Course 2018-2019 a.y.

In the "Management of Fashion and Luxury Companies" course, special attention is devoted to the following topics:

• Core market trends in fashion and luxury.
• Fashion and luxury consumer behavior and competitive benchmarking.
• Market segmentation and target identification.
• Product and brand positioning and management.
• Innovation management and new product development.
• Merchandising.
• Buying and retailing.
• Customer relationship management.
• Digital strategies and social media marketing within fashion and luxury markets.

• Understand new trends in fashion and luxury markets and recognize how companies are reshaping their strategies to leverage them at best.
• Manage the core tools needed to analyze demand and competition in fashion and luxury in order to build a distinctive value proposition.
• Deal with product and brand management, mastering the basics of merchandising, buying, and retailing.
• Understand the fundamentals of successful omnichannel strategies and social media marketing initiatives.

• Develop a sound business and marketing plan in fashion and luxury markets.
• Apply the acquired technical knowledge to solve real-life management and marketing problems experienced by companies in omnichannel settings.
• Design a consistent digital strategy for fashion and luxury brands, balancing customer engagement and aspirational status.

• Face-to-face lectures
• Guest speaker's talks (in class or in distance)
• Company visits
• Case studies /Incidents (traditional, online)
• Group assignments
• Interactive class activities (role playing, business game, simulation, online forum, instant polls)

• Attendance is required at all regular classes.
• The pedagogical style is a hybrid of lectures, cases, and guest sessions. The course is conducted as a seminar focusing on discussions, student’s initiated topics and occasional lectures.
• Preparation for class discussion, active class participation, preparation of short assignments and initiated topics and questions are crucial ingredients of the course.
• Several guest speakers from leading fashion and luxury brands share their managerial competences with participants in class.
• Selected company visits are also going to be planned in order to enrich the overall learning experience.
• Ad-hoc exercises designed with top managers from key players of the industry are delivered and discussed in class.
• Participants are provided with practical tools needed to analyze specific problems and take decisions.

With the purpose of measuring the acquisition of the above-mentioned learning outcomes, the student assessment is based on two main components:

• Group assignment (group grade, 40% of the final grade) designed and delivered in class in collaboration with the top management team of a leading player of the fashion and luxury market. The assignment aims at verifying student’s ability to:
• Identify and analyze the main challenges faced by a real fashion/luxury company.
• Apply the appropriate tools and techniques learnt in class to structure an ad-hoc strategy.
• Apply their analytical reasoning and critical thinking to come up with creative solutions to the problem. The expected output is a power point presentation.
• Final written exam (individual grade, 60% of the final grade; closed-books), based on a mix of open questions, incidents/cases and close-end questions related to the shared readings, slides, and notes, which aims to assess the student’s learning level of the theoretical models and the main concepts, methods and tools covered in the course.

The assessment of non-attending students is entirely based (100% of the final grade) on the final written exam.

For all students:

• Readings available in the Bboard Platform via Bocconi Library's Course Reserves.
• In addition, slides and some other materials (articles, videos, useful links, etc.) are provided during the course. Students need to refer to the Bboard platform.