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The Online Master's in Marketing

Building on our history of innovation, William & Mary is introducing an online master’s degree in marketing designed to prepare the next generation of leaders in this dynamic field. An extension of the long-standing foundation of excellence that makes our graduate business programs among the highest-ranked in the nation, our online Master of Science in Marketing offers broad yet deep expertise in the tools, technologies and strategies used by forward-thinking marketers across industries.

Whether you are hoping to build a solid foundation for a career pivot into marketing or you’re ready to position yourself on a trajectory toward upper management and the c-suite, the Online Master’s in Marketing offers everything you need to know to thrive in today’s rapidly evolving digital world.

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Online Master’s in Marketing by the Numbers

33

Credits

10

Courses

1

On-Campus Residency

#1

Business School for Learning¹

#6

Best Business Professors²

What Is a Renaissance Marketer?

The Online Master’s in Marketing has been designed to create a new type of marketing leader through the cultivation of what are often considered disparate skills sets across the analytic, strategic and creative sides of marketing.

Renaissance Marketers are not interested in business as usual.

They are comfortable in a dynamic world and not bound to the mechanistic rhythms of conventional workflows. Embracing ambiguity and iteration, Renaissance Marketers understand that the best use of time is often nonlinear. They are adept at the digital and analytics-based skills that drive innovative decision-making. They are capable and fluent in the rapidly evolving technology that defines their profession, and they recognize its role as an enabler of collaboration and insight.

To Renaissance Marketers, no challenge is simply an obstacle to overcome.

They treat even the most difficult problems as opportunities for strategic creativity and innovative brand strategy. They approach their work informed by, but not beholden to, time-tested methods: They balance the wisdom to respect proven processes with the courage to adapt them—or even radically change them—for current challenges.

Renaissance Marketers look outward.

Because they understand broad collaboration to be key to identifying problems and creating solutions, they act with humility, engage with empathy, and create a culture of respect that nonetheless challenges all involved to do their best work. In this environment, they cultivate new ideas by inviting diverse perspectives, engaging in deep immersion, encouraging open debate and treating every idea as a hypothesis to be tested.

Renaissance Marketers strive to create an impact on the problem at hand, the company they work in, the market they serve and the world they inhabit.

Are you ready to become a Renaissance Marketer?

Become a New Type of Leader

Our graduates are:

Empowered with strategic, innovative vision and leading-edge digital skills
Adept at using analytical tools to drive decision-making
Fluent in quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques, including conjoint analysis, cluster analysis, and customer lifetime value calculations

Are You Up to the Marketing Challenge?

At the core of our Online Master’s in Marketing program lies the Marketing Challenge: the defining, unifying project that you create, refine and build throughout your coursework. To complete it successfully, you must expand your thinking and adopt a broader, strategic view of marketing.

Work starts right away in the foundational Renaissance Marketer course. You’ll start to develop your unique Marketing Challenge, establishing parameters for a project you’ll work on throughout the master's program.

At the beginning of each course, you’ll identify areas of your Marketing Challenge that need development, and the current class’s possible impact on its outcome. At the course’s end, you will update your challenge’s parameters, discuss the course’s impact on it and outline your next steps.

As you grow professionally through work on the Marketing Challenge, you’ll create value for your current business. The challenge gives you opportunities to reach out to senior leaders in your company with whom you don’t interact on a daily basis. In meeting with them, you’ll have the chance to demonstrate strategic skill by addressing your challenge’s tactical requirements. You will become adept at collaboration and relationship building through peer discussions.

William & Mary students have recently created and addressed these Marketing Challenges:

With podcasting companies focusing predominantly on high-income audiences, how do we create compelling podcast content for an underserved population and connect it to a brand that serves that audience?
How do we increase referrals from general veterinary practitioners to veterinary neurologists?
How do we create and market a content creation company for Black men?

Expert Guidance Through an Ever-Changing Field

Study with faculty creators and innovators who have been influential in building nationally and internationally known companies and brands, including:

American Express
Arby's
Best Buy
Burger King
Discover Financial
Domino's Pizza
Expedia
Geico
Kraft Foods
MetLife
Microsoft
Mondelez (Oreo, Chips Ahoy, Velveeta)
Morgan Stanley
Old Navy
Taco Bell
Target
Turkish Airlines
Uber
UPS
Volkswagen
Walmart
Zillow

Curriculum

Program Prep Course

Program Prep Course (0 credits)

A pre-program course designed to ensure all students begin the program with consistent knowledge of fundamentals. Online, but not instructor-led. Tutors available to all students. Consists of two modules: math for marketers and marketing principles.

This course can be waived by scoring 80 percent or higher on a marketing background assessment, by demonstrating three years of direct experience on a marketing team, or by possessing an undergraduate degree in marketing or an MBA.

Foundation Course

BUAD 5207 Renaissance Marketer (4 credits)

Renaissance Marketer is a four-credit course and serves as the foundation for the Online Master’s in Marketing program. It will introduce students to a view of the traditional “4Ps of Marketing”—Product, Price, Promotion and Place—through a new lens: Renaissance Marketing. Renaissance Marketing acknowledges the new world of marketing: one that is more collaborative, dynamic and faster moving than ever before. In this environment, today’s successful marketers must apply the principles of the discipline in a different way. The course will also introduce students to a 5th “P”: Participation. With Participation, marketers engage consumers in the marketing process using technology, new forms of market research and advanced feedback techniques to co-create products, services, experiences and business models.

Analytics and Insight Courses

BUAD 5217 Analytics for Evaluation and Situation Analysis (4 credits)

This course focuses on qualitative and quantitative analytics techniques designed to assess the current state of any marketing situation, such as how consumers are responding to current efforts, how their responses fit with expectations, and gauging the effect on purchase, repeat purchase and recommendation.

BUAD 5247 Analytics for Planning and Optimization (4 credits)

This course focuses on the use of research to plan and optimize future marketing efforts. Consumers expect personalization in exchange for a measure of loyalty. Customer analytics allow marketers to use customer behavior data to identify insights and help make key business decisions. Market segmentation is used along with predictive analytics to drive tactics such as product/service innovation, promotional activities such as direct marketing, distribution decisions like site selection, pricing tactics and customer relationship management.

Marketing Innovation Courses

BUAD 5257 Product Management and New Product Development Strategies (4 credits)

The course will focus on an ability to innovate through several interrelated capabilities: a) the ability to identify unique insights into customers’ needs and motivations, b) the ability to identify and define the best opportunities for innovation given these insights, c) the ability to generate creative product and service solution concepts to exploit these opportunities, and d) the ability to continually learn from customer feedback and to iterate toward products and services that capture a disproportionate market share and/or that create new markets. Course activities will promote the development of each student’s innovation skills and mindset (e.g., design thinking), as well as equip each student to participate in and lead cross-functional innovation projects.

BUAD 5267 Market-Driven Innovation Strategy and Management (4 credits)

This course is focused on innovation tools and techniques appropriate to corporate strategy along with innovation management. Success factors in innovation management include: innovation strategy, innovation process, resources and organization, and innovation culture. Visual design, innovation techniques and cutting-edge tools are added to the traditional strategic toolbox to bring new insights into innovation management including business model canvas, value proposition canvas, strategy canvas, service blueprinting, corporate identity, branding and other visual marketing strategy tools.

Modern Integrated Marketing Courses

BUAD 5277 Integrated Campaign Marketing (4 credits)

Integrated campaign management entails the orchestration of paid, earned and owned media vehicles to create a marketing experience that increases consumer engagement, strengthens brand differentiation and demand, and moves consumers through the purchase funnel toward repeat purchase and brand advocacy. This course will approach integrated marketing communications through an experience-planning lens: teaching students to create integrated communications experiences that make strategic use of communications vehicles to drive brand and business growth.

BUAD 5287 Digital Content Management (4 credits)

This course explores the evolving world of digital content management and its role in integrated marketing campaigns. Students will examine how digital media tools and techniques can be leveraged to promote products and services as well as their personal brands. Upon completion of this course, students will have a working knowledge of the current digital marketing ecosystem, content marketing tactics and ethical practices.

Residency Support Course

BUAD 5237 Residency (1 credit)

The residency is designed:

To help students better understand and assimilate into the culture of William & Mary and the Mason School of Business
To teach content that is best learned in a face-to-face environment (e.g., experiential exercises)
To allow students to make connections with faculty and each other along with an opportunity to create relationships that will endure beyond the end of the program

Capstone Course

BUAD 5297 Capstone: Revolutionary Marketing Leadership (4 credits)

This course helps students with insights into the tenets of leadership—how to lead and motivate a team, how to handle crises and how to manage ethical considerations in modern marketing. The leadership content is designed to prepare students to practice the skills they learn in the program in a senior-level marketing position. It also serves to complete the study of the Marketing Challenge. Each student will prepare a presentation to give to the class on their Marketing Challenge.

Online Master’s in Marketing at a Glance

Complete in as few as 15 months
1 free program prep course
1 on-campus residency
2 opportunities to start per year

Want More Insight?

Take a look at what’s ahead in the Online Master’s in Marketing program—download our program details guide, your one-stop document for admissions requirements, courses and more.

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Finding a Common Ground: Residency and the Program Prep Course

Students in the Online Master’s in Marketing program arrive with a diversity of personal and professional backgrounds. That’s why our marketing master’s degree program includes two opportunities to begin building a shared experience with your cohort, both in terms of marketing knowledge and your interpersonal relationships with one another.

The Program Prep Course offers you the chance to prepare yourself for the intellectually challenging course content that will follow throughout the remainder of the program. This self-guided online course ensures that you have the proper mastery of math and foundational marketing principles to succeed in subsequent classes. And best of all, this course is completely free!

The Program Prep Course can be waived by scoring 80 percent or higher on a marketing background assessment, by demonstrating three years of direct experience on a marketing team, or by possessing an undergraduate degree in marketing or an MBA.

For the Residency Weekend, we invite you to make the trip to our beautiful Williamsburg campus to meet your online classmates and faculty face to face for the first time. In addition to bonding and networking over the course of three days, you will complete a one-credit course introducing you to unique aspects of the William & Mary experience and helping develop the interpersonal skills that are essential for any successful marketing leader.

The residency curriculum is structured around three themes:

Collaboration: Content and exercises designed to capitalize on face-to-face opportunities
Culture: Experiences to more tightly bind students to the culture of William & Mary and the Raymond A. Mason School of Business
Connections: Social interactions designed to create relationships between students and faculty that endure beyond the end of the program

Residency Weekends are offered twice per academic year. While we recommend attending the residency weekend nearest to the beginning of your time in the program, doing so is not required.

Get to Know the Raymond A. Mason School of Business

About the Raymond A. Mason School of Business

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Sources

^{1. Retrieved on March 18, 2020, from bloomberg.com/business-schools/2018/#ranking=2}
^{2. Retrieved on March 18, 2020, from princetonreview.com/business-school-rankings?rankings=best-professors}
^{3. Retrieved on January 20, 2020, from www.bls.gov/ooh/management/advertising-promotions-and-marketing-managers.htm}
^{4. Retrieved on January 20, 2020, from ncta.com/whats-new/iot-has-quietly-and-quickly-changed-our-lives}
^{5. Retrieved on January 20, 2020, from emarketer.com/content/us-time-spent-with-media-in-2019-has-plateaued-with-digital-making-up-losses-by-old-media}
^{6. Retrieved on January 20, 2020, from linkedin.com/pulse/have-we-reached-peak-ad-social-media-ryan-holmes/}

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