John F. Sherry, Jr. Raymond W. & Kenneth G. Herrick Professor of Marketing BA 1974, English/Anthropology; University of Notre Dame MA 1978, Ph.D. 1983, Anthropology; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (574) 631-6484 FAX: (574) 631-5544 E-mail: jsherry@nd.edu Printable Version

Culture, Consumption and Marketing (MARK 70550) Contemporary marketing requires a holistic understanding of fantasy and behavior as they interact in marketplaces around the globe. This course will help you comprehend, stimulate, manage and resist desire as you unpack the forces that shape and reflect the culture(s) of consumption. You will grasp the market as a complex system of material and metaphysical interactions, and learn to manipulate these interactions in a prosocial, ethical manner. Tempering interdisciplinary perspectives with a symbolic cast and combining the techniques of systematic introspection with participant observation, you will examine the many ways that consumption ramifies throughout daily life. Marketer and consumer misbehavior will also be probed. Cultural, subcultural, generational, class, lifecourse and group influences on marketing and consumption will be investigated. Semiotic interpretation, cross-cultural analysis, scenario planning, trend projection and other frameworks are employed throughout the quarter. This course is especially useful if you want to comprehend the "human" aspects of marketing, especially as they influence the "technical", and if you seek insight into the deep structure of your own motivations. Its most immediate relevance is to careers in consulting and entrepreneurship, category and brand management, new product development, advertising and multicultural marketing.

Qualitative Marketing Research (MARK 70150) Qualitative research methods are spreading rapidly among firms across industry boundaries, in recognition of the fact that marketers often have no systematic intuition about or affinity for the segments to which they cater. As managers are exhorted to "get closer" to the consumer, they must divine unarticulated needs and anticipate intersections of their own industry with others. This course is designed to help you distinguish the actual lived experience of consumers from the assumptions of the firm. That is, you will seek authentic consumer insight. Our emphasis is on the managerial implications of prolonged engagement with consumers. You will analyze and interpret the experiential and functional dimensions of product/service/brand essence. You will learn to conduct rapid appraisals using qualitative methods, and to supervise diagnostic research into marketing problems. The class will observe a seminar-workshop format, and depend for its energy upon discussion of ongoing field research projects that student teams will conduct in naturalistic settings. This course will be immediately useful to careers in consulting and entrepreneurship, technology, category and brand management, new product development, advertising and marketing research.