Read This (by staying in the course you agree to abide by these rules)
In remaining registered for this course, AK/ADMS4220.30A Consumer Behaviour, you agree to the conditions under which this course is offered, including the policy on late work. The course meets twice a week for three hours for six weeks. There is no exam, no test, only the six assignments, done as a group. The last part of the project serves as a final exam substitute. Because of this tight time schedule and the highly structured nature of the project, you cannot receive credit for, expect to have graded, or substitute anything else for any work that is not in on time, regardless of your reason. There can be no extensions; if you find yourself for any reason unable to complete your share of the group's work, you must either work out an arrangement with the group or drop the course. You cannot do the project alone and you cannot ask an entire group to defer work. You will be assigned to a group on the first day of class and you may not change that assignment; latecomers to the course may not join groups already assigned, but may form new groups with other latecomers. If you cannot agree to do the course under these conditions, wait and take it in the traditional twelve-week mode. 

Course Objectives
As a learning exercise in this honours level marketing course, you will be assigned to a group of no more than six students to do a research/field-work project that links Consumer Behaviour theory directly with practice. There are no exams or tests in this course, so the material you are learning MUST show up in your assignments.

Think of the six assignments you will hand in as preparing an outline of the body of knowledge presented in each chapter of your Consumer Behaviour text. Your main job in this course, in these assignments, is to outline the body of knowledge presented to you in the text and the lectures and website. You are restricted to a small number of pages in which to do this for a reason: just outlining a chapter is very low-level academic work (elementary school at best); taking an entire chapter of a full discussion of academic theory and practical application of a particular area of knowledge and boiling it down to a concise outline with practical examples from a real-life situation forces us to carefully consider each element of the area in relation to other elements and to the overall body of knowledge as well as to its practical application. When you finish these six assignments, you should have a very thorough understanding of the field of Consumer Behaviour, with a useful outline of less than 20 pages, with specific examples, which should be useful to you when working in the field of Marketing if you need to refer back to it for  useful techniques, and theory to back up decisions you may be making.

In addition to the objectives common to all courses I teach (see Ground Rules), this course in Consumer Behaviour has these further specific objectives

To achieve these objectives, you will be asked to do some specific tasks

Rules of The Game
(for more general rules regarding courses and course work see Ground Rules Page)

The Product
Because we're limited in time, the assignment of products for this project is fairly specific. On the first night of class each group will be assigned a product class (which you cannot change) from which they are to choose a specific product, actually existing, currently sold in the Canadian market today by a specific company (it need not be manufactured in Canada). This may be a good or service or combination, or it may be an idea, place, or person. You may wish to review the difference between good and service in my notes for Introductory Marketing on Product. Don't ask me to help you choose: the assignment starts here, just as it would in real-life, with the need to come up with a specific product with which to work. Since a large part of this course is based on analysis of the consumer through advertisements, you need to choose a product for which you will be able to find an advertisement; you may use an ad from the Internet.

After learning about the consumers who buy this product, the group will then create the concept of a product extension having to do with the summer season. This new product must be something that is not currently marketed by that particular company, that you think would interest the same customers who are buying the original product. Your product extension does not have to be totally "new" - there's probably no such thing any more, but it has to be something new to the company you are representing, and it has to be sold to the same target market. Do not ask to vary these instructions; they are tight and specific in order to save you time in a 6-week course. 

Two important points here regarding the choice of your product extension: First, you cannot choose a product that is currently marketed by a real company; this is very simply because I do not want you going to that company and getting their marketing material and then just reproducing on paper for me what they've already done in their own marketing. Secondly, it has to be something that is useable in the summer - not ONLY the summer but definitely the summer. For example you could market a car because it is used in summer, and all seasons. You cannot market a snowmobile because, as far as I know, no one uses a snowmobile in summer (our summer, not Antarctica's). This is because it's a summer course and when I wrote this assignment up I was very tired of winter and I didn't want to spend six weeks reading a dozen projects all about snowy wintry cold products! 

EXAMPLE: if you were assigned the product class of soft drinks, you could choose Gatorade with their green (and other colours) drink which is marketed to young sporty people, particularly males. Your product line extension might be a line of Gatorade sports clothing, or (to borrow from a hilarious example provided by a student in Intro Marketing) a soft drink named Slammin' Prune, which you are going to attempt to sell to the same young sports-oriented crowd (good luck on that one! but you should get the idea). You're okay to use this because soft drinks are consumed in the summer. The rules don't say that your new product can only be consumed in the summer, nor do they say that your original product has to be consumed during the summer, but the rules do stipulate that your new product must be usable during the summer. 

Another Example: suppose you are given the product class of sports equipment. You might choose Cooper who makes hockey sticks. You then could come up with some product usable during the summer that Cooper could market to those same people who played hockey during the winter -- perhaps badminton helmets to give an example of a product that could be used in summer (or winter for that matter but the important point is it CAN be used in summer), and which is definitely not currently marketed by Cooper. I checked this out; Cooper does NOT currently produce badminton helmets. Your group will have to find out whether your company currently markets the product extension you are thinking of marketing. It's okay if someone else markets badminton helmets; you just can't use it for Cooper if Cooper currently already markets it. 

These examples are of goods but you might want to choose a service, or an idea, or a person. You might have Gatorade marketing a summer-sports consulting service. You might have Cooper putting their corporate wealth behind a campaign to elect a political candidate who's running in a summer by-election and is known to be friendly to the idea of building more tennis courts. Use your imagination and do something that interests the group. 

Your first assignment has to do with providing information on your company's CURRENT product, but it will help you organize your project if while you're writing these first assignments, you know what your product extension will be. It's the reverse of what case-study business professors have always told you: we were always told, don't figure out your answer first and work backwards, but that is exactly what you'll need to do here. You will decide on a product currently sold, while having in mind what the extension will be. In the "real world" of marketing, a team would undertake to thoroughly investigate a particular target market who is currently purchasing a particular product to find out what unmet needs they have (what you'll be doing in your first assignments). Only after knowing a fair amount about the target market would they then presume to propose a new product to market to the same people. What we're doing in this short six-week course is short-cutting the process. You will decide very early on what product extension you wish to market to these same people who now buy a particular product, so that as you read about consumers (in the text), hear the lectures (in the classroom), and talk to people (in the "outside world") you can try to find out things that also will be helpful to you in marketing the new product to the target market.  

One of the first things you are asked to do is to list three major characteristics of your target market. When you are doing this, be sure that at least one of these characteristics, preferably two, ideally three, also coincide with the new product extension. Both the product currently marketed and your product extension should be in some way related to the product class, but these can be tenuous connections (ultimately everything is related to everything else in one way or another). For example, if your company is currently marketing an eye-shadow, your product extension could be a magazine about eye care - the whole point of the exercise is that your product extension must be appealing to the same people who currently buy the product you've chosen. Your first four assignments deal only with the current product and its target market. The idea is that, just like real-life, before you market something new you have to find out things about the needs of the people who buy something that make you think they'll also buy your new product. 

Importance of Theory
The purpose of this project is to give you practice in analyzing and presenting solutions to a real-life practical marketing problem in the context of Consumer Behaviour theory. Be sure in all parts of the project to show what you have learned about Consumer Behaviour in this course using this specific textbook and course materials. There are no tests or exams in this course, so it is imperative that the assignments you complete show your knowledge and understanding of the course material. The majority of your mark will come from how well you use and appear to understand the theory. Projects based on everyday common-sense knowledge of products, or projects which mainly emphasize concepts learned in Introductory Marketing do not meet the objective of reviewing conceptual, empirical, and methodological developments in research on Consumer Behaviour, nor the requirements of the tasks for achieving those objectives in this course kit. Use the specific terminology of the area; use the theory; show how the theory applies to what you are finding in practice. Show me what you have learned from the course. Do this by using the theory, not by quoting from the textbook, but do use as much of the terminology of the course as possible. This is where you should put the majority of your effort. I know this is difficult both to do and to fully describe but figuring out what to do and being able to do it are what make this a fourth year project and not an Introductory Marketing project. 

Importance of Structure
Some marks are reserved for that most prized of talents in the business world -- the ability to know what to do and how it should be done, and to be able to do it in the format as requested. Do not ask me for more direction than is here in these instruction pages. It is not helpful when I tell one group they may do X and the next week get talked into telling a second group they may do Y. The instructions are here. You are in a fourth year honours marketing course; it is your responsibility to figure out how to do it and how to do it best within the boundaries of the instructions. Remember that you can't fit everything in the chapters into the pages you are allotted. Part of your task is to decide what is most important, and the marks for this will depend to some extent on what other groups find important; you are, as always, being graded in part in comparison to your peers. If something truly is not applicable to your product, you can state "N/A" with a brief explanation of why it is not applicable, but be very wary of using N/A - almost nothing is "not applicable." Most things in the text are relevant in some way to just about every product and you should not have to use it often. For example, Westjet, a domestic-only airline, still has to face the issue of the global economy because a consumer looking for a place to spend tourist dollars can fairly easily and inexpensively get to many other places in the world than just Canada, and so Westjet has to contend with the global economy/consumer as an issue. Clinique make-up prides itself on having no scent, so you would not want to say that "sense of smell" is "Not Applicable."

Grading and Content
Realize that as with all North American schools, you are graded partly in comparison with your peers. This works to your advantage in this course. If I were to make up my own grading template of the things that I think are important in the chapters, you would be up against the view of the holder of a PhD in Marketing, which means that I would probably include every single detail in every single chapter, which, of course, you do not have room to include. Since I temper my lists by first reading through all the lists of the groups in each year's class before making up the grading scheme for each assignment in each year's course, I end up adjusting my list to more accurately reflect what the current group of scholars (that year's class) sees as the most important items in the body of knowledge that you are analyzing. There are certain things in all chapters that you must see as important: all red titles, for example, and almost all bolded items. Where lists differ is in whether to include some bolded items, and which italic items to include (I think of these as the A+ items; I don't expect every group to get every single item). What different groups see as important will differ from one term to the next. For example, in the summer of 2006, when I did the first marking of the papers with my original marking scheme, the class average was 61%. But when I went back and adjusted the marking scheme for the items that most of that year's group of scholars found most important, the average mark rose to 77%. This is as it is in the world of academic study. Twenty years ago, what scholars thought was important in the study of Marketing is not the same as what scholars today believe is important. In your work as scholars in the field of Consumer Behaviour, I honour your opinion as current scholars in the field. The downside of this is the same as it is in all classes: you are to some extent marked in comparison to the work of your peers and you cannot know what that work will be until all work is handed in. But hey! It is like the "real world" of business - there are no crystal balls and no guarantees. Students have occasionally asked why, if it is such an onerous job for you to reduce all this material into such a short number of pages, don't I give you a longer number of pages in which to do it? My answer is because then it would be no more than an elementary school exercise of outlining the textbook. Here you learn the material (and former students tell you learn it well) by spending the time carefully boiling it down, much as you do when you spend three days boiling sixteen quarts of water and ten pounds of beef bones down to eventually make one cup of Béarnaise sauce (check out a copy of the 1968 version of Joy of Cooking if you've never done this!).

Point of View
When writing the project, put yourself in the role of a marketing consultant to the producer of the product you have selected. Use this voice; do not choose another one. 

Presenting 
We will use the projects as examples in informal and impromptu presentation as we proceed through the course material, but we will not be doing the usual PowerPoint dog-and-pony-shows. For any presentation you are asked to do, you will either be given time in class to prepare it, or more likely I will just ask you to stand up and present, as happens most of the time in the "real" world of business. We are meeting in the new TEL building which has among its technological gadgets, a "doccam" which allows you to place on its surface an ordinary book or magazine and have the image projected onto the screen. This will be tremendously useful to us in the use of advertisements from magazines to illustrate concepts we are learning, without having to make overhead acetates..  

Informed Consent (We will no longer be doing this part; the administrative process has been made too difficult)
In Assignment Three, you will be asked to interview some people. For that purpose, you will need to provide a sheet of paper to each person, telling them about your study, no matter how informal. A template is reproduced for you in this webpage. Please be sure to make a copy, fill in your own details, and give a copy to each person you speak to.

 Please use plain white ordinary paper, stapled and without a binder, but with a Cover Page that includes:

You are strictly limited in space because learning to write precisely and concisely for business reporting is part of the learning process for this particular course, and because it pushes you to learn the material as described in the Objectives Section of this webpage. Write in short concise POINT FORM, not prose; avoid rambling, cut out all excess words, say exactly what you mean to say in as few words as possible. Use bullets and charts where possible. Take page limits and structure seriously, and follow instructions; you will lose points if you unfairly try to gain an advantage that other groups who followed strict limits did not have. You are not allowed any appendices, nor do you need any. Note that each Part is a separate submission, graded separately; you will use the work in the previous part to build on the next one, but you submit only the one new part each Wednesday. The page limits are limits - i.e.: if you can do it in fewer pages, that's okay (but most groups find they need all the space). 

Group Work
This course is taught very much as a class-participation course. Although there is no part of the mark labeled "class participation," either the group or the professor may decide that if you are not pulling your weight, you will not receive credit for part or all of the group work. The course depends hugely on group cohesiveness and individual cooperation in the groups. The course is planned so that groups may actually do nearly all the group work in class, and if people are not showing up for class, they are not doing the work of the group. Plan to be here for the full three hours of class. I lead a discussion of the subject material on Mondays and Wednesdays, usually for a little over an hour; we then have a break, and the second half of the class is dedicated to group work in-class with me there as a facilitator. This method succeeds only if people are showing up for class. If someone is not in class, they are not contributing their fair share. This does not mean you can't ever miss a class; if you are ill or suddenly called out of town, get in touch with your group and work out arrangements with them for catching up on your part of that work. But do not start this course expecting that you will do all of "your part" at home. It's not a correspondence course. Groups are not allowed to decide that they will "carry" someone who is not pulling their weight in the project. You may accommodate someone for one missed class meeting, but beyond that deductions of marks will occur for those who are not here.

The group doing the work determines before each Wednesday whose names go on each assignment, and only the names on the front of each submitted part will receive credit for that part. It is your responsibility, as a group and individually, not only to see that the work of the group gets done, but to see that the group does the work. If one or two people take over the project and do it all, then they are not participating properly nor are the other members who allow them to do this. If one or two members slack off and don't do their share, they are not participating properly, but neither are the other members of the group who do nothing to fix the problem. The list of names of group members names on the front of each assignment of those who contributed their fair share on that part is part of your "peer evaluation" system for this course. If someone did so little work on the part you are handing in that you wish to leave their name off, do so, but be prepared to defend your decision as a group to the person. I will back you up if people are not contributing to the group effort. In the same way, if the group submits a piece of work with a person's name on it, the group is thereby testifying that that person did their fair share. 

Read more here about Group Work

Write it Like a Business Report
When you're writing these six assignments, think of them not as an essay but as a business report for a very busy boss who has no time to read anything. You are limited in space for a very particular reason. Anyone can explain almost anything, given enough time and space; the real skill is to explain it in as few words as possible. In the "real world" of business, no one has time to read through a lot of prose, sifting out the important information s/he needs for the 10 a.m. meeting with the client while admiring your clever phraseology, your intricate alliteration, your fine grammatical structure and your astounding use of metaphor. We're working harder to educate business students how to express themselves and convey their message in as few words as possible, while still making it interesting and readable.  

So, don't worry about writing flowing prose; don't worry about making those transitional connections between paragraphs, those introductory sentences and concluding remarks linking back to the thesis statement which all work together to make a good "essay." This isn't an essay; it's a point-form, bulleted, chart/list/outline that lays out the most important points of the chapters, using your particular product to show what the terms mean in the "real world" of Marketing.

At the same time, it IS an academic course and I am looking for evidence that you're using the theory you are reading about. So use it and use the terms. Don't waste any space defining terms. Just as in an open book test I would tell you not to waste time giving definitions, realize here that I know you've got the textbook and I'm not impressed with your ability to copy out definitions. Instead, use the terms. 

On Using Point Form
Use of POINT FORM helps keep the writing to a minimum, and makes it easier for the person reading it to quickly get the most important points. Here, from an exercise done by the class of Summer 2003, is an example of good point form structure. The exercise involved reducing the lower half of p. 117 in your textbook to point form: 

The Motivation Process (p. 116) Motivation      causes people to behave as they do      tension drives customer to reduce need:           utilitarian (useful) or hedonic (emotional)      has strength and direction Goal - where consumer wants to be       goal attainment = tension motivation Drive - level of desire to reduce tension between      present & desired state Want - Personally/culturally determined need:       basic (hunger) want: choice (burger)

Purpose of the Assignment
In the chapter on Learning we'll talk about coat hangers and how, just as you have to have something in a closet to hang things on, so must you have something in your memory banks on which to "hang" new material. Thus do we learn. If we find new knowledge but have nothing to relate it to, it ends up on the metaphorical floor of our minds, crumpled and useless. 

The purpose of this six-part assignment is essentially to replace the incentive for study that you would normally find with an exam in giving you a way to find the hooks. Before an exam, you would be re-reading the chapters, making notes, sorting things out, putting them in groups when they are similar and on separate note cards (or whatever your method of study) when they are different, organizing the material in a way that would help you remember it. You would be in essence hanging all the new pieces of knowledge on metaphorical hooks in the closet of your mind When you're finished with this course, I'd like you to be able to go out into the work world and know where those hooks are, what's hanging on them, and what they're useful for. Without an exam to encourage you to do this important task, it is my hope that by diligently working through this six-part project, you will put the necessary hooks in the wall. Students from past sections of this summer S1 course have consistently told me that they learned far more here than in a course where they just memorized for an exam. Think of the parts of this assignment as similar to preparing a "cheat sheet" that you have been given permission to bring to an exam. You are preparing basically an outline of what is important in the chapter, using examples from the particular product you are working with. (My thanks to my friend Paul Carr for this analogy of coat hooks; he used it to help me understand why I was failing to comprehend econometrics even though I was spending ten hours a day studying).

Grading The Assignments
Students frequently ask, "what should I put in the paper to get an A." This isn't like some high school courses you may have experienced where you were handed a checklist of everything that needed to go into an assignment and if you included them you were guaranteed an "A." In a university course, you have more responsibility - you have to decide what ought to go into the paper. I don't know exactly what an "A" paper will be until I am nearly finished grading. You are marked in comparison with your peers on how well you put together something that meets the requirements of the assignment. You are told what to do in the assignment, and you have the text, my lecture notes, and the web page notes to guide you, but you also have to do some independent thinking yourselves as to what is important to include and how to structure it. What will be an "A" and what will be a "B" or "C" will depend on what the particular groups that term write. Even when I get a near-perfect assignment from a group, it does not become the ultimate model for an "A" paper and it's why I don't bring examples of previous classes' work. Just as in the business world, things are always changing and improving (and sometimes worsening) as new people tackle tasks and new issues become important. For example, fifteen years ago ethics was not deemed by many students as an important part of most business courses; today its crucial relevance is nearly universally recognized. And remember finally that "B" is a good grade. If you've only made a C or C+ in a fourth year course, you've got some problems to work out, but if you've made a "B" it's a good average mark. An "A" paper has to do something to differentiate itself from the pack.

Remember when you're working on these assignments that you're not going to be graded on whether you get a particular topic (e.g.: differential threshold) right for a particular purchaser of your particular product  -- I don't have these "right" answers for all possible products students might come up with -- but you are being graded on whether you use the terms correctly and seem to understand them, and you are being graded on how well you cover the material using your own product as an example. 

The Six Parts of the Six Wednesdays Project

Other Web Pages
Other parts of this web-site also form an integral part of this assignment. The Policy Page on Grades tells you more about submitting work properly to ensure a better grade. Where any of those general instructions might differ from these specific ones for this course, follow this CB Assignments page. The other pages and the course kit as a whole form an integral part of this assignment and you are responsible for what is written there. If you need to find anything, use the comprehensive Index on the Teaching page. 

Testimonials About The Format of This Course
From students who have taken this course before in this format, here are some comments about the course and how it is taught: