Short Course Description
The course setting: Companies must understand their target consumers to succeed. This basic realization has led to the customer-centric approach to marketing. To develop an effective marketing strategy (Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning (STP) and the 4p's), firms must understand how consumers process information, feel, think, attend, remember, evaluate, choose, consume offerings and talk about them. Importantly, though we are all consumers, our insights and intuitions about our own behavior and that of others, is often inaccurate, and may at times, be misleading. This is especially true if our target market is very different from ourselves (for example in culture, lifestyle and age).
The course goal: The aim of this course is to help you become an insightful investigator and strategic shaper of consumer behavior. Achieving this goal involves examining and analyzing consumer behavior critically, and uncovering findings that can steer managerial action and value creation.
How? To achieve the course goal, the course is designed to provide you with a broad coverage of frameworks, concepts, tools, and techniques to understand the minds of 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 overarching goal of understanding and influencing consumer behavior.
Topics include consumer need analysis, consumer perception & attention, consumer motivation, representation of knowledge, evaluation, choice, and consumer talk (word of mouth and recommendations). We will also touch on broad external influences that sway consumer behavior such as culture, reference groups and social class. We will also consider how the digital economy has changed the consumer journey. The course format is action-learning-oriented with in-class participation, assignments and exercises.
Full Syllabus
