Performance Achievement Planning

This short course is a professional development course that is designed to support all PG students in the University of Bedfordshire Business School to enhance their employability and develop a professional profile through their journey in the Masters. The specific aims are to:

1. Enhance students’ professional, personal development and communication skills.  
2. To support students to evidence how their experience at masters level has contributed to the development of their professional profile as required after graduation.
3. To support students to develop the necessary academic skill required for successful completion of postgraduate research

Brand Communication And Reputation Management

The central aim of this Unit is to provide you with a thorough understanding of the role that Communications plays within the marketing strategy of any organisation and be able to critically analyse and reflect upon the relationship between buyer behaviour and the development of a Marketing Communications Strategy. The unit will enable you to understand the main functions of the marketing communications mix including key areas of integrated marketing communications systems: public relations, advertising, and digital media. In addition, the unit will seek to develop a critical appreciation of the role of Public Relations and Digital Marketing as a key tool for ‘reputation management’ and the mechanisms for developing successful digital campaigns.

Marketing And The Digital Future

Digital marketing has become an increasingly vital ingredient for business success. Organisations that neglect their digital marketing activities and operations are doomed to failure.

Digital platforms are not only revolutionising marketing, but creating new business models and new methods of social interaction. This unit explores the effects on management, business, economics, sociology and ethics. 

For organisations some of the key questions are: what do my customers want; how do potential and actual customers view my offering; how do I make my product or service different; how much shall I charge for it and where/how do I 'talk about' it and make it available?

All of these questions are of course posed in a context of competition and in a political, economic, socio-cultural and technological framework that is constantly evolving. The motto for organisations often is 'change or die'. A key component of any digital marketing is the ability to communicate effectively online via social media, thus bringing together new technological developments as well as economic, sociological and political changes combined with the extent to which academic theory matches practice.

The unit therefore aims to engage you with a critical understanding of 21st century digital marketing and communication in practice.

Digital Analytics And Online Customer Experience

Increasingly, big data and digital analytics technologies are changing the way that organisations are generating and using data. Many organisations have realised that in order to operate and innovate more effectively online, they need to build and leverage knowledge of online customer behaviour, use digital analytics to assess and tune their marketing strategy, evaluate new product lines, determine how to invest in social media, and how to identify and target key market segments. A key area of focus is on enhancing customer engagement through improving the customer online experience. An overview of current CRM software provision is used to demonstrate mechanisms for making effective and efficient use of available customer data. Systems such as Salesforce and other emerging cloud based technologies such as HubSpot demonstrate evolving technologies increasingly adopted by SMEs to improve customer engagement and retention.

This unit has been designed to give you a strategic online business perspective via digital analytics methodologies. After studying this unit, you will be able to

1.   develop a critical understanding of digital analytics as a means to inform digital business strategy and operations;

2.   critically evaluate the procedures involved in collecting, measuring, analysing and reporting internet data to optimise web usage and enhance online business performance; 

3.   via practical experience of conducting digital analytics, develop your ability to critically appraise complex problems relevant to online business scenarios; and

4.   critically evaluate digital analytics practice thereby to effectively use the resulting insights to support decision-making.

Digital Marketing Strategy

In today’s business world information as a resource is crucial to facilitate decision-making, create new business models, and achieve competitive advantage. Moreover, information is nowadays primarily stored in, and managed by, business information systems. This unit develops your knowledge and understanding of the use of business systems and information systems for driving an effective digital marketing strategy as well as wider management tasks in a variety of business settings. Crucially, you will learn about the role of information systems in strategy, data analytics, digital marketing, and related areas.

The unit takes an integrated approach to critically assess the relationship between information systems and how they can create a competitive advantage. The aim is to enable you to understand and critically assess what information systems are, what key characteristics they have and what they can (and cannot) do for an organisation. An increasing trend related to information systems is their capability to facilitate company data analysis (Big Data/Business Intelligence) – this is also something that you will explore.

Successful completion of the unit will give you a comprehensive and detailed overview of theory and practice and you will acquire a ‘toolkit’ that provides the basis for understanding the potential – and limitations – of information systems for business success.

Business Dissertation

Aims:

• To bring theory and practice together to formulate a  topic of your interest whether it is a research-oriented topic or a more clinical topic that is relevant to the context of business and conduct research on your choice of topic relevant to your field of study
• To stimulate you to reflect on issues critically and to identify aspects that need further research
• To provide you with the opportunity to explore a topic and appreciate the importance of literature review in the learning process
• To critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of other people’s research to formulate your own study
• To enhance skills in time-management, research management, project organisation and decision-making
• To apply and reflect on the practicalities of research including access to sources and ethical considerations

Relevance

An important aim of a Master’s degree is to master and apply your knowledge and skills independently so that you can successfully carry out research. This dissertation provides you with the opportunity for sustained independent study that builds on your research proposal and represents the culmination of your Master’s level studies.