Brands differ from commodities through the additional benefits perceived by customers. They thus reduce the interchangeability of one’s services, the price pressure of customers and create long-term value for one’s own company. However, brands do not “happen.” They have to be created and maintained. They must be agile and, at the same time stable, react to current trends, but still be a rock for customers. At the same time, megatrends change the game’s basic rules in the long term and, in some cases, barely noticeably.

An essential prerequisite for the success of a brand lies in customers’ perceptions. Strategic communication ensures that opinions, attitudes, expectations, and behaviors are influenced according to specific objectives.

Relevant subject areas:

• Brand positioning
• Brand value
• Identity, image, and purpose
• Brand portfolio management
• Brand architectures and synergies
• Brand experiences and storytelling

The customer is at the heart of every successful company. Customer Centricity arises when the company doesn’t put itself, its structures, and its processes at the center of its strategy but rather focuses on its customers. Successful Customer Centricity can be achieved in very different ways: Starbucks, for example, deliberately makes ordering coffee easy for its customers through an app. Patagonia creates Customer Centricity with the help of unconditional transparency. Swiss offers better service than its competitors. YouTube personalizes product experiences for billions of customers. Every industry, every category, and company needs to explore what Customer Centricity means to them.

Relevant subject areas:

• Customer experience
• Customer journey thinking & mapping
• Value selling and value-based pricing
• Moments of truth
• Storytelling

Digital marketing now influences all facets of marketing. For marketers, digital marketing offers many challenges: For example, digital marketing is often newer, more complex, more complicated, and more expensive than traditional marketing. Online, fewer customer senses are accessible, and established offline strategies cannot be transferred. Online customer expectations also increase: While customers are happy to wait in a crowded store, more than half of customers abandon brand interactions online if a web page does not load within 0.5 seconds. Furthermore, the Internet offers users new opportunities for interactive communication: Think Spotify Premium, YouTube Premium and ad blockers, and social media.

Relevant subject areas:

• Online marketing & social media
• eCommerce
• Artificial intelligence & machine learning
• Marketing automation
• Programmatic advertising
• Voice branding
• Chatbots
• Virtual & augmented reality

Markets today are VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous). They are constantly changing and harbor risks and opportunities. Business models and entire industries are disrupted. This requires continuous vigilance. The market strategy of one’s company must be continuously reviewed and, if necessary, quickly adapted. All of this requires the right mindset and the right individual competencies and tools to react to changes swiftly:

Relevant topics:

• Trend analysis
• Market & customer insights
• Market and customer segmentation
• Business model innovation and its monetization
• Value proposition development

Key accounts are vital to a company’s sustainable, long-term growth and require a significant commitment of time and resources. Sales staff must develop a clear strategy and structure to manage and grow key accounts. The St.Gallen Key Account Management concept promotes collaboration with key customers and comprises the six S’s (Screening, Strategy, Solutions, Skills, Structures, Scorecard). As a field-tested framework model, it offers the opportunity to actively design, introduce and optimize a systematic KAM approach in one’s own company.

B2B marketing is fundamentally different from B2C marketing. On the one hand, customers have to be segmented according to different criteria. For another, each customer is much more complex: For example, sales must be made to purchasing committees, consisting of several people and functions. Here, many personalities, functions, and hierarchy levels must be considered.

Relevant subject areas:

• Sales excellence
• Key account management
• B2B marketing

Pricing is a central element of marketing. Pricing plays a special role in the marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion): it is the customer’s worth attributed to the product, promotion, and distribution. Prices should not result from the market. Prices must be actively managed. Managing the price image and the price confidence in a product or service is critical. It is, therefore, important not to delegate pricing to sales. Pricing is of both strategical and operational importance.

Product management guides how companies can design their services to be uniquely positioned in the market and meet the demands of the desired customer groups. How can corporate services be systematically configured, communicated, and commercialized? It also addresses the central question of how product management in companies should be successfully organized in the long term.

Relevant subject areas:

• Dynamic pricing
• Value pricing
• Behavioral pricing
• Performance systems
• The role of the product manager
• Product life cycle management