Dr. Elias Abdelkefi on Marketing and Digital Marketing at Parul University

The session was taken by Dr Elias Abdelkefi. He is a Tunisian academic and a Professor at the Swiss School of Business and Marketing and North American University. It is an honour for students to learn from such great experts. He is the head of digital marketing. He taught the MBA students at Parul University’s Faculty of Management Studies. He visited the university under CIRR‘s Visiting Professor Programme.  His work portfolio has research on mobile marketing, advertising, and consumer behaviour. Also, he is a certified digital marketer and a subject matter reviewer for leading education platforms.

He started his session by breaking down the idea of marketing. He said that marketing is about selling and advertising. He used the image of iceberg to explain that advertising and the sales floor are the tip of an iceberg. The unseen part, below the tip plays a huge role too. The unseen part is the decisive part, it contains market research, designing, visualising about the product, pricing and features. These are the crucial parts of marketing that are below the tip. He shared that marketing has divisions. He divided the discipline into strategic marketing, that has Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning (STP) that takes years to settle. Along with tactical marketing. He also described the four main Ps of product. The four Ps are product, price, place and promotion.

Also Read: Dr. Vijayesvaran Arumugam of IMU University on Marketing and Brand Competition at Parul University

A classroom exercise made a point stick: a student was asked to sell an anime toy to a buyer who disliked it, and no discount worked, proving that selling the wrong product to the wrong person always fails and that a marketer should qualify interest before spending effort. Citing Philip Kotler, Dr. Abdelkefi argued the marketing team is really the customer department, acting as the customer’s advocate inside the company even when that makes it unpopular with finance or production.

He reduced marketing to three words, needs (a sense of something missing), value (the offering must matter to that specific person) and satisfaction (quality, size and price must all deliver), and stressed honesty. One genuinely satisfied customer brings in many more, while a disappointed one tells far more people, so retaining existing customers matters more than chasing new ones and a misleading sale destroys a brand. He framed marketing as a never-ending PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act), where a company reviews last year’s errors, adopts tools such as AI, and plans better.

Dr. Abdelkefi highlighted the importance of differentiating between needs, wants, and demands. A need is “a feeling or a desire that is not satisfied by possessing a good or service,” while a want is “the specific form of a need that is shaped by culture and controlled by a person,” and demand “occurs when there is a want supported by the ability and willingness to buy.” In response to the controversial statement about whether marketers can actually create needs, he pointed out that they cannot, but they can “trigger a need to buy something, such as a home, or make a need more urgent, for example, the smell of fresh bread.” Additionally, the speaker discussed such concepts as customer engagement (the level of a customer’s involvement) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management, systems that track everything a company does online, including clicks and purchases, to help it respond) and create campaigns. Furthermore, the speaker examined the concepts of creating versus capturing value and such a marketer’s disease as marketing myopia, the obsession of organizations with short-term gains at the expense of customers’ long-term interests.

In the practical digital-marketing session, the focus was the buyer persona, a detailed, logical profile of an ideal customer built on age, needs, platforms and products that must hold together rather than be random guesses. Student groups built personas for major global brands. When many groups pasted AI-generated profiles without checking whether they made sense, Dr. Abdelkefi turned it into a career lesson: unverified AI output will embarrass a professional in an interview or a boardroom, and human intellect must control AI, not the other way round.

He used the brand presentations to teach core concepts in real time. McDonald’s illustrated behavioural segmentation by usage frequency and the value of loyal repeat customers; Yamaha, that a persona’s purchasing power must match its stated location; Nike, product mapping, matching each product to a specific buyer such as comfort-focused shoes for an older customer; and L’Oreal Paris, how global brands tailor product lines to the purchasing power of each market.

His sharpest analogy came with Coca-Cola. To explain why a customer moves between healthy and sugary choices, he described market segments as fixed containers and customers as balls that jump between them depending on the occasion, like a bank manager in a suit at work and in shorts at the beach, so marketers must target the occasion as much as the person.

The session ended on a professional tool. Dr. Abdelkefi gave students a content-calendar template on a digital workspace, the kind real agencies use, and set them to plan four weeks of twelve posts and execute three. He divided content into five types: informative (a launch or discount), educational (which earns saves more than likes because people return to it), emotional (a story that leaves an impression), brand (image over product) and hard-selling (urgent, effective but easy to overuse). He ran the class as a safe space to make mistakes, which is where he wanted the learning to happen.