Master of Digital Marketing

Business managers request, assess, purchase and use marketing research to make a wide range of informed decisions about target markets, product offerings and the performance of marketing activities. To be able to do this competently, managers need to know what benefits marketing research can provide, what research methods are appropriate for the different types of problems, and how data should be collected, analysed, interpreted and presented so that it is meaningful to other users. These are skills students will acquire through their participation in a 'real-life' client-sponsored project.

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This subject focuses on how to improve customer experiences (CX) through effective design and organisational change management. Students will learn how to design highly contextual and personalised experiences for customers through the use of Human Centred Design (HCD) principles, tools and techniques. Some of the HCD stages and tools include: the double diamond framework; discovery research; empathy mapping; customer personas; jobs-to-be-done; journey mapping; service blueprinting; ideation; desirability, viability and feasibility (DVF) framework; prototyping; concept testing, and reflection.

Customer experience design examines the whole lifespan of a customer’s experience with a brand through multiple physical and digital touch points, rather than focusing just on a single website or a mobile application development. Human Centred Design training is becoming a strong differentiator as the new business models demand an increased focus on customer service and creative problem solving.

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This subject will introduce to students the fundamentals of viral marketing on social media. It will discuss topics including how to create engaging and effective marketing content on social media, how content is used to attract and build communities on social media, how to foster a strong brand using social media influence, how to seed content on social media, and how to measure and track marketing campaign performance on social media. It will also cover the practicalities and techniques of crafting shareable marketing content. Topics covered include: the psychology of share motives, the elements and structure of high engagement content, hybrid brand activation campaigns, and the mechanisms underlying digital word-of-mouth.

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This subject introduces students to the large number of digital metrics available, including engagement ratios, click-through rates, conversion ratios, customer lifetime value and related concepts. Particular attention is paid to the reasons for using these metrics, what these metrics measure precisely, and how they can be used to achieve desired outcomes. Some sessions will be spent on introducing key analytics platforms, such as Google analytics and similar. As such, this course expands students' knowledge of major measurement tools, theories and state of the art thinking in the measurement of digital marketing performance.

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It has become increasingly important to know how marketing actions translate into revenue and profit growth. The tools that enable this translation are part of a toolkit called “Marketing Analytics.” Marketing analytics is a technology-enabled and model-supported approach to harness customer and market data to enhance marketing decision-making. Within the big data phenomenon, new ways of analysing data (e.g. text mining), running social media experiments and gleaning insights on customers’ digital behaviours have taken centre stage to inform business decision making. The methods that surround it, and the inferences derived from it have put marketing “on the map.” Although these methods are here to stay, as big data becomes mainstream, it is fundamentally altering the way we collect and analyse data to demonstrate ROI.
This course introduces new emerging analysis techniques and methods to deal with the analysing customer generated content (messaging, blogs, posts, reviews). This subject provides students with the basic understanding of methods and approaches to analyse digital marketing data to derive business and academic insights.

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Today’s customers shop in an omni-channel world—from digital shopping on their laptop or mobile phone, through to physical shopping in stores such as pop-ups, hypermarkets, and vending machines. Effective marketing and retail managers harness the right combinations of retail channels to meet the needs of target customers across all of the digital and physical locations of their busy lives—to deliver the right product in the right location at the right time. This subject focuses on understanding and influencing how consumers navigate these digital forms of retail, and how digital forms of retail fuse and interact with more traditional physical stores—the omni-channel customer experience. Digital retail capabilities are developed within the overarching omni-channel retail ecosystem to create value for the customer and the retailer.

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This subject will introduce students to the building blocks of content marketing. It will discuss topics including translating the organisational mission and objectives to the strategic context of content, developing a content strategy framework, targeting messages based on buyer personas, and empathy mapping. It will also cover styles of content in various genres and channel planning. Content distribution through content management systems and scheduling software as well as optimization and community management will be covered with input from industry professionals along with governance issues and ethical concerns. The subject also includes how to measure content effectiveness from reach, engagement, as well lead generation and sales conversion linking with marketing & sales force automation systems. Students complete praxis orientated assessments based on best practice guidelines.

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This subject will showcase Australia’s top digital marketers who will share their experience and network with the students. Each speaker will cover in depth their digital marketing strategies and tactics to illustrate how the key learnings from the program such as lead generation, eCommerce, online community building, google advertising, online auctions, design thinking, e-government, or cloud offerings are implemented in practice to meet customer, business and societal needs. During this process, the digital marketer will also outline the analytics used to measure and monitor performance of the strategy. In summary, this subject will consolidate student learnings as they are made aware of cutting-edge global practices and future digital marketing trends.

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This subject concentrates heavily on advertising, but also addresses the issues of internet advertising, public relations, and sales promotions. The emphases will be on understanding the theoretical foundation underlying persuasive communications, promotional strategy selection, integration of communications with other marketing activities, strategy implementation, and budgeting. The subject incorporates both lecture and cases as instructional vehicles.

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This subject involves the completion of a professional work placement (internship) either:

off campus at an approved host organisation in Australia or overseas OR

on campus at the 'WorkHub'

Integrating academic learning in business & economics areas of study, students will gain an improved knowledge of employability skills, workplace culture, and career pathways. Students will be required to undertake pre-placement online modules designed to equip students with employability skills and techniques for creative problem solving, as well as learning tasks throughout the placement period. The placement will draw on students' specific discipline skills associated with the specialisation of their degree.

Internships may be paid, or unpaid provided they comply with the Fair Work Act.

This subject is intended to provide students with the opportunity to apply their business knowledge in an industry setting under the joint supervision of an industry and an academic mentor. Students can either apply for a University-sourced internship or apply to have a self-sourced internship approved for credit. Applications should be submitted by the due dates published on the MBS website. Selection into this subject is based on suitability of the placement, and demonstrated motivation to benefit from the program, and timely submission of the application.

The on-campus 'WorkHub' provides a modern collaborative and supportive office environment for students to complete internship tasks in groups, and connect with industry professionals both on-campus, virtually, and at the host organisation.

Students will either enrol in the off campus or on campus availability following selection.

The subject coordinator will have final approval of all selected students. Enrolment will be capped and subject to meeting the relevant academic program requirements and availability of appropriate internship opportunities.

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This subject concentrates heavily on advertising, but also addresses the issues of internet advertising, public relations, and sales promotions. The emphases will be on understanding the theoretical foundation underlying persuasive communications, promotional strategy selection, integration of communications with other marketing activities, strategy implementation, and budgeting. The subject incorporates both lecture and cases as instructional vehicles.

View detailed information in the Handbook

This subject focuses on the task of developing and managing brands. It examines the way in which brand decisions may contribute to creating competitive advantage and explains how to analyse industries, make changes in brand strategies over time, and respond to competitive moves. Students also gain an understanding of the issues involved in the development and management of new products, how to manage product lines, and how to measure, develop and manage their brand equity.

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The purpose of this subject is to examine the topics of Managing Innovation in the context of large and small organisations. Innovation is ultimately the lifeblood of organisations, in that it is concerned with the capability to effectively introduce new products and services, new or substantively improved processes or other major initiatives into existing and new organisations. Topics include innovation capability, new product/process technology introduction, and innovation culture and innovation measures The subject addresses the process of innovation exploitation and exploration and the role ambidextrous organisational designs and dynamic organisational capabilities play in this process. The subject will examine the emerging importance of open innovation in the co-evolution of market and customer value and the use of crowd and expert sourcing in this process. Key elements addressed that are part of successful innovation companies are vision and strategy innovation, creativity and idea management, culture and climate, management of technology, organisational structures, intelligence and systems. Firms that have successfully and systematically created such capabilities will be used as case studies.

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New Product development is an important source of growth and profitability as existing markets become price competitive and saturated. However, the process of new product development is fraught with risk. In this course we study the process of managing products and how companies can manage their introduction and elimination from the product portfolio. We review how these decisions are made within the context of profit seeking and not-for-profit organizations. We then review the implication of these decisions for performance.

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Research techniques and insights from the cognitive neurosciences are increasingly used in marketing research and practice. This subject examines the research tools and insights from the neurosciences relevant to marketing theory and practice. Topics include functional implications of key brain systems for consumer judgements and decision-making; examination of neuroscientific and psychological techniques used in marketing research; applications of tools and insights from cognitive, emotional and social neurosciences for strategic marketing planning, product development, packaging and advertising research, and ethical considerations associated with use of brain imaging technology for marketing research.

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Business markets account for approximately two-thirds of all economic activities and for the vast majority of jobs. Nevertheless, typical B2B firms remain largely unknown to the public, yet they are leaders in their respective areas. This subject aims to provide insight into the issues, and challenges of particular interest to firms operating in business markets. Skilled B2B marketing professionals tend to make more strategic decisions based on long term profits and stakeholder benefits. Thus, to operate successfully, skills in procurement, sales, negotiations, crafting value propositions (value-in-use) as well as aspects of contractual and relational governance need to be put into placed. Students will learn about business relationship dynamics, their development and decay, and their embeddedness to business networks.

Furthermore, it is the objective of this subject to link theory and practice through different cases. Cases help to develop an ability to effectively use and apply concepts in real-life organizations. As such, the aim is to provide an experience that also includes the use of industry executives.

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The purpose of this subject is to study and practice topics on developing an entrepreneurial venture from an idea through to its first ‘minimum viable product’ in the market, and first customer.

The subject closely examines how entrepreneurial ventures are established; the building of attributes and skills of successful entrepreneurs; how product-market fit is established through business models; development of financial models in entrepreneurial ventures; how and with what outcomes meso-level interfacing between the entrepreneur and market incumbents exists; and deployment of a value-adding product in the market.

This subject presents some of the key frameworks and tools needed by entrepreneurs and is for anyone who has an interest in understanding entrepreneurship as either potential founders, those looking to intrapreneurship in large organisations, or those looking to work with entrepreneurs in one way or another. The subject uses a combination of theory building and key entrepreneurial model exploration and intensive ‘bootcamp’ approach, similar to entrepreneurial bootcamps in practice, to build knowledge and skills in the area, recognising that these are transferable and useful to many students will either start or work for non-traditional organisations.

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Monitoring, designing and managing customer experiences (CX) is essential to overall business performance. This subject will explore how organisations can enhance customer and employee experiences to promote brand satisfaction, loyalty, positive word of mouth, and overall well-being.

We will investigate the management of human, digital, and physical touchpoints throughout each stage of the customer journey: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.

We will understand how businesses can manage contextual factors that impact customer experience. This includes the visual aesthetics of omnichannel environments and the interactions with front-line staff, including chatbots and robots. We will also examine the role of customers in the co-creation and co-destruction of value. Finally, we will learn how to identify and monitor crucial customer experience pain points and how businesses can effectively recover from significant negative deviations in customer experience ratings.

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This subject explores the role of marketing and consumption in a world facing significant social and environmental challenges. What is the role of marketing and marketers in climate change, digital privacy, or the obesity crisis? Does marketing actually improve consumers’ wellbeing? Many ‘ethical’ consumers now integrate their concern for society and the environment into their purchasing decisions. And many ‘ethical’ brands now promote their social and/or environmental credentials. So, can we market and consume our way out of these crises? This subject will address the criticisms of marketing’s role in sustainability issues, and then equip students with the strategic and ethical direction to respond proactively to the opportunities these challenges provide.

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Sales are the only sustainable source of revenues for any firm. Despite the importance and significance of sales, the understanding of sales, the different salesperson roles (facilitator, persuader, orchestrator, etc.), and the different selling situations that might arise are often poorly understood. In this subject we discuss these issues alongside aspects such as the potential for sales to contribute to the creation of customer value, the importance and approaches to pricing, and we introduce the concept of selling value. A specific aspect of this course involves the drafting of sales plans and pitches.

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This subject explores key issues facing managers of international businesses. These include the need to develop skills in cross-cultural communication, negotiation, conflict resolution and global teamwork within the firm and with other parties in host countries. This subject further explores how managers respond positively to the challenges of using a multi-cultural workforce, including expatriates, global teams and operating a business in a number of culturally-distinct environments.

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Conflict between individual and groups is an inevitable aspect of day to day life. This subject will review the nature of conflict in the workplace and the conflict management strategies of influencing and negotiation. Students will be given the opportunity to apply negotiation techniques to case studies and in simulations.

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