Short Course Description
The course setting: Companies MUST understand target 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 other consumers, may be inaccurate and misleading. This is particularly true when we significantly differ from our target markets.
The course goal: The main aim of this course is 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 can steer managerial action and value creation.
How: To achieve the course goal, we have designed the course to provide you with a 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 overarching goal of understanding and influencing consumer behavior. Topics include consumer need analysis, consumer perception & attention, consumer motivation, how consumers represent information, evaluation, choice, and consumer talk (word of mouth and recommendations). We will also touch on broad background influences that affect consumer behavior such as culture, and social class. The course format is action-learning-oriented.
Full Syllabus
