Consumer Behavior

As they seek to increase their market share and consolidate their brand, marketers around the world keep pondering the same questions: How can we keep our products at the forefront of consumers' minds? How can we influence their decisions so that they start (and keep) buying from us? How can we further influence consumers to make them willing to recommend our products to their family, friends and acquaintances? If we hope to influence consumers, we first need to understand how they behave and why they behave in the way they do. This is the goal of this course.

In this course you will learn how consumers' attention can be shifted towards a product or away from it. You will learn how to boost product recall and how consumers form beliefs and attitudes towards products. The course will cover several models that illustrate how consumers make decisions and will explore how factors like motivation and personality play a key role in the decision-making process. Beyond that, the course will show how consumers can be susceptible to persuasion and will set out several useful persuasion strategies. Finally, it will stress the importance of remembering that the human mind exists within a biological body, and how feeling tired has important consequences for the way consumers behave.

Note, this course is an ESCI elective. In other words, it is an integrated course with Spanish students and the weekly schedule follows the Spanish university system, which means classes may be held on Fridays.