For me the first lesson was pretty much divided into three different main topics. The first was the overall view on marketing. What is marketing and how has the meaning of what marketing is developed over time. Especially during the last years through several forces of change (For example the various types of customer which have a better access to information, the growing number of competitors and the various new types of technology).
If one takes into account the mentioned forces of change the modern Marketing should especially:
- understand the customer
- create value
- profit through customer satisfaction
- develop products that fit the customer and are developed FOR the cusomer / a focus just on the product is wrong
Secondly we talked about the marketing framework. Especially how to link the 3Cs and 4Ps in a framework that fits in the overall strategy and is valuable for the customer.
Thirdly we had look into consumer behaviour. The main message here was that consumers are no rational decision makers, but by investigating consumer behaviour it is possible to understand decision making processes of the consumers.
One example for this would be that consumers satisfy in a decision process. This means that consumers mostly decide for the clear better option (example economist).
Besides that when talking about consumer behaviour we had the topics of Social Norms, Choice Overloads, prospect theory and the fact that consumers always tend to think that they would behave good in the future – but they actually dont do so in the short term (example banana/chocolate).
Afterwards we linked the facts that we investigated in consumer behaviour to some real cases and linked it tot he 4 Ps. Here it was easy to see how companies linked typical facts of consumer behaviour to their marketing plans.