MPA8104 Customer Orientation

This course has been designed to provide students with the skills required to convey and maintain a customer sensitive culture and promote the company image to customers.  The course will provide the skills to enable a positive approach to be maintained towards colleagues and customers leading to more effective working relationships and a higher level of customer satisfaction.  

Contemporary approaches to marketing emphasize the importance of adopting a customer-centered orientation. This course examines the art and science of understanding the consumer (or “customer” or “buyer”). The course has both theoretical and practical aims in that it is designed to provide insights into consumer psychology per se and also to explain how consumer behavior can be shaped or influenced.

Students should develop a better understanding of their own behavior as targets of marketing influence, an understanding of how knowledge of consumer behavior can be used to develop profitable, efficient and fair marketing techniques and tactics, and an ability to view marketing techniques from both a managerial and a consumer’s perspective

The course includes a general overview of consumer psychology. Some of the issues addressed include: Does advertising work through changing beliefs or emotions? Can consumers be influenced subliminally? Why are some products more involving than others? Can consumers be conditioned without their knowledge? What determines brand image? 

What makes some kinds of people more responsive to some kinds of brands? How are consumers’ attitudes formed and altered? How should consumers be grouped into market segments? How important is personality and lifestyle to consumer preferences? How does consumer behavior differ across cultures and what implications does this have for marketers?

 What kinds of consumer-influence techniques are unethical? In addition to providing some answers to these questions, the course will also critically examine the evidence on which these answers are based. Because of this critical perspective, the course will include a substantial focus on the research methods used to study consumer behavior, the ethical considerations in consumer manipulation, and the public policy implications of different views of the consumer

Course Objectives
This course is designed to help students:

• Gain an excellence in customer care
• Get an Understanding of the customer’s point of view
• Gain an Ability to increase customer’s loyalty