Consumer Behavior

Contemporary approaches to business emphasize the importance of adopting a consumer focus. Marketing, in particular, is a customer-driven function that begins and ends with the consumer—from recognizing their needs to ensuring post-purchase satisfaction. In this course, I enhanced my understanding of how and why people choose, use, and evaluate goods and services the way they do. While all of us are consumers, our intuitions about our own behavior, as well as that of others, are often inaccurate. In this class, I utilized theories developed in marketing, psychology, and other behavioral sciences to better predict how consumers will respond to different marketing activities.

The primary objective of this course was to provide key tools and frameworks for analyzing consumer behavior in order to solve marketing problems and define effective marketing strategies. Specifically, I learned to:
• Appreciate the importance of consumer analyses to the design, implementation, and evaluation of successful marketing strategies and programs.
• Learn about relevant theories and research from the behavioral sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology, economics) that can help marketers understand and influence consumer behavior.
• Apply consumer behavior research when developing and evaluating marketing strategies.
• Understand the strengths and limitations of specific, often competing theories for interpreting particular consumer issues.
• Improve my ability to discover original consumer insights that go beyond surface-level intuitions, particularly using theory to develop experimental research approaches.