Wharton Accepting Applications for New Online Course in Customer Centricity
The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania has begun the application period for its first online-only executive education course. The course is called “The Strategic Value of Customer Relationships” and it will cover topics related to consumer centricity.
The course aims to encourage executives to think about changes in the ways firms go to market, develop products and services, and distribute and market them. Executives who enroll in the course will learn how to build a business strategy around their best customers instead of their best products. Students will learn ways to sell more effectively to their best customers and identify potential new customers with similar behavioral tendencies to their best customers.
The course will be offered from March 3 to April 27, and it will be taught by Wharton Marketing Professor Peter Fader. The class will consist of a mixture of case studies, video lecture, live and recorded teaching sessions, online classroom discussions, and group projects. The course will also include interviews with leading experts in consumer centricity, including Zachery Anderson, the VP of Marketing Science and Analytics at Electronic Arts; Bernd Skiera, a Professor of Electronic Commerce at Goethe-University in Frankfurt; and Michel Vounatsos, the President of Consumer Centricity at Merck.
In addition to serving as a Professor of Marketing, Peter Fader is the co-director of Wharton’s Consumer Analytics Initiative. He was recently named a “Professor to Watch” by the Financial Times. He has also written a book on the course topic called Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage. The book is available from Wharton Digital Press.
Enrollment will be limited to a small group of executives. To receive a place in the course, executives must present a specific business challenge they face that can be addressed with this approach to consumer relations. The course will not count towards a Wharton degree and does not provide credit.
The deadline to apply for “The Strategic Value of Customer Relationships” is February 14. The application is available on the course website.
