Leading European companies like Airbus, Barilla, Decathlon, Gucci, IKEA, LÒréal, or Vodafone market their products and services successfully in international markets far away from their headquarters. IKEA, for example, earns about 5% of its revenues inside and 95% outside Sweden. BWM earns about 13% of its revenues at home and about 40% in the United States and China combined.

In this course, you will learn how such companies grow their brands internationally. You will acquire the up-to-date knowledge and skills to identify target customers in international markets and develop compelling market offerings to serve them.

You will attend interactive lectures, analyse brands and global marketing trends, present and discuss their insights, work on case studies, and interact with international marketing professionals. At the end of the course, you will demonstrate their newly gained knowledge in a final multiple-choice quiz.

Critical reflections on international marketing practices in relation to sustainability, diversity, equity, and inclusion will be an integral part of the course.

The goal of this course is to advance your knowledge on international marketing and develop your skill in taking creative and analytically rigorous marketing decisions. You will get several opportunities to sharpen your communication skills group work, case study discussions, deep dive presentations, and interactions with international marketing specialists.

Knowledge and understanding

By the end of the course, you will have advanced your knowledge on

• the global economy at large
• the current strategic context for international marketing,
• theories and practices of global brand strategy
• strategies for entering foreign markets,
• the role of national culture for targeting and brand strategy,
• the specific economic, social, and cultural qualities of emerging markets,
• how consumers from different cultural backgrounds process information,
• the ways of thinking about the future in a global marketing context
• the critical aspects of global marketing

Cognitive and subject-specific skills

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

• analyze the strategies of global brands,
• study local (consumer) cultures,
• identify lucrative target segments in non-domestic markets,
• develop effective measures to grow brands domestically and internationally,
• manage an advertising campaign development process,
• critically assess the ethical dimension of a brand strategy,
• conduct qualitative and quantitative market research, and
• use Artificial Intelligence tools effectively for research and ideation.

Attendance in the first two sessions is mandatory. In these sessions, we will set the stage for the course and explain the learning elements, deliverables, and the grading schemes. If you do not attend these first sessions, you will be de-registered from the course.

To obtain a grade for the course, you must attend at least 80% of the sessions. An absence of 3 hours (1 session) ispermitted. Please let the lecturer or tutor know about your absence in advance. You will only receive class participation points for the lectures in which you are present. You have to attend the final multiple-choice test to complete the course.

The course utilizes a combination of interactive lectures, global marketing topic discussions, case study work, empirical idea testing, and interactions with global marketing professionals. Attendance and participation in class discussions is essential for achieving the learning outcomes and advancing your skill as marketer, strategist, consultant, or manager.

60% of your tasks will be group tasks. The lecturers will assign students to groups of 7-8 students that will tackle the group work tasks together. While these are large groups that require more coordination and diplomacy than smaller groups, they allow for dedicating less class time to students presenting to each other and more time for lectures and guests to share their expert knowledge.

In many situations, learning is better without the use of technology. Therefore, some classes will be analog classes, where your computer, tables, smart watches, etc., will be placed into a corner of the room so that you can focus entirely on the lecture or our guests.

Please carefully prepare read the assigned chapters, articles, and other materials prior to the session for which they are assigned to ensure a lively class discussion. 

Please log in with your WU account to use all functionalities of read!t. For off-campus access to our licensed electronic resources, remember to activate your VPN connection connection. In case you encounter any technical problems or have questions regarding read!t, please feel free to contact the library at readinglists@wu.ac.at.

Availability of Instructors

• Meetings are possible after each class.
• For appointments, please contact Sophie Klikovits at imm@wu.ac.at.
• For administrative matters, please contact our Teaching Assistant (will be introduced in class).

Course Materials

All course materials will be made available via WU’s Canvas learning platform and the WU library.

Ethical Marketing

The following UN Sustainable Development Goals will be discussed in this module: 

• 5.1 (Gender Equality).
• 8.3 (Encourage the formalization and growth of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises)
• 12.1 (Encourage Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns)
• 12.8 (Ensure that people everywhere have the relevant information and awareness for sustainable development and lifestyles in harmony with nature)  

The Use of AI

We encourage you to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as Open AI’s Chat GPT, Google’s Gemini, or Antropic’s Claude for tackling the tasks outlined in this syllabus. 

• To capitalize on AI use, we recommend using AI as a collaborator not as a competitor. Because according to recent findings in AI in education research, the following will happen when you use AI in ineffective ways:
• If you outsource your thinking to an AI, the AI will learn and you will not.
• If you let the AI solve the problem at hand, you will not enjoy the good feeling of owning your recommendation and be unable to defend it.
• If you come out of a session with an AI and do not remember what you have just learned or how it shifted your thinking, you have wasted your time.
• If you accept AI output as fact without checking it, you will get the bad grade, not the AI
• If you present AI output without diving deeper into the subject matter, you will give an average presentation and earn an average grade.

We have integrated the use of AI into our teaching and declare openly where and how we are using AI in our lecture. We encourage you to do the same so that we can discuss best practices in class. 

Note that misuse of AI (e.g., submitting entirely AI-generated assignments as original work) constitutes a case of academic misconduct and can have serious consequences. 

For guidelines on citing AI-generated output in your submission, please consult WU Library Website, section “fit4research”: https://library.wu.ac.at/bib/fit4research/index.php/en/fit4research-english/cite-and-organize-your-literature/citing-correctly/citing-ai/