Understanding Customers
Description
Offered at Harvard Business School for the last three years as a second-year elective, Understanding Customers is a practical, entirely case-based course grounded in actual problems and methodologies encountered in the field. The format is twenty sessions with a final research project that is a key pedagogical component of the course. In preparation for the last module, students execute a group project that challenges them to augment an existing case study with new, high-impact exhibits about the customer.
Students who enroll in the course can expect to:
o gain an appreciation for key dilemmas involved in generating customer insights;
o become familiar with the most important marketing research methodologies;
o develop perspective on non-conventional methods and processes;
o learn about important factors that influence consumer behavior;
o build self-confidence through practice;
o become motivated to meet with customers and anticipate their viewpoints;
o cultivate a spirited and open approach to marketing.
What differentiates this course from more conventional marketing research courses is that rather than focus on methodologies and their proper application, it attempts to answer the question, What do managers do to learn about their customers? We review contexts in which managers set out to understand their customers, and further investigate methodological aspects that appear likely to enhance managerial dynamism and customer orientation.
The goal of this approach is not to substitute lessons from the field for academic expertise. To the contrary, the premise of the course is that the practices by which managers attempt to understand customers are greatly in need of renewal. Marketing research in too many places is reduced to a few satisfaction scores and an occasional piece of confirmatory research aimed at matching superficially defined segments with functional features of products and services. On the other hand, advances in behavioral sciences and research methodologies have no chance to spawn convincing applied insights without a pull by managers confident that a proactive approach to understanding customers can become a key personal and organizational asset.