For Tuck MBA courses, Professor Kopalle currently teaches Retail Pricing Strategies and Tactics. He has also taught both Marketing Concepts and Strategies and Marketing New Products.
In addition to the MBA courses, Professor Kopalle teaches within Tuck's Executive Education Custom Programs designed for U.S. and international companies. The content of the programs is tailored to the specific needs of firms, helping them develop valuable strategic insights into their current business challenges. He has also taught marketing to college juniors and seniors in the Tuck Business Bridge Program®.
Statistics for Managers: MBA Core Course
This course provides an in-depth introduction to statistics as applied to managerial problems. The emphasis is on conceptual understanding as well as conducting statistical analyses. Students will learn both the limitations and potential of statistics and how to interpret results. They will also gain hands-on experience using Excel as well as more comprehensive packages such as SPSS. Topics include descriptive statistics (central tendency, dispersion, skewness, and covariance), continuous distributions (especially the normal), confidence intervals and hypothesis tests for means, and regression analysis (model evaluation, coefficient evaluation and interpretation, prediction intervals, multicollinearity, omitted variables bias, indicator variables, and model building). Application areas include finance (for example, portfolio construction), operations (such as quality control), and marketing (for example, promotion and advertising response).
Retail Pricing Strategy and Tactics: MBA Elective Course
In this minicourse, we will study both the strategic and tactical aspects of pricing decisions for retail products and services. In this regard, we will cover the “how to” of pricing new and existing products (or services). The course is quantitative in nature and takes into consideration the role of marketing, economics, statistics, and management science in determining pricing policies. In this course, students will estimate different classes of demand function models, conduct optimization to arrive at optimal pricing strategies. Students will also play a retail pricing simulation game in a competitive, car rental market. A significant part of work for this class will be a price optimization project that students will complete in groups. This course is applicable to anyone who will be directly or indirectly involved in retail pricing decisions and will be particularly valuable to those who intend to work in general management, marketing, and consulting.
We will also link pricing theory to the practice of retail pricing via the various consulting engagements of the professor across many companies in the retailing and business to business industries. The course deals with various levels of competition and product differentiation and focuses on pricing structure through time, across product lines, and over customer segments.
Marketing: MBA Core Course
The marketing course prepares general managers and brand managers to understand the strategic role of marketing and how to apply it in their organizations. The course teaches how to grow a business by thoroughly understanding its current and prospective customers, the only source of a firm's revenue. Companies with high or increasing market capitalizations know how to create, communicate and deliver value to their customers. Students will learn how to create such value by applying a set of frameworks and analytical tools in three areas: identifying market opportunities, setting a marketing strategy, and formulating the marketing mix. Case studies and a competitive simulation exercise are used to develop experience in implementing these frameworks and analytical tools in order to grow a business. Specific course topics include market research, consumer decision making, market segmentation, targeting, positioning, product development, advertising, pricing, and distribution.
Marketing New Products: MBA Elective Course
The development of new products represents one of the key processes firms can exploit to maintain and expand their market position in today's dynamic markets. The course provides a practical introduction to the process of designing and marketing new products and it covers the major phases of product development. We start with opportunity identification with specific regard to customer and product knowledge as main sources for new product ideation. We then move to product design and pre-market testing and forecasting. We conclude by highlighting key decisions in launching new products. In the course we will use proven techniques, but emphasize also state of the art methods like "listening in", creativity templates techniques, and probe and learn approach in new product development and launch.
Marketing Research: MBA Elective Course
This course will expose you to the scope of marketing research and to the most frequently used marketing research techniques. The goal of the course is for you to become intelligent consumers of market research and reasonably skilled at actually executing a market research project. The content of the course is evenly split between the acquisition of data in both offline and online arenas, and the multivariate techniques used to analyze data for marketing decisions. Data acquisition includes topics like research design, sampling procedures, questionnaire design, syndicated data, qualitative data, and unstructured data. Data analysis techniques include cross-tabulations, factor analysis, text/sentiment analysis, and conjoint analysis. The course uses readings, case studies, and two hands-on business projects.
Tuck Integrative Experiential Learning
TuckINTEL stands for Tuck’s Integrative Experiential Learning. It is a customized, immersive, integrative, and competitive exercise. The purpose of this minicourse is to help students integrate the key insights of Tuck’s first-year core curriculum. The idea here is to add integrative experiences in our MBA program that will help our students connect the dots across our core curriculum. This intensive, four-day course incorporates key elements of finance & accounting, marketing, communications, statistics, economics, decision science, strategy and management, and operations. During the course, teams of four or five students run a company in a next generation wind turbine market for a multi-year timeframe. Each year constitutes a year of decision making about such areas as marketing and communication, strategic priorities, timely production, economic analysis, cash requirements and funding, presentations to the board, and team excellence and personal leadership impacts.
Marketing
An introduction to key marketing concepts. The class is designed for college juniors and seniors majoring in the liberal arts and sciences and helps them become more competitive and confident in a business environment.