MSc Economics and Business - Specialisation in Marketing
Rotterdam, Netherlands
DURATION
1 Years
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Full time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
01 May 2025
EARLIEST START DATE
Sep 2025
TUITION FEES
EUR 2,314 / per year
STUDY FORMAT
On-Campus
Introduction
Our academic master's program focuses on three pivotal areas (marketing management, customer experience, and customer insights), forging a pathway that is different from other marketing programs. Our specialization in these areas arises from the fundamental recognition that the relationship among them serves as the cornerstone for achieving and sustaining a strong market presence. Therefore, we hone in on these areas with a razor-sharp focus.
We guide our students to deeply understand marketing management, teaching them how to handle its complex challenges, to actively shape market trends, and to align it with the sales function. We see customer insights not just as data, but as the most important information for making key marketing decisions. Our focus on customer experience goes beyond basic interactions between the firm and its customers, diving into the emotional and psychological factors that impact customer perceptions and buying behaviors. We help our students see these three areas as an interlinked network, affecting every decision and result in marketing.
In our program, your ideas and creativity are not just welcomed, but crucial for problem-solving and innovation. The program is interspersed with frequent group assignments, offering you the rich opportunity to blend your group's creativity and collaborative efforts to address real-world cases. This iterative process of compiling, analyzing data, and formulating strategic conclusions and recommendations will not only sharpen your analytical and strategic skills but also forge a pathway to practically apply your learning in realistic business scenarios. The emphasis on evidence-based decisions stands at the heart of the program, acting as a critical catalyst for not just comprehending but mastering the dynamics of marketing, which in turn, contributes to organizational growth and heightened profitability.
Why study Marketing in Rotterdam?
The marketing department of the Erasmus School of Economics is arguably one of the top marketing science groups in Europe. Here in Rotterdam, you will learn from award-winning and practice-experienced lecturers who contribute regularly to major academic publications and have close ties to business life as well, ranging from SMEs to multinationals. Our experts will share their marketing practice experience with you. The consistent and integrated use of data, data analysis, and insights will improve your decision-making capacity, and this will help you to ensure company growth and improved profitability. The department has trained many current and former top executives in the Netherlands and abroad. This is due to the intellectual, and academic rigor as well as the practical experience you gain during the program.
Do you aspire to become one of the next leaders in marketing and do you want to join the network of our thousands of marketing alumni? Do you share our students’ intellectual curiosity, analytical reasoning, creativity, team spirit, and open-mindedness? In that case, our marketing program is an excellent choice.
This study will bring you:
- Frequent interactions with companies, ranging from guest lecturers, workshops, and cases to career events
- A highly valued Marketing Master’s degree, which is very much appreciated by companies and institutions looking for new and young marketing talent
- Award-winning, frequently published as well as practice-oriented professors with excellent business community connections
- A valued degree from an established and recognized institute that is consistently highly ranked globally.
Admissions
Curriculum
Attain your MSc in Economics and Business with a focus on Marketing through a specialized program encompassing 60 ECTS credits.
The master’s specialization in Marketing consists of core courses, seminars, electives, and a master’s thesis distributed over five blocks of eight weeks each.
In block 1 you will first follow three core courses (4 credits each), that aim to build expertise in the three different areas of our program (marketing management, customer experience, and customer insights). In the Branding & Product Management course, you will gain a deep understanding of branding and how to develop a strong brand identity that resonates with customers and sets your business apart from competitors. Furthermore, you will learn how to create a customer-centric culture that prioritizes the customer experience at every touchpoint in the course Managing Omnichannel Experiences. Finally, in the Customer Intelligence course, you will understand how you can collect data about your customers, using various methods, including surveys, focus groups, and social media listening.
In block 2, you continue with a core course (Marketing Analytics and Data Visualization), in which you learn how to use analytical tools and software to analyze customer data. It also includes data visualization tools and predictive analytics. You also choose two electives (4 credits each). One of these electives has to be a marketing course, while the other can be an economics and business course. There is a variety of marketing elective courses, such as Engaging Customers Through Digital Marketing, and Marketing & Sales Alignment that will help you to further develop your skills.
Seminars are the most important component of the master’s specialization. For these intensive courses with a maximum group size of 24 students, active participation and strong commitment are essential. You start with your first seminar Strategic Marketing Leadership in block 3 (10 credits), which combines a hands-on marketing strategy simulation (StratSim) with discussion-based sessions (lectures, coaching, and cases). It will teach students how marketing analytics can be connected to strategic decision-making, how to balance the short-term and the long-term, and how to make decisions under uncertainty. As such, the simulation bridges the “theory” and the “practice” of strategic marketing and students will also gain soft skills and teamwork skills (learning how to divide roles, adopt decision processes, and joint efforts to make better decisions).
In block 4, you can choose a seminar in order to specialize in a topic of your interest, such as Marketing in a Globalized World, Marketing Meets Society, Designing New Products and Experiences, and Leveraging Insights to Create Customer Value. Our experienced lecturers will present insightful marketing cases during class, and introduce guest lecturers with a proven marketing practice track record who are happy to share their experience with you. You will be expected to present excerpts of literature or case applications, ask questions, express doubts, and share ideas in class discussions.
You should already start to think about the research subject of your Master’s thesis in December and the last three blocks will be (partially) dedicated to the writing of your Master's thesis, which is based on the research you have conducted yourself under the close supervision of a member of our academic staff.
The curriculum consists of:
- 34% marketing management
- 33% customer experience
- 33% customer insights
Course Overview
- Take-Off Master
- Marketing Research Methods
- Branding
- Sales & Account Management
- Marketing Research Design
- Seminar Strategic Marketing
- Seminars
- Electives
- Master's Thesis Marketing
Ideal Students
Is this the right choice for you?
Are you ambitious to spearhead marketing campaigns with your expert skills? Inspired to turn creative ideas into innovative, real-world marketing solutions? Prepared to harness the power of customer insights for strategic decision-making? Are you ready to explore and enhance the crucial facets of customer experience and buying behaviors? In that case, we have an exciting program on offer.
Obtaining your marketing degree at Erasmus School of Economics will fully prepare you for these challenges and to excel in marketing practice in increasingly competitive markets. The marketing program at Erasmus School of Economics is an excellent choice if you recognize yourself in the profile below:
- Delving into the intricacies of customer decision-making and marketing management intrigues you.
- Combining out-of-the-box thinking with a pragmatic approach comes naturally to you.
- You are always eager to discover the world and your role in it.
- You are ambitious and have a go-getter mentality.
Career Opportunities
This program enables you to shape your own marketing future and follow in the footsteps of the many top executives worldwide who were trained by our marketing group.
After graduation, you have a broad set of options to start your career. Graduates find themselves working in a variety of industries and countries. Throughout the program, you develop the marketing and leadership skills to realize your goals over your entire career, whether it be in a marketing job, as a consultant, entrepreneur, or executive manager. Most of our alumni find a job within two months after graduation. Below you will find examples of the type of companies our graduates typically join and the roles they fulfill:
- Product/brand/marketing manager in a variety of small, medium, and large firms (e.g., large firms like Philips, Unilever, Nestlé, Pfizer, IBM, and Microsoft)
- E-commerce/ campaign performance specialist for online retailers such as Coolblue and Booking.com
- Marketing analytics expert or market researcher in consulting firms (e.g. McKinsey, BCG, VODW) and in multinationals (e.g. Google, KPN)
- Sales & Account manager in companies such as P&G, Unilever, and ABN-AMRO
- A start-up entrepreneur who develops new products that cater to consumer needs