Your time is valuable. We have designed the CEO Marketing Boot Camp to provide you with end-to-end understanding of marketing strategy in one day. Our course gives you a working knowledge of marketing strategy issues and processes so you can fully participate in marketing decisions and effectively lead your organization.

The outline below is the curriculum for our one-day class. Though we will be flexible with course material and focus more intently on the subjects that you and your classmates want, the entire outline will be covered in class and in the printed, 100-page course materials.

Outline - CEO Marketing Boot Camp

1 Intro

• Why it is important for CEOs to know marketing theory
• Around the room intros with blurb about your businesses and where you are in your growth cycle

2 Overview of strategic activities

• What marketing is and what it is composed of
• Market definition
• Segmentation
• Buyer genotype identification
• Whole product definition
• Positioning
• Branding
• Market message development (market and field messages)

3 Market definition

• Why define your market?
• What is not in a market definition
• Common market definition metrics
• Market sizes (total, addressable, realistic, segments, geographies, other)
• Market bounds – identifying limitations (adoption, market disciplines, “six forces”, competition, economics)
• Positioning and SWOT as part of market definition
• Common mistakes in defining a market for investors

4 Market segmentation

• What are market segments?
• Why bother segmenting?
• Common segmentation models
• Why to avoid common segmentation models
• Organic segmentation and the key criteria list
• Prioritizing segments (segment life cycles, self-referencing)
• Finding the common thread helps define your brand

5 Buyer genotypes

• What is a genotype (common types, B2B and B2C)
• Influence, veto and decision makers
• The need to prepare communication for all genotypes
• Motivator and demotivator mapping (common threads and core market messages)
• Managing the complex sale with many genotypes – who is important and in which sales phases

6 Whole product definition

• What is a whole product?
• Why it is important to develop a whole product offering?
• Nobody can build it all – the alternatives (build, buy, partner, depreciate, open source)
• Discovering the whole product for each market and segment (deep interviews, surveying, feedbacks, social/buzz)
• Whole product per segment and chaining segment-to-segment priorities

7 Positioning

• What is positioning and who cares about it? You, your competitors, market perceptions and next-step moves
• Positioning as a tool to plan market dominance
• Positioning matrices (common, real and unique vectors, matrices)
• Positioning influence (whole product, genotype motivation, segments)

8 Branding

• What is a brand?
• What branding is not and why the word is so misused
• Branding and communicating to the market
• The divided human brain – logical and emotive – how and why to tap both halves
• Why emotions matter to technology buyers
• Brands gone wrong – matching reality to hype
• Brand elasticity and knowing its limits
• Competing brands – when and why to have more than one brand

9 Messaging

• The myriad of messages (core, field, segment, genotype, topic/audience)
• The messaging matrix and the complexity of cross-messaging
• Messaging for multi-segment models
• Creating messaging – the structured approach (core, segment, field, external)

10 Inbound marketing

• What is inbound marketing and why is it important?
• Expected outcomes vs. features and benefits
• Fetching, receiving, and communing – depth vs. breadth and why getting both can be difficult (research, receiving, communing)
• Qualitative vs. quantitative and when to apply each research type
• Sales feedback and why to use it with caution

11 Wrap-up

• Recap and review
• Required reading
• Open discussion time