Syllabus

Short Course Description

The course setting: Companies MUST understand consumers to succeed. This basic fact has led to the customer-centric approach to marketing. To develop an effective marketing strategy and implementation, companies must understand how consumers process information, feel, think, attend, remember, evaluate, choose, consume offerings, and talk about them. However, though we are all consumers, our insights, and intuitions about our own behavior and that of others may be inaccurate and misleading. This is especially true when we are very different from target market consumers.
The course goal: To teach you to become an insightful investigator and strategic shaper of consumer behavior. Achieving this goal requires examining and analyzing consumer behavior critically and uncovering findings that steer value creation and managerial action.
How: The course is designed to provide you with broad coverage of frameworks, concepts, tools, and techniques to understand consumers, with an emphasis on uncovering, generating, and interpreting business-relevant consumer insights in today?s rapidly changing world. We will discuss relevant theories and research in behavioral sciences with the goal of understanding and influencing consumer behavior. We will discuss consumer motivation and need analysis, how consumers perceive, attend, and represent information, how they evaluate options and make choices, and what they say about the marketplace. We will also discuss how background influences such as culture and social class influence consumer behavior. The course format is action-learning-oriented. So, we can delve more deeply into the subject matter, before each meeting, you will complete an interactive survey covering the topics of the meeting.