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Dates Location Tuition
Nov 3, 2008 - Nov 7, 2008 Philadelphia $8,450
Jun 8, 2009 - Jun 12, 2009 Philadelphia $8,450

Anticipating competitors’ actions and reactions to your moves may be the key determinant of success for any marketing strategy. One competitor cuts prices, undermining your pricing strategy. Another may decide to offer new products and services, possibly over the Internet that have the potential to completely undermine your existing strategy. Could you have anticipated such moves? How do you respond?

Competitive Marketing Strategy teaches you how to anticipate your competitors’ moves during the planning stage, so that you’re not caught off guard. Learn how to analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Discover a number of tools and concepts to manage your competition. By helping you anticipate potential competitive responses to your actions, this course will help you develop effective marketing strategies for the long term.

Tuition includes lodging and meals. Prices are subject to change. Program Consultants are available to provide more information on course specifics and discuss how this program might meet your needs. Please contact them by telephone at +1.215.898.1776 or by e-mail.


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Case studies and competitive simulations that compress years of competition into a few short days help you gain a hands-on understanding of competitive interactions in your industry. These cases and simulations allow you to see the results of your actions across different competitive scenarios.

Session Topics for the Competitive Marketing Strategy Program

  • Strategies for Achieving Advantage
  • Sources of Competitive Advantage
  • Anticipating, Pre-empting, and Reacting to Competitors' Actions
  • Managing and Competing With Brand Equity
  • When Customers Are Also Competitors
  • Responding to Competitive New-Product Entry
  • Managing the Threat of Private Labels and Other Low-Price Brands
  • Competitive Pricing Simulation
  • Scenario Planning and Peripheral Vision
  • Developing New Category Products and Markets
  • First-Mover Advantage

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Program Logistics

Program officially begins on Monday morning and will conclude at noon on Friday. Hotel accommodations are provided Sunday through Thursday evenings.

Marketing executives and others involved in the strategy for a brand, product, or strategic business unit are ideal candidates for this course. Corporate planners benefit from the marketing perspective on competitive strategy. Past participants from all over the world have included upper and middle managers from a broad range of industries, including health care, pharmaceuticals, energy, technology, other industrial products, and consumer packaged goods.

We encourage companies to send cross-functional teams of executives to leverage the application and value of the program. Additional group benefits are available when four or more participants attend a program.

Those with no prior background in marketing may find it useful to attend Essentials of Marketing before coming to this program.

Develop a strong working knowledge of competitive marketing strategy, and anticipate the effects of offensive and defensive strategies. Learning about competitive pricing, the impact of technology, and making decisions in uncertain markets will give you the tools to be able to define the sources of competitive advantage. You will:

  • Use new tools to analyze competitors and anticipate their reactions to your actions.
  • Leverage your strengths from your customers’ perspective.
  • Understand the competitive landscape for your products or services.

Jagmohan Raju, PhD JAGMOHAN S. RAJU, PhD
Academic Director
Joseph J. Aresty Professor
Professor of Marketing
The Wharton School

Professor Raju is a leading authority on competitive strategy and pricing. His research interests include pricing, strategic alliances, new-product introduction strategy, retailing, private labels, and corporate advertising. He teaches marketing management to the MBAs, pricing strategy to the Executive MBA students, and mathematical models in marketing to the PhD students. He is the academic director of Wharton's Essentials of Marketing, Competitive Marketing Strategy, and Pricing Strategies Executive Education programs and is the marketing editor of Management Science. He holds a PhD in business, an MS in operations research, and an MA in economics from Stanford University. He also has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and a BTech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
David J. Reibstein, PhD DAVID J. REIBSTEIN, PhD
Academic Director
William Stewart Woodside Professor
Professor of Marketing
The Wharton School

Professor Reibstein has conducted research into competitive marketing strategies, e-commerce resource allocation, promotion evaluation, product variety, brand equity, and market segmentation. He has authored numerous books, developed the ValueWar competitive simulation, and teaches marketing management and marketing research in the MBA program, where he has received numerous teaching awards, including national recognition for teaching among business school faculty in BusinessWeek and Fortune. He developed and coordinates several Wharton’s Executive Education programs such as Competitive Marketing Strategy and Wharton Marketing Metrics™: Linking Marketing to Financial Consequences. He helped found Bizrate.com, a leading infomediary that has surveyed more than three million Internet customers and was recently appointed to a new marketing task force for Major League Baseball called Major League Baseball in the 21st Century.
undefined STEPHEN J. HOCH, PhD
Patty and Jay H. Baker Professor
Professor of Marketing
The Wharton School

Professor Hoch has researched and written extensively on retail strategy, consumer behavior, and the psychology of forecasting. His research areas include retail merchandising, assortment, pricing, and promotion strategy; decision support systems and the psychology of forecasting; and consumer behavior. Prior to teaching, he served as national sales and marketing manager for Disney Music. Professor Hoch is the faculty director of the Jay H. Baker Retailing Initiative, the result of a $10 million pledge to the Wharton School by Jay and Patty Baker. The Initiative will link retail theory with practice by forming a partnership among world-class researchers, educators, and the global leaders of today's retail industry. Professor Hoch also teaches in Competitive Marketing Strategy and Pricing Strategies programs.
undefined KARL T. ULRICH, ScD
Chairperson, Operations and Information Management Department
Professor of Operations and Information Management
The Wharton School

Karl Ulrich is professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research activities are focused on product design and development, including work with Boeing, Hewlett-Packard, Polaroid, United Technologies, and Eastman-Kodak. His current projects study the management of product variety, with particular emphasis on the relationships among product architecture, market strategy, and production process design. Professor Ulrich has been a member of development teams for more than 30 new products or processes, including medical devices, tools, computer peripherals, food products, and sporting goods. As a result of this development work, he has been granted 18 patents. From 1999-2002, while on leave from Wharton, he founded and managed Nova Cruz Products, a manufacturer of high-performance personal transportation products.
undefined CHRISTOPHE VAN DEN BULTE, PhD
Assistant Professor of Marketing
The Wharton School

Professor Van den Bulte’s research focuses on how new products and technologies gain market acceptance and on how social networks affect the dissemination of information. Applications include quantifying the importance of “word-of-mouth” among physicians in the adoption of new pharmaceuticals and quantifying the impact of product-market overlap among competing mutual funds companies on their product launch decisions.
undefined GEORGE S. DAY, PhD
Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor, Professor of Marketing
Co-Director, Mack Center for Technological Innovation
Director, Emerging Technologies Management Research Program
The Wharton School

George Day began as a market development engineer with a major plastics maker and has been deeply involved in management of new products since. For 10 years he was academic director of the product planning program at the GE company. His current areas of research are marketing, organic growth strategies, strategic planning, organizational change, and competitive strategies in global markets. Dr. Day is the author of 14 books in the areas of marketing and strategic management, his most recent being Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals that Can Make or Break Your Company (with Paul Schoemaker). He has received all of the major awards in the field of marketing.
Peter Fader, PhD PETER FADER, PhD
Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor
Professor of Marketing
The Wharton School

Professor Fader’s expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities. He works with a wide range of data sources from industries such as consumer packaged goods, e-commerce, and music (online and offline). His research focuses on using data generated by such new technologies as retail scanners to understand customer preferences and to help companies fine tune their marketing strategies. His work has been published in (and he serves on the editorial boards of) a number of leading journals in marketing, statistics, and the management sciences.

"Wharton's program is an adventure through five days of advanced case studies and simulations on competitive marketing strategies. The hand-picked staff of presenters was very good. I feel charged up and ready to immediately apply the strategies to my business."
— Group Product Manager, Chemicals Manufacturer

"Wharton's Competitive Marketing Strategy Program is top notch. The program effectively blends case study with theory to address real-life competitive issues."
— Director of Finance, Optics Manufacturer

"This program has helped open my horizon to the possibilities of improvement and innovation in my organization. The instructors are world class. The case studies were on target and current."
— National Sales Manager, Magnetic Media Co.

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