2.0

Average Course Rating

New digital technology has enabled consumers to take more control of their lives. Wearable devices, smartphone apps, etc., provide consumers with new tools to connect with friends, expand their network, obtain information to improve their buying decisions, change bad habits, monitor health indexes, manage mental health, etc. Individual decisions are often influenced by others. In this course, we learn what drives consumers’ needs and their choices, with special reference to the new tech environment. Making use of these insights and taking into account a company’s constraints and the competitive environment (i.e., competitors’ product portfolio, their constraints, etc.), we study how firms can come up with new products/services or modify their existing portfolios to serve unmet needs. The customer insights also allows us to achieve more efficient segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP), and design more powerful tactical tools like pricing, distribution, advertising, and marketing communication (commonly referred to as the 4Ps) to help reach targeted consumers and improve their adoption and loyalty, with the goal of providing superior customer value to the consumers. Marketing is a multidisciplinary area that makes use of economics, psychology, sociology, experiments, field data, statistics, and econometrics to understand how individuals make their decisions. A unique aspect of this course is to study how the internet has empowered peer effects via social networks and two-sided market platforms, and how companies should take advantage of these new tools in managing customers and developing their businesses.