Managing Customer Experiences

Students will learn how account planners at advertising agencies, client marketing departments, direct marketing agencies, design consultancies, PR firms, and media independents, manage customer experiences. More specifically, they will learn how to: gather, distill, and synthesize information available in the public domain about trends and social movements that might help brands succeed; moderate focus groups and conduct ethnographic interviews with target consumers, putting themselves in the customer's shoes, seeing the world from their perspectives, and giving them the authority to speak on the customer's behalf; write a creative brief that inspires new ideas to help brands succeed; work with creative people to help bring those ideas to life in a way that will break through the clutter of competing messages in the marketplace; develop those ideas further in creative development focus groups or one-on-one interviews; measure whether or not the messages do in fact break through the clutter and register with target consumers; monitor and assess the effects of messages in the marketplace; and modify communication strategy to keep pace with a rapidly changing world.