Understanding Consumer Behaviour: Customer Decision-Making and the Customer Journey

In just ten-weeks, this microcredential will teach you how to identify what your consumers want and need, and how to give it to them by applying a customer-centric marketing approach.

Get to grips with consumer buying behaviour

For marketing professionals who want to stay ahead of the game, this microcredential will help you understand consumer behaviour theory as it exists today and how it should influence your integrated marketing communications online and offline.

Through theories surrounding consumer behaviour, you’ll examine the psychological and sociological drivers that influence how customers buy and explore the consumer decision-making process.

You’ll investigate current buying and behaviour trends and look to the consumers of the future, investigating how you should interact with them and why.

Create buyer personas using consumer behaviour analysis

As customer experience (CX) moves to the top of agendas in successful organisations around the world, understanding your customer and the barriers to purchase are vital to improve the customer journey.

ARU’s experienced digital marketing practitioners will teach you how to map the customer journey and use your findings to create customer personas to improve customer experience and success. You’ll learn how to apply CX thinking to create a targeted marketing strategy that drives conversions and fosters positive customer relationships.

Discover effective targeted marketing and segmentation strategies

As well as customer journey mapping, you’ll learn customer targeting, segmenting, and customer retention strategies.

You’ll discover best-practice for segmenting consumer markets, customer profiling, and how to define, select, and reach and retain specific audiences across online marketing channels.

As you investigate the merits of various digital marketing channels, you’ll develop your understanding of how social groups create digital tribes online and how you can use these tribes to improve existing customer relationships and build new ones.

Will I learn to apply customer behaviour theory in practice?

Yes. This microcredential is designed to help professionals apply the core principles of consumer behaviour theory to practical marketing efforts in an organisation.

You’ll often be asked to put your skills and knowledge into practice, with live and ‘on-the-job’ tasks as you progress through the course.

Is this microcredential for online and traditional marketing professionals?

Yes. This grounding in consumer choice and behaviour will be applicable to the work of a traditional marketeer, those working in digital marketing, as well as those who do both.

This theory puts the consumer at the heart of marketing planning and strategy, whatever the marketing distribution channel.

How is this marketing course assessed?

This microcredential includes a final assessment in the form of a single 3000 word work-based report. The report will be based around one of the elements of the customer journey.

Courses under this program:
Course 1: Introduction to Consumer Culture and the Customer Journey
-Explore how the customer makes decisions, their motivators and their thought processes as they make decisions.

Course 2: Consumers and Technology, Perception and Risk
-Explore the growing importance of technology in the decision making model for the consumer.

Course 3: Who Am I? Personality, Attitudes, & Behaviours
-This course prepares the groundwork for the understanding of personality. A deeper look at who we are and what drives us.

Course 4: Customer Segmentation, Targeting and Retention
-This course considers how we segment consumer markets; how do we define, select and reach specific audiences online.

Course 5: Digital Tribes, Listening to Customers and New Trends
-This course considers what and who digital tribes are, how we should interact with them and why.