A primary goal of this course is to help you understand how you develop your ideas about the meaning of data and its action implications. This is more than presenting and defending ideas. It requires probing at a level of thought that normally goes unexplored. Since this deeper level of thought is the primary driver of decision quality there is great practical utility in improving it. The topic of customer behavior provides a rich subject for doing this since an understanding of the customer is at the heart of business strategy.
Customers are very diverse.
Similarly, managers may respond differently to the same customer data. Market dynamics are the joint products of customers and managers, the intersections of customer and manager thinking. Each module provides an opportunity to improve your skills in sensing important customer behavior questions, identifying important concepts, anticipating relevant data, developing sound insights from data, translating these insights into imaginative action, and understanding your unique way of approaching these matters. Classes are best viewed as experimental settings for you to develop, explore, test, and accept, reject or reserve judgment about various ideas. Class discussion and assignments are tools for thinking about what and why customers and managers do what they do.