Digital Food Marketing

The fast-changing digital landscape offers new ways to approach and engage consumers. We need to understand the consumer behaviour in the digital environment (e.g., digital buying, searching and sharing behaviour), as well as the differences digital marketing entails compared to traditional marketing. New digital marketing tools to communicate, reach and engage consumers are presenting themselves in this digital world. In this course students learn about opportunities and challenges in digital marketing, communication through digital platforms, and other contemporary consumer issues related to digital marketing in the food sector.

Topics include: This course covers an overview of digital marketing and deals with a range of diverse contemporary topics related to digital marketing in the food sector. Since this field is rapidly developing, topics may be picked from this list, depending on the current trends: Consumer behaviour in digital environment, online versus brick-and-mortar store (e.g. marketing mix, consumer journey), digital marketing communication (search engine optimization, paid search advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, location-based marketing), recommendation agents, personalization, etc. It also covers some data analytics to illustrate how data from digital platforms can help to make marketing decisions. The course will combine the discussion of scientific literature, cases studies and hands-on assignments.

After successful completion of this course students are expected to be able to:

• describe digital marketing theories and concepts;
• explain how digital marketing theories and concepts are applied in the food domain;
• apply digital marketing theories and concepts to case studies in the food domain;
• identify and summarize the key findings in scientific digital food marketing literature;
• critically analyze scientific digital food marketing literature.

Assumed Knowledge:
This course assumes some prior knowledge on the basics of marketing and consumer behavior. For example: MCB11805 Introduction to Management and Consumer Studies or MCB20806 Principles of Consumer Studies or BMO24306 Management and Marketing.