Consumer Behavior and Marketing Strategy

Examine marketing’s role in business and the consumer’s role in marketing. Learn to identify and describe business objectives and the beliefs, behaviors, or emotions you wish to instill in the consumer. Identify key aspects of consumer data needed to serve them better (and encourage a  desired belief, behavior, or emotion). Explore how a company’s perspective may be different from the customer’s.

Define the key elements of a 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.

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.

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 a behavior and the strengths and weaknesses of each type of schedule. Explore examples of marketing strategy 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 loyalty program.  Consider and argue both sides of the debate on the ethical risks of behaviorism in marketing.

Learn about cognitive science as a conceptual model for certain marketing problems via the concepts of 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.

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.

Analyze a business situation to identify the kind of consumer insight needed to solve its problems.  Create a conceptual model for analyzing a business problem using one or more of the theories presented in the course.  Apply the conceptual model you have created to make marketing recommendations and design a testing plan.