Have you ever wondered why you can remember an advert from your childhood but haven’t a clue what adverts you saw yesterday? Or maybe you’ve been in a supermarket and wondered why all of the cartoon characters on cereal boxes are looking down. If so you’re probably interested in consumer psychology. Consumer psychology is a specialty area of psychology that studies how feelings, beliefs, and perceptions influence the way consumers buy and relate to goods and services.

This exciting new discipline uses psychological insight and research and applies it to the problems facing markeeters, helping them make better decisions. For example, if a brand is developing a new advertisement, it is essential that it grabs consumers’ attention. Not only should it grab attention, but marketeers will want to ensure that consumers learn the targeted message - and psychologists can help achieve this.  For over a hundred years psychologists have studied concepts including: attention, perception, decision-making learning and motivation to name a few. While these have traditionally been studied in a laboratory based system, the relevance to marketing is obvious. By applying principles generated from learning psychology and our knowledge of how the visual system works, psychologists are able to develop advertisements that are more effective at capturing attention and more likely to be remembered.

Today consumer psychologists are working for some of the largest companies tackling questions ranging from the relatively simple (for example which product packaging grabs the most attention) to the hugely complex (how should the National Health Service use behaviour-changing interventions to reduce waiting times?). In order to help answer these questions techniques used range from traditional focus groups, questionnaires, and crowd-sourced data to the more specialised psychological based approaches including: laboratory experiments, brain imaging and eye tracking. 

This exciting new course will focus on the latest theoretical developments and explain how science is influencing: advertising, branding, consumer decision-making, merchandising, packaging store design and more. This course is perfect for any graduate wishing to start, or further develop a career in Consumer Psychology and Business and is delivered by schools that enjoy an international reputation in their respective fields.