APPLIES TO ACADEMIC YEAR 2014/2015

GRA 6435 Marketing Finance

Responsible for the course
Rutger Daniel van Oest

Department
Department of Marketing

Term
According to study plan

ECTS Credits
6

Language of instruction
English

Introduction
The CEO’s mandate is to increase the firm value to the benefit of owners, society, and other stakeholders. Within the boundaries of finite budgets this is an issue of allocating scarce resources to where the highest return can be gained. Marketing is the function most exposed to the revenue side of the firm, and we witness an increased emphasis on ensuring return on marketing investments. With this, customers should be viewed as assets representing the firm’s future cash flow.
The objective of this course is hence to expose our graduate students to the new role of marketing and provide them with quantitative techniques to compute customer value and the financial impacts of various marketing decisions on customer and hence firm value.

Learning outcome
The learning outcome of this course is to appreciate the concept of marketing accountability and acquire concrete quantitative techniques to put into practice.

Prerequisites
Bachelors degree qualifying for admission to the MSc programme.
The course is open to graduate finance students who have covered courses in marketing management and multivariate analyses.

Compulsory reading

Collection of articles:
A collection of scientific articles from journals such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research and Marketing Science

Other:
During the course there may be hand-outs and other material on additional topics relevant for the course and the examination.


Recommended reading
Books:
Gupta, Sunil, Donald R. Lehmann. 2005. Managing customers as investments : the strategic value of customers in the long run. Wharton School Publishing

Other:
Will be presented during the course or you can ask the lecturer


Course outline
Marketing Finance is founded on three pillars: marketing theory, applied statistics, and finance. The objective is to integrate these three disciplines into a framework allowing participants to perform data driven decisions illuminating the consequences of different marketing investments before and after they were made. Being able to compute customer value and to model aspects impacting customer equity is central to the course. The course will consist of a combination of lectures and group assignments and will contain a large quantitative component. It should be treated as a resonably advanced marketing research course.

Computer-based tools
Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and SPSS

Learning process and workload
A course of 6 ECTS credits corresponds to a workload of 160-180 hours.

The course will be a combination of lectures and group assignments. It will have a large quantitative component in it and should be treated as a reasonably advanced marketing research course. We will cover topics such as customer selection, customer lifetime value, managing customers as investments and customer base analysis.

Please note that it is the student’s own responsibility to obtain any information provided in class that is not included on the course homepage/It's learning or text book.

Examination
The course grade will be based on the following activities and weights:
Student project/assignment 1 30 % (groups of two or three students)
Student project/assignment 2 30% (groups of two or three students)
Final written exam (3 hours) 40% (individual)
To get a final grade in the course, students need to complete and achieve a passing grade in all parts of the evaluation.

In this course class attendence is mandatory. Absences can result in a lower score. Specific information regarding student evaluation beyond the information given in the course description will be provided in class. This information may be relevant for requirements for term papers or other hand-ins, and/or where class participation can be one of several elements of the overall evaluation.

This is a course with continuous assessment (several exam elements) and one final exam code. Each exam element will be graded using points on a scale (e.g. 0-100). The elements will be weighted together according to the information in the course description in order to calculate the final letter grade for the course. You will find detailed information about the point system and the cut off points with reference to the letter grades on the course site in It’s learning.

Examination code(s)
GRA 64351 continuous assessment accounts for 100% of the final grade

Examination support materials
A bilingual dictionary and BI-approved exam calculator.
Examination support materials at written examiniations are explained under examination information in the student portal @bi. Please note use of calculator and dictionary in the section on support materials.

Re-sit examination
It is only possible to retake an examination when the course is next taught.
The assessment in some courses is based on more than one exam code.
Where this is the case, you may retake only the assessed components of one of these exam codes.
Where this is not the case, all of the assessed components of the course must be retaken.
All retaken examinations will incur an additional fee.

Additional information
Honor Code
Academic honesty and trust are important to all of us as individuals, and represent values that are encouraged and promoted by the honor code system. This is a most significant university tradition. Students are responsible for familiarizing themselves with the ideals of the honor code system, to which the faculty are also deeply committed.

Any violation of the honor code will be dealt with in accordance with BI’s procedures for cheating. These issues are a serious matter to everyone associated with the programs at BI and are at the heart of the honor code and academc integrity. If you have any questions about your responsibilities under the honor code, please ask.