Hi I'm Patricia Harris and I'm the course director of the MA Marketing and Brand Management at Kingston Business School
The MA in Marketing and Brand Management is aimed at people who want to study not only the general concept about marketing
but specialise in managing and growing brands.
So it would be be particularly suited for people who aim for a career as brand managers
for either fast moving consumer organisations, services organisations or either non profit organisations
You don’t need to have prior knowledge in business or in marketing to get a place on this course.
And it's for people who know they want to work in marketing but they haven't studied it before.
So it gives them an introduction to the world of marketing and in particular brand management.
Its really for a wide target audience. You need to have a Bachelors Degree but it can be in any discipline at all.
Students on the MA Marketing and Brand Management at Kingston Business School will study a variety of courses
including global marketing management, strategic brand management, consumer behavior,
design with the focus of designing a brand and its brand elements, such as developing a brand name, the packaging and logos for a brand.
They will also study integrated marketing communications,
so how to communicate to consumers with the more modern social media and the more traditional communication such as advertising on TV or in the press.
In the second part of the course, the students will follow a course of research methods.
Which will enable them to develop a final research project or dissertation.
Students who graduate from the MA Marketing and Brand Management at Kingston Business School
will aim to find employment within a major fast moving consumer goods organisation or services organisation or not for profit organisation in the position of brand managers
The lecturers who teach on MA Marketing and Brand Management include Professor Robert East who is our professor of consumer behavior.
He is the author of one of the leading textbooks on consumer behavior
and our branding expert is Fransecsa Dall’Olmo Riley
who has also written extensively on brands and is an expert on brand evaluation, brand associations and also on luxury brands.
The marketing communications module is taught by Debbie Anderson
and the market research module is taught jointly by our Professor Stavros Kalafartious and Dr Lesley Leaden.
Professor Kalafartious teaches the quantitative elements of research and data analysis and Dr Leaden teaches qualitative data analysis using envevo software.
Kingston’s MA Marketing and Brand Management is a pretty unique course. There isn't really anything quite like it available at another university in the United Kingdom.
You can study marketing at many universities.
You can study branding from a design perspective
but putting the two together from a business and managerial perspective is quite rare so this course is distinctive.
It's particularly distinctive with having the blend of strategic brand management, operational marketing, market research and then the branding design module.
Ever since I have started work as a brand manager for Benetton, I found the world of branding intriguing.
In particular thinking about how is it possible that if we have something like coal.
It really really difficult to put a brand name on something that is really the same everywhere. Coal is coal.
And yet if we look at another commodity, water, how is it possible that the bottled water business is such a huge business all over the world.
This is a very important question for me.This is one of the questions we will tackle if you come to study Marketing and Brand Management at Kingston Business School.
Another important question that I think puzzles many of us is how come some brands make it in one country but not in others.
Take another brand of bottled water, Dasani. Dasani was one of the major flops of Coca-Cola in the UK and yet it is the biggest brand of bottled water in the US.
Why does a brand succeed in one country and not another.
If we look at brands in different countries, what is the difference between Heinz and Watties?
The packaging is the same, In fact, it is identical and yet the brand name is different. Why soup is called Watties in New Zealand but Heinz in the UK and the US?
How do brand managers decide which brand to use in which country?
What are the factors behind strategies that they would apply to building and growing a brand?
How can a brand manager put a value, a financial value on the balance sheet?
How can they convince the financial world that brands are valuable assets?
They are not just a expense. They are not just a cost.
If you come to Kingston to study the MA in Marketing and Brand Management you can find out.