CIM Chartered Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing

The main advantages are:

1. Greater focus on work based assessment rather than examinations – this will help you apply your knowledge more effectively.
2. This is particularly relevant if your employers are sponsoring your course.
3. Improved Marketing Communications planning and execution skills
4. New focus on Contemporary Issues such as the Credit Crunch / Recession and how you can survive and thrive in adversity.
5. With four submission dates per year (rather than two), you can now spread your studies evenly throughout the year.

Please note that you need an existing degree to start the programme.

Is this format for you?

The programme offered by the Marketers’ Forum is specifically designed for aspiring marketers who want to:

• Speak the language of marketing more convincingly
• Add academic rigour and theory to your experience
• Build your confidence
• Build a network of like-minded marketing professionals
• Learn from cutting-edge practitioners

Ideally you should have completed either the CIM Diploma or have a marketing related degree. However, we place a greater emphasis on professional experience at this level.

The Chartered Postgraduate Diploma In Marketing is a challenging, high-level two stage marketing qualification that demonstrates specialist professional knowledge across many areas and a route to Chartered Marketer status.

The qualification aims to enable marketers to champion the customer experience and exert a strong influence on the organisation to adopt a customer orientation, contribute along with other directors and senior managers to its competitive strategy, align the organisation's activities to the customer, and manage the organisation's marketing activities.

This qualification is aimed at marketers who have already gained a significant level of knowledge and/or experience of marketing. The focus is on the strategic aspects of marketing management.

Course Units

Emerging Themes

By the end of this unit you should be able to:

• Critically evaluate a range of key emerging macro-environmental themes and make a critical assessment of their significance for a specific sector or industry
• Propose strategic marketing responses to the key emerging themes judged to have the greatest potential impact on a specific sector. Responses should reflect contemporary marketing practice (ie, marketing’s new ground) and demonstrate creativity

Analysis and Decision

By the end of this unit you should be able to:

• Undertake a strategic marketing audit, assessing an organisation’s competencies, competitive advantage, market performance, customers, competitors, product and service portfolios, positioning, value proposition and market impact to assess the impact of these factors on an organisation’s strategic intent and direction
• Utilise the strategic marketing audit to critically evaluate a range of strategic marketing options available to an organisation, including innovation, mergers, acquisitions, partnering, alliances, environmental sustainability and CSR, in order to deliver best value growth and expansion opportunities
• Utilise a range of financial and other measurement tools to assess the financial and non-financial benefits of recommended strategic marketing decisions
• Utilise a range of risk assessment tools to critically assess the risk of strategic market decisions and and their impact upon an organisation.

Marketing Leadership and Planning

By the end of this unit you should be able to:

• Critically evaluate ways of delivering an organisation’s corporate mission and vision effectively
• Develop marketing strategies to establish competitive and sustainable marketing and relationship strategies to achieve an organisation’s strategic intent and deliver its value proposition
• Utilising a synergistic planning processes, develop strategic plans, taking account of different planning frameworks, ensuring they are within the resource capabilities of an organisation
• Determine the most appropriate organisational structures for market-oriented and/or changing organisations, whilst evaluating the resource implications and requirements
• Develop sustainable competitive advantage through suitable approaches to leadership and innovation in order to generate stakeholder value and contribute to organisational success

Managing Corporate Reputation

By the end of this unit you should be able to:

• Critically evaluate the way organisations develop their identities and how some organisations use these to form images and assign reputational status
• Critically analyse the elements that contribute to the identity that an organisation projects to its stakeholders, sometimes through a corporate brand
• Critically evaluate linkage between how an organisation wants to be seen and how it is seen, namely corporate communications

Do you qualify?

As a minimum, the following qualifications and experience are recommended as a prerequisite for entry onto the first stage of the Chartered Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing:

• CIM Professional Diploma in Marketing or the old CIM Advanced Certificate in Marketing
  OR
• A business or marketing Bachelors or Masters degree (or an equivalent qualification) where a minimum of half of the credits come from marketing
  AND
• A range of experience working at Senior Marketing Management level that has provided potential students with ability to evidence that they can meet the learning outcomes of the CIM Professional Diploma in Marketing if required to do so.

How will you be assessed?

It's possible to qualify within one to two years studying part time. You will be assessed using a blend of two basic methods:

1. By formal examinantion
2. By assignments such as coursework and case studies that require longer answers and will often be based on various findings and recommendations within your own company (or a company of your choice)

Summer 2013 Timetable