This course introduces students to the science of consumer neuroscience and neuroeconomics, examining how advances in measurement and theory have transformed our understanding of how consumers evaluate options and make decisions. Topics span the neural foundations of value and choice, the role of attention and gaze in preference formation, emotional and affective influences on decision-making, learning and memory systems underlying brand equity, implicit persuasion and choice architecture, and the developing consumer across the lifespan. Students also explore neuroforecasting, the use of individual-level neural and physiological data to predict aggregate market behaviour. The course combines rigorous engagement with primary research with hands-on experience using advanced methods including eye tracking, skin conductance, EEG, and fMRI, and culminates in a team-based original research project using the LSE Behavioural Lab.
This course provides a systematic introduction to the principles and analytical tools of digital marketing, with an emphasis on data-driven decision-making in dynamic markets. Topics include the digital consumer journey, search engine optimisation, paid search and display advertising, social media and influencer marketing, consumer insight from user-generated content (including text and image analysis), omnichannel strategy, personalisation and digital pricing, and platform business models. Students develop both conceptual and practical skills through a market simulation game in which they apply marketing analytics to make strategic budgeting, targeting, and media decisions, and are assessed through a final essay.
This course provides a systematic introduction to the psychology of consumer behaviour, covering the major theoretical frameworks that explain how and why consumers think, feel, and act as they do across all stages of the customer journey. Topics progress from foundational questions about attitude formation, persuasion, and behaviour change through learning and memory systems, motivation and goal pursuit, attention and judgment heuristics, affect and nonconscious processes, and social influences on consumption. The course concludes with an overview of emerging methodological frontiers in consumer research, including neuroimaging, process tracing, and experience sampling approaches. Students develop skills in reading and critically evaluating primary empirical research, and apply course concepts through a team-based consulting project in which they design and conduct original primary research via survey, focus group, or experiment to generate actionable recommendations for a real organisation.
This compulsory doctoral seminar introduces first-year MRes/PhD students in Marketing with research in marketing, cognitive psychology, and social psychology on information processing and judgment and decision making related topics. It will also aim to help students develop the quantitative foundations for academic work in marketing. Both theoretical models which help analyse marketing issues including product, pricing, advertising, salesforce, and distribution, and decision-support models will be covered. This course aims to give students a strong foundation for critical thinking in the area of consumer behaviour and quantitative marketing, and to enable students to conceptualize, develop and operationalize research ideas.
This compulsory doctoral seminar introduces first-year MRes/PhD students across LSE's Management programmes to the philosophy and practice of scientific inquiry in the social sciences. Using Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a foundation, the course addresses the nature of paradigms and scientific progress before turning to the practicalities of management research: causal inference from experimental and non-experimental data, ethical dimensions of research design, quantitative and qualitative methods, survey and measurement design, big data, and neuro/physiological approaches. A central pedagogical goal is broadening students' scholarly horizons: participants read and present work from outside their home subfield, developing both academic presentation skills and an appreciation for the range of approaches that constitute management science.
This course surveys the scientific foundations and applied potential of consumer neuroscience, examining how tools developed in cognitive and affective neuroscience are reshaping marketing research and practice. Topics range from well-established methods such as eye tracking and facial action coding to emerging approaches including mobile physiological sensing and neural predictors of market response, with applications spanning attention, emotion, memory, decision-making, branding, and product development. Students read and critically evaluate primary research, apply neuroscientific frameworks to real marketing problems, and complete an original group research project presented as a scientific poster. The course is designed to be self-contained while serving as a natural complement for students with backgrounds in business, economics, psychology, or neuroscience.
This two-day pre-sessional workshop introduces incoming MSc Marketing students to the fundamentals of programming in R and RStudio, with no prior coding experience assumed. Working through a structured series of hands-on exercises, students learn to create and manipulate variables, work with arrays and data frames, install and load packages, and import, clean, visualise, and export real datasets. The session uses a Major League Baseball player dataset to illustrate applied data cleaning workflows, exploratory visualisation with ggplot2, and the practical consequences of outliers and skewed distributions. The workshop is designed to lower the barrier to quantitative coursework by building both technical competence and confidence with scripting-based data analysis.