Professional Development

Price includes full board accommodation and course materials.

Level: Masterclass

Key issues:

Today a key challenge for marketers is to harness the market information they have to make it relevant to the way in which they conduct their business and strive to grow it profitably. For example, the results of customer satisfaction surveys often seem to bear little relationship to the performance of the business; there is little point in knowing that customers are satisfied if that satisfaction does not translate into genuine customer loyalty and, ultimately, improved business performance.

The purpose of this course:

The course will show what organisations need to look out for to truly understand - and therefore influence the behaviour of - customers and other stakeholders, by analysing and interpreting market information in a way which digs deeper than the surface customer response. It will show you ways to harness such insights in order to grow your business profitably.

Who this course is for:

The course is for “specialists” in market-related functions (marketing, sales, market research, etc), but is also useful for “generalists” occupying a more general management/strategic function who wish to assess their organisation’s performance as market-sensitive enterprises.

There are no specific prerequisites, since the course content is practical rather than overly technical/academic, being intended to be intuitively understandable and relevant to any business person who is focused on market performance.

Benefits for your organisation:

The course will reveal tools to help your organisation differentiate itself from the competition, make best use of its marketing resources and strengthen its brand and customer loyalty. Its creative yet pragmatic - rather than “academic” – focus will help you to maximise value from existing market information and make best use of the money spent on future market research.

Benefits for you as an individual:

The course will provide you with ideas and action checklists to consider when you return to the workplace. You will be more confident about the key questions to be asked about your market and your organisation’s position in it; about how market information should be analysed and interpreted and about how it can be related to your organisation’s business performance.

You will learn how to:

• View the market more laterally and understand it in greater depth than a surface interpretation of market responses would allow
• Apply approaches and tools to enable you to gain better market insights
• See how different pieces of market information can be brought together to enable fresh insights to be gleaned (so that “2 plus 2 makes 5”)
• Take into account all the key elements which need to be considered to help your organisation achieve profitable business growth
• Harness market information to maximise its relevance to your organisation’s business performance

Course content:

• Tracing the link between the actions you take and your business performance
• Identifying the business winners and creating value
• The relevance of effective market segmentation and customer targeting
• The search for winning new product/service propositions
• The pivotal role of loyalty and input-impact analysis of actions taken
• How you fare against the competition – and against customer expectations
• Performance versus brand equity
• The impact of staff and other stakeholder/influencer perceptions

To take away from the course:

A checklist of the key questions to answer in your organisation to reveal how market-sensitive the organisation is, where its strengths and weaknesses lie and what actions need to be prioritised.

Professional Standards

All of our marketing courses are based on CIM's Professional Marketing Standards, ensuring that marketers at all levels of seniority gain the practical skills that employers require to improve business performance. Review our Professional Marketing Standards framework