Course description

Course description

This course applies a hands-on approach to market research by diving into a current topic of food marketing – functional foods. It will enable you to conduct a market research project from A to Z. The course comprises all steps from the generation of research questions to the analysis of self-collected data to the deductions of implications for marketing. We will look into implicit as well as explicit attitude measures as well as psychological covariates. We will apply segmentation techniques as well as causal-effects models.

The focus of our research will be functional food. Functional food is a steadily growing product segment, which bears a lot of potential but also various pitfalls for food businesses. Even though, consumers are principally interested in food with an additional health/wellness benefit the uptake of new functional foods is very slow and the flop rate is higher than the average for other food products. Against this background, we will look into implicit and explicit attitudes of consumers versus functional food and derive from our findings ideas for the marketing of functional food.

Course objectives and learning outcomes

The course enables students to handle and solve complex research questions in marketing and social science. Based on examples of (business) strategy students get to know complex multivariate analysis methods and how to apply them on their own. By obtaining knowledge and the ability to use statistical software packages, students also qualify to perform operational empirical analysis in a research project, consultancy, and professional practice.

By the end of the course, it is expected that students will be able to:

1. Demonstrate the ability to transform marketing problems into research hypotheses and proposal.
2. Display the ability to develop proper measurement to collect data on the variables that are relevant to address the research hypotheses.
3. Demonstrate the ability to select and utilize proper statistic tools to assess the dataset and the research hypotheses.

The skills mentioned above are key for a prospective student becoming an empirical researcher in the fields of social science, especially in market research.