DUKE UNIVERSITY
The Fuqua School of Business
BA 460: Product Management

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• Contact Information
• Course Background and Objectives
• Class Format
• PHARMASIM
• Grading and Course Requirements
• Class Participation
• Individual Case Write-up
• PHARMASIM
• Final Exam
• Course Material
• Required
• Optional
• Course Schedule
• Acknowledgments

Career Focus

Product and brand management are at the heart of many organizations' survival. Brand and product managers "run" a small business and, as such, have profit and loss responsibility for brands. Yet few courses in the curriculum are intended to walk students through the steps necessary to achieve this objective. Accordingly, the goal of this course is to prepare such managers to build brand assets and create an enduring advantage for their brands in the marketplace. The focus of the course will be highly applied with many cases and guest speakers that emphasize the actual management of products and brands.

Brand management has traditionally been associated with consumer products and services markets, though there is increasing interest in branding by firms who operate in industrial markets. The brand manager's key focus is developing and building the brand itself, which may extend across multiple product lines or categories.

Product management is typically used to describe a wide range of activities centered around a product or product line. Product management is often the preferred organizational approach in high technology and industrial markets, and in consumer products companies who favor a product category focus.

Finally, the course exposes students to the contemporary challenges faced by a broad variety of firms in creating and maintaining brand equity. The settings of the cases and exercises used in the course are quite diverse in terms of the sizes of the organizations involved and the types of markets they serve. Hence, the course is relevant to students whose interests are in general management and consulting as well as those who expect to work directly in brand or product management.

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• better understand the issues pertaining to the execution of brand strategies,
• formulate strategies for building, leveraging, and defending brands,
• manage integrated campaigns to influence customer and trade behavior,
• work with data of the types that are typically available to brand and product managers, and
• draft a marketing plan that reflects these objectives.

Thus, you will have acquired skills that will help you to manage your products and brands to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage, command greater price premiums, and efficiently allocate your marketing resources.

Class Organization

Product Management is a marketing elective that is designed to improve student’s marketing skills and understanding of specific marketing topics, as well as “big picture” issues of how various aspects of marketing “fit together,” all from a brand equity perspective. Accordingly, Product Management is organized around the product and brand management decisions that must be made to build and manage brand equity.

Specifically, the course is organized in three sections: a) describing the brand and product management system, b) managing a brand and c) extending brand management across products and geographies. In the first section, we discuss i) how to organize the firm to manage the brand asset and ii) the concept of brands and a framework to provide insight into how brands are built. This first section will overview the course. In the second section, we articulate the product strategies that can lead to enduring brand advantage. Last, we look at marketing decisions that extend beyond the core brand and market.

Each section of the course employs an amalgam of cases, lecture, article discussions, videos, and guest speakers in order to lend perspective to the brand management problem. The frequent use of guest speakers, typically drawn from the area of the cases they will attend, will help you to understand the implementation issues associated with managing a brand and ensure that the discussions reflect the most contemporaneous management practices.

The following table summarizes how your grades will be determined. The subsequent discussion elaborates upon each of these requirements.

Please note that final grades will approximately follow the distribution recommended by Fuqua (30% SP, 45%HP, and 25% P and below). The length of the assignment refers to double spaced, 1" margin, 11 or 12 point font.

Class Participation

Case-based learning requires class participation from every student. Participation and discussion are imperative to engender a collaborative learning environment in class. Without that participation, the learning experience is significantly diminished (to help ensure that participation is more widespread, and that all students have the opportunity to participate, students may randomly be selected to commence the case discussion in each class).

In addition, participation also enables you to develop the skill to present and defend your ideas as well as to see contrasting points of view. Those skills can prove invaluable in your forthcoming careers. Further, when guest lecturers are present, their reactions to your comments will provide practical input to your ideas from someone who has to broach similar issues in a daily fashion. These participation points are reflected in the grading scheme. For a discussion of how class participation will be evaluated, please click here.

Last, class participation will include some brief exercies that will not be graded per se, but will help set the frame for the class. These include the following:

Please note that, with the exception of a print out from the Intel CD-ROM case, there is nothing to "turn in" for these assignments.

Teaching Philosophy

Please note that the case orientation of this class implies its quality will vary with your effort. I intend to work hard to deliver an excellent course. I have had 4 years of product management experience, so I am well prepared to direct this course (for more information on my background, please click here). Ultimately though, at a graduate school of this quality, your scholarship and learning become increasingly self-directed. I view my role to guide rather than micromanage your education. That ensures that what you learn is customized to your needs and interests. However, ultimately it is your scholarship that will yield the dividends necessary for your success. Accordingly, I urge you to prepare carefully for each section.

Individual Case Write-up(s)

Two brief case write-ups are required. The objective of these assignments is to provide more detailed feedback on your analyses than you may receive in class. Details for each assignment can be obtained by clicking below.

1. Eastman Kodak

2. Marketing and the NHL

PHARMASIM & Marketing Plan

As many of you will have to write one, an extremely important part of this class is the marketing plan. Given the short duration of the term, it is infeasible to request you make contact with an actual firm, find a product line of interest, and draft a marketing plan. Accordingly, we use a computer simulation of a business to serve as a foundation for the marketing plan.

However, this assignment has a corollary purpose; to give you increased exposure to running a business. Thus, 5% of the PHARMASIM grade will be predicated on your performance and 20% will be based on the marketing plan (for total of 25%). Note that these two factors are not independent; strong marketing plans lead to strong performance.

The Marketing Plan assignment can be accessed by clicking here.

For those of you who have used MARKSTRAT, Pharmasim differs on several dimensions. First, you play against the computer as opposed to your classmates. This enables you to perform the assignments more at your convenience. Second, the simulation is targeted at brand management rather than company management. Thus there is a greater emphasis on the promotion and advertising decisions faced by product and brand managers. Consistent with this distinction, the number of decisions to be made is simplified or removed with respect to MARKSTRAT (e.g., production product development). Thus, the simulation is ideally suited to practicing the art of managing brands. Third, the simulation should take no more than 10 hours, total.

The PharmaSim manual is of moderate length. Please begin reading it sufficiently early such that you are not overwhelmed when the assignment begins.
Important: For more tips on PharmaSim, please click here.

Final Exam

The final exam will be a take-home case analysis. You will receive the exam in the last class and then complete the exam during the time allotted for the final exam. Details regarding the final exam will be distributed in class.

Required

• Course Pack
  The course pack contains the cases to be discussed in this course as well as some ancillary readings. Click here to view the contents of the course pack.
• Required Texts
  1. Keller, Kevin Lane (1998), Strategic Brand Management, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
  2. James, Stewart W., Thomas C. Kinnear, and Michael Deighan (1998), PharmaSim: A Brand Management Simulation, Charlottesville, VA: Interpretive Software, Inc.

Supplemental

The course readings may be supplemented by a number of texts and articles related to the topics discussed in this class, but too numerous to cover in the term. To see a list of these readings, please click here. Some may prove invaluable on your job.

1. Click on the case listing for more detail on the questions you should prepare for class.
2. Click on the lecture for a Power Point slide show of that lecture (to download the files, click here).
3. Click on the readings for a brief synopsis of content and how the article related to class.

I would like to express my appreciation to to Douglas Bowman (Emory University) for supplying ideas, assistance and materials for the development of this syllabus. All mistakes and limitations are my sole responsibility. Additional comments and ideas are welcome.