Overview of Course

Most people, including new business students, equate marketing to advertising and sales. Yet, with its focus on revenue generation and value creation, marketing is a core business function that should permeate all areas of a business. At its core, marketing creates, communicates, delivers, and exchanges offerings that have value for customers and society. Given marketing’s connection to many social, environmental, and economic issues of global significance, it is also imperative that marketers approach this function with a triple bottom line (profit, people, planet) perspective.
This course provides students with an understanding of marketing concepts and frameworks, applies learned concepts to real-world situations, and examines marketing strategy in a changing global environment. In doing so, we will often take the perspective of chief marketing officer or marketing manager to unpack ideas in the context of complex organizations competing in dynamic global environments faced with evolving challenges. In doing so, we will examine how marketing contributes to organizational successes and failures, reflect on marketing’s influence on people and the planet, and explore implications of marketing for future careers (across vocations). Ultimately, we will produce viable marketing plans that could help businesses in the countries visited by Semester at Sea.