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Consumer Behavior and Marketing Strategy

Drive business growth through deeper consumer understanding.

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At a Glance

Enrollment:
Open Enrollment
Length:
8 weeks
Format:
Online
Total CEUs:
4.2 CEUs
Investment:
$2,800
Also offered in:

Change the way you see consumer data to build strategic, insight-based brand marketing initiatives.

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Consumer data is meaningless without an understanding of human behavior. In this UChicago online course, you will learn social science theories around cognition, motivation, emotion, personality, social influence, culture, and other aspects of human nature to transform analytics into a powerful tool for marketing action.

Designed For

Designed for professionals interested in acquiring a deep understanding of consumer behavior grounded in cutting-edge social science theory.

Learning Objectives to Become a Customer Behavior-Savvy Marketer

Over eight weeks, you will learn and practice applying social science theories to real-world marketing problems. In addition to gaining insights into human behavior, you will learn new, data-driven ways to approach marketing solutions.

After completing the course, you will be able to:

  • Persuade business and marketing leaders to solve marketing problems by putting the customer at the center of the strategic decision-making process.
  • Make a case for a customer-centered solution based on data and present it using a persuasive conceptual model.
  • Recommend a marketing plan based on your in-depth understanding of the consumer.
  • Devise a framework to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing plan.
  • Earn a credential certifying completion from the University of Chicago and become part of the UChicago network.
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Leverage Deep Consumer Insights to Improve Marketing Performance

Find out how UChicago’s Consumer Behavior and Marketing Strategy course can help you stay ahead of the competition.

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Consumer Behavior and Marketing Strategy Curriculum

You will learn to:

  • Define a business goal in terms of what we want the consumer to think, feel, or do.
  • Frame a desired consumer response within a conceptual model based on social science theory.
  • Use data to provide insight into consumer behavior and determine the proper course of action.
  • Establish and present a plan to test the effectiveness of your recommended marketing action.

Online Format Features

  • Self-paced interactive learning modules with a variety of engaging learning activities, assignments, and resources.
  • Live sessions that bring you, your peers, and your instructor together to learn collaboratively about the current state of the field, engage with real-world problems, and explore authentic solutions.
  • Continuous support from your instructional assistant, who will accompany you on your journey through the content, answer your questions, and provide feedback on your work.

Weekly Course Schedule

Learn to combine two factors to plan marketing actions or to show proof that your marketing plan will work: marketing analytics and social sciences. Explore the stages of the scientific method to make predictions and use the social sciences as a framework for thinking. Use marketing analytics to enable data-driven decision-making and a theory- or hypothesis-driven approach to provide more consumer insight, understanding, and successful planning.

Using the theory of behaviorism, examine current behavior and ways to encourage people to start, continue, and stop a behavior. Define different behaviorist schedules for encouraging behavior and the strengths and weaknesses of each type of schedule. Explore examples of marketing strategies based on behaviorism to uncover the behaviorist strategy underlying an existing brand loyalty program and create a behaviorism-based strategy for a new loyalty program or an improvement to an existing one. Consider and argue both sides of the debate on the ethical risks of behaviorism in marketing.

Define the key elements of culture: membership, practices, rituals, mythic stories, ways of life, and unspoken assumptions. Identify types of cultural meaning: norms, beliefs, ideologies, emotions, values, mindset, mentality, and worldview. Discover what is meant by a cultural understanding of consumers. Learn how a cultural understanding of the consumer can be the basis for a marketing strategy and dissect a culture-based marketing program to identify its cultural insights.

Explore key concepts of social class from Bourdieu, Destin, Marx, Nietzsche, Veblen, Warner, and Yosso. Identify insights into a consumer audience based on a conceptual model of social class. Learn to recommend marketing strategies based on insights grounded in social class concepts and identify the class-based insights that drive an existing marketing campaign. Design an approach to testing your class-based marketing recommendations.

Learn about cognitive science as a conceptual model for certain marketing problems via memory storage, memory retrieval, effortful recall, and information integration theory. Devise a marketing strategy to solve a brand problem or capitalize on a brand opportunity using cognitive science as a conceptual model. Design a testing plan to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

Explore the concepts of brand symbolism or brand image, the self, and how a match between a brand’s symbolism and the consumer’s self-image can make a brand more attractive to an audience segment.  Recommend a testable marketing strategy based on brand symbolism, and vice versa—identify the brand symbolism strategy behind an existing marketing campaign. Consider and argue for (or against) the idea that it is ethical to do marketing based on brand symbolism.

Examine marketing successes and failures using network mathematics. Define the key concepts of network math: hubs, nodes, scale-free networks, and patterns in network growth. Recommend a marketing strategy based on network math and a plan to test its effectiveness.

Create a conceptual model for analyzing a business problem using one or more social sciences as a conceptual framework to address a marketing analytics situation. Design your own scientific method using the ideas you find most persuasive from Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend.

Earn a Credential in Consumer Behavior and Marketing Strategy

After successful completion of this course, participants will receive credentials certified by the University of Chicago including a digital badge to recognize their achievement.

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Meet Your Instructor

Our highly trained instructors are courageous thinkers and passionate leaders who leverage years of industry expertise and up-to-date knowledge of terminology, tools, and trends to deliver an unparalleled learning experience. Through their rigorous discourse, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and field-shaping contributions, they create practical solutions and pioneering innovations that enrich our world.

George Davidson

George Davidson, MBA

Market Research and Consumer Insights Specialist and Founder of The Lantern

George Davidson has over twenty-five years of marketing experience working for the world’s biggest brands, including InterContinental Hotels Group, McDonald’s, and Netflix. He has also worked for food and hospitality brands like Costa Coffee, Greene King (Britain’s largest pub company), and McDonald...

Learn more about George

Career Outlook

Data and the people that can make sense of it are strategic assets to any organization. There is a rising demand for professionals equipped with the skills to help enterprises optimize their marketing actions through data-driven customer understanding. The employment rate of market research analysts is expected to grow 22 percent from 2020 to 2030, much faster than the average for all occupations.

Potential Job Titles for Professionals with Expertise in Consumer Behavior and Marketing Strategy

  • Chief Marketing Officer
  • Consumer Insights Manager
  • Consumer Insights Specialist
  • Consumer Researcher
  • Customer Data Specialist
  • Customer Insights Analyst
  • Customer Service Specialist
  • Director of Consumer Insights
  • Insights Analyst
  • Marketing Director
  • Marketing Research Analyst
  • Strategic Planner

Offered by The University of Chicago's Professional Education

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