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 (STP and 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 other consumers, is often inaccurate, and may at times, be misleading. This is especially true when our target market is very different from ourselves.
The course goal: The main 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, and social class. The course format is action-learning-oriented with in-class participation, assignments and exercises.
Full Syllabus
