders who excel in thinking, designing and communicating value to both business and consumers.

XL is designed to bridge the gap between academic research and commercial execution. We use the latest research findings to solve real-life business problems. Theories from the academic world are combined with our partner companies’ and our own experiences, and together we find new and effective ways to create and communicate value.

XL has three cornerstones;

seminars, workshops and internship.

In seminars we absorb the latest research and models and apply them on real life cases. In workshops, companies and agencies work with students to solve and discuss actual cases and challenges they have encountered. Each student also completes a one-month internship at one of our eminent partner companies.

XL enables students to develop the skills needed to generate ideas and make them come to life. It is set up to enable them to excel in their future careers. Our solutions are always comprehensive in both strategy and implementation, and they never lack in creativity. Our partner companies help us understand how creative business development, brands and communications work in the real world and their support and feedback is essential for our success.

XL graduates are highly attractive to employers looking for talents to help them innovate, develop brands, and inspire customers.

Media Management

In a rapidly changing media industry, it is important for media corporations to know how to speed up a product’s time to market. The challenge for media corporations today is to keep pace with new technology and to continuously learn and create knowledge in a rapidly changing environment. An important objective of this course is to teach students how to explore business opportunities and make decisions in this environment. The course aims to provide the students with tools for observing, analyzing and understanding business models, value creation processes and driving forces in the media environment.

Technology has been a driving force in the development of the media industry. Nevertheless, scientific work has shown that advances in technology alone are not enough to achieve high organizational performance, which means that the role of the individual has been underemphasized. The competition within the media industry is fuelled by low exit barriers for media consumers, low entry barriers for new players, several different distribution channels for content and high demand for new content. Despite large resources, both human and material, media corporations, due to their organizational structure, risk not reacting fast enough to the changing market needs. In this context, it is crucial to understand how managers can cope with competition through continuously adapting to changing market needs, and use strategic actions aiming at creating and re-creating value for customers/consumers. Key concepts and issues in the course are aspects of value creation, business models for media companies, strategic decision-making and the achievement and sustainability of competitive advantage.

Strategic Marketing & Business Development

The purpose of the master level course ‘Strategic Marketing & Business Development’ is to provide students with language, tools and insights needed to effectively and successfully develop and manage businesses that create customer value particularly in business-to-business contexts.

The course is based on two perspectives on marketing and business development:

• The role of Marketing in integrating different functions in the firm.
• Marketing as integration with the market

The course begins by bringing students up-to-speed regarding marketing schools of thought related to this overall frame and introduces the tremendous diversity of issues facing marketers in practice. Subsequently, the course addresses issues such as how effective sourcing and supply management contribute to value-creating business strategies. This is an often underplayed but highly critical aspect of the value creation-process which ever more companies tend to address at an increasing pace.

The creation of effective and customer-driven distribution strategies is the third part of the course and addresses modern forms of distribution. How marketing and sales can be organized to facilitate integration between functions in the firm and with the market concludes the course. Sales and marketing is a very costly area and in recent times a lot of new opportunities thanks to e.g. emerging technologies have come to play and provide a lot of new opportunities for improving efficiency as well as effectiveness.

After this course you are able to develop and manage businesses to effectively and successfully create value. More specifically, after completing the course you are able to…

…relate fundamental marketing concepts and theories to each other, as well as relate these concepts and theories to the broader context of management and development of business activities,

…explain and discuss concepts and theories relating to the main themes of the course, discuss how the phenomena captured by these theories and concepts impact on each other, and relate these concepts and theories to the management and development of business activities,

…use and systematically integrate theories from several schools of marketing thought to manage the complex interplay between functions in the firm (such as sourcing, supply management, distribution, and marketing and sales) and the firm and its environment (suppliers, customers, other stakeholders) in previously unfamiliar contexts relating to the management and development of business activities.