Buyer’s Behaviour – A Course Review
Report by Tina-Marie H.
If you are thinking about taking marketing courses at VIU, I can recommend you one in particular. The course is called Buyer’s Behaviour and the VIU course ID is MARK 260. You might have already taken a course similar to this one in Germany, probably a course about basics of Marketing. However, if you want to know more about the Canadian market and the Canadian consumer, I can only highly recommend enrolling in this course.
Great Instructors
Usually, there are several sections offered for Buyer’s Behavior. I have chosen the one with C.R. as an instructor; I had two courses with her as a professor. She is a very friendly and helpful teacher, which always puts much effort into her course preparation and she does whatever she can do to support her students.
I decided to take the 8:30am section and I guess you can imagine how hard it was to get up twice a week around 6am. But be assured, she honors your effort to come to class that early in the day. There are participation marks, which account for 5 % of your total course mark. It is basically about being in class regularly, doing short in-class exercises or handing in a take home exercise.
Workload
The course Buyer’s Behaviour also includes case study work, but do not be afraid, you will learn step by step how to work on these cases. They are real cases, referring to actual businesses and help you to apply the course theories and concepts to real life. At the beginning of the course, you will form intercultural groups in which you work on your cases. The instructor has a great concept on how intercultural groups are formed to ensure, each group has experts of necessary skills, such as academic writing, presenting and organizing. Throughout the semester, each group will present their solution for two cases to the class and hand in a written report of the case.
Exams and Excercises
You will have two exams in this course, one midterm and one final exam. Both include multiple choice questions and several essay questions from which you can choose the ones you would like to answer. The textbook and the lecture slides are really helpful for studying and Carleigh might also provide you with some chapter review questions at the end of each chapter to give you a feeling of how the exam questions might look like. There is also an online learning tool from the textbook where you can practice with online flashcards and quizzes for each chapter.
Overall, the course content is presented by the instructor with many practical Canadian examples and your international fellow students might add interesting information from their home countries too.
And last but not least: Canadian professors are really into challenges. Since it was an early morning class, my instructor was always kidding about a coffee dispenser in the class room. One day, someone mentioned that another professor brought coffee for the students… The next day of class, she actually brought coffee for all of us so whatever you say to your Canadian professors – be careful, they might take it as a challenge ;-)
