Di­git­al Mar­ket­ing and Con­sumer Cul­tures

Course content

This comprehensive and advanced graduate master course explores the intricacies of digital marketing within the context of diverse consumer cultures. It provides students with an in-depth understanding of the challenges and opportunities companies face when developing and implementing digital marketing strategies in a global marketplace.

The course mobilizes theoretical insights from marketing and communication studies, science and technology studies, and anthropology to articulate how digital technology’s affordances, infrastructures and social imaginaries influence and shape consumer cultures, values and worldviews.

The course includes topics such as strategic marketing, consumer culture, digital infrastructures, algorithmic cultures, and emerging digital cultures.  

In this course, students will explore critically these digital marketing phenomena in relation to social responsibility: Identifying digital markets and meeting the needs of customer groups ethically is critical to achieving organizational goals and a positive reputation. Students will develop a systematic understanding of digital marketing by learning concepts and tools whose applicability will endure even as specific technologies and implementation procedures change. Students will learn different marketing and communication strategies tailored for emerging online landscapes and how to influence consumers in an ethical manner. The students will learn to use responsibly and critically different advertising and marketing channels including search advertising, social media marketing, influencer marketing, platform content marketing and the synergies between them. Students will learn the key corporate responsibility principles that are the driving force of creating and maintaining online brand communities. Methodologically, the course introduces students to established and emerging digital methods including digital ethnography and social media analysis.