Courses

Within the specialisation Consumer Studies the following courses are offered:

Academic Consultancy Training
The multidisciplinary and preferably multicultural team (4-7 students) will carry out a design type project for a client. This may be design of new technologies, but also policy papers, business plans, communication plans or draft research plans for integrated research programmes. Crucial is that teams reach an interdisciplinary synthesis of the compiled information and translate this into an advice on future actions for their client.

Innovations in Marketing Decision Making
This course integrates knowledge of marketing management and consumer behaviour. Marketing management should be the mirror image of consumer behaviour. Only the understanding of both sides of the market transaction allows meaningful policy making.

Sensory Perception and Consumer Preference
This course teaches how sensory perception drives and affects consumer behaviour in the market place and how marketing offerings (products, services and environments) can be designed to optimize the consumer's experience.

Capita Selecta Marketing and Consumer Behaviour
Integration of  knowledge of marketing management and consumer behaviour.

Sustainable Marketing
The global lack of sustainability may at least partially be attributed to the externalization of environmental and social costs by the traditional marketing system. Rather than assuming that this is entirely due to market inefficiencies, this course will focus on market deficiencies as well. Evidences of these flaws in the market system and possible solutions will be traced in issues like Fair Trade, Organic Agriculture, Corporate Social Responsibility, Consumer Boycotts and others.

Within the specialisation Marketing Management, the following courses are offered:

Innovation Management and cross-Disciplinary Design
This course first introduces recent theoretical insights from innovation theory. Subsequently, guest lecturers present existing efforts and approaches for inter-disciplinary design. Here the aim is to facilitate productive dialogue between technical and social science modes of thinking about design. In the third part of the course cross-disciplinary teams of students make a social-technical problem analysis around a topic of their choosing, and proceed to develop design criteria, research agendas and/or process designs as early steps in a possible innovation trajectory.

Analysis and Management of Sustainable Organic Production Chains
This course aims to analyze agricultural chains in terms of their organization, institutions, sustainability, markets and ethics. The goal of the course is to provide students with tools to analyze and manage agricultural food and non-food organic chains for sustainability.

Capita Selecta Marketing and Consumer Behaviour
Integration of  knowledge of marketing management and consumer behaviour.

Advanced Supply Chain Management
This course provides a theoretical basis for multi-disciplinary analysis and improvement of supply chains and networks, focusing especially on supply chain modeling methods. It builds upon the (qualitative) theories and concepts discussed in 'Introduction to SCM' . It is about operations management processes, strategic partnerships and operational performance.

Academic Consultancy Training
The multidisciplinary and preferably multicultural team (4-7 students) will carry out a design type project for a client. This may be design of new technologies, but also policy papers, business plans, communication plans or draft research plans for integrated research programmes. Crucial is that teams reach an interdisciplinary synthesis of the compiled information and translate this into an advice on future actions for their client.

Strategy and Models
The course focuses on obtaining and integrating up-to-date scientific knowledge with respect to theory, development and application of strategic models in a business environment. Main elements of the course are discussing and exercising analytical techniques and computer models obtained from the scientific strategy literature and applying the resulting skills in managing strategic processes and business relationships systematically and analytically in a computer or web-based strategy simulation game. The application area will be in marketing and logistics functional strategies.

Innovations in Marketing Decision Making
This course integrates knowledge of marketing management and consumer behaviour. Marketing management should be the mirror image of consumer behaviour. Only the understanding of both sides of the market transaction allows meaningful policy making.