Unit Catalogue

Understanding customers, which frequently includes both consumers/endusers and businesses, is an essential task for all organisations. Those that more fully appreciate customer needs, attitudes and behaviours can gain significant competitive advantage by creating optimum marketing mixes. However, understanding buyer behaviour is challenging. Effective suppliercustomer interaction is an important focal point of the unit. This customercentric perspective enables marketers to create shared value and more effectively develop and extend their offerings. This unit unravels the complexities of buying behaviour by drawing on relevant concepts, theories and models from Psychology and Sociology. Real life examples are used to illustrate the relevance of these disciplines to marketing design and to help students recognise the tactics that organisations use to influence customer decision making.

Students will learn how to evaluate buyer behaviour and how to use this understanding to create marketing mixes with maximum appeal to specific customer segments. This includes informing the effective design of products and services, retail and service delivery settings, pricing, promotion and advertising.