DM407
Behavioural Marketing
Faculty
Kenda Macdonald
CEO of Automation Ninjas
Course length
Duration
Total hours
Credits
Language
Course type
Fee for single course
Fee for degree students
Skills you’ll learn
Overview
This course teaches you how buying decisions actually happen in the brain, and how to design marketing that works with that machinery rather than against it. The premise is simple: platforms, tools and channels change constantly. The brain buying from you doesn't.
The course runs in three parts:
1. Foundations. The neuroscience of the purchase process, anchored on two questions you'll learn to ask of every piece of marketing: how do you get attention, and how do you build reward? You'll cover how attention is won and lost, how the brain weighs reward against pain, and how memory, emotion, cognitive load, trust and identity shape every buying decision. You'll also learn to read the evidence itself: which effects are solid, which are contested, and how to tell the difference.
2. The customer journey. The foundations applied across the four stages of real marketing work: lead generation, nurture, sales and conversion, and retention and growth. Each stage is taught through teardowns of real campaigns, where you'll diagnose what the marketing is doing to the buyer's brain and whether it helps or harms the decision.
3. The behavioural audit. The professional method for working out why marketing isn't working. You'll conduct a full audit of a real customer journey and present your findings the way a practitioner would present them to a client or a board.
Learning highlights
- Gain an in-depth understanding of the neuroscience of purchase behaviour, including attention, reward and pain, memory, emotion, cognitive load, trust and identity, and use it to improve lead quality, engagement, conversion and customer lifetime value
- Learn to diagnose where and why customer journeys fail, using cognitive biases and behavioural barriers as a working diagnostic vocabulary rather than trivia
- Map content and campaigns to buyer awareness stages across the full journey, from first attention through to retention, referral and advocacy
- Read behavioural research critically: understand effect boundaries and replication, and distinguish evidence from marketing folklore
- Apply ethical constraints in practice, separating persuasion that supports a buyer's autonomy from manipulation that removes it
- Conduct and present a complete behavioural audit of a real customer journey, with findings grounded in the research
Course outline
15 classes
Session 1
The Buyer Brain Framework: How do you get attention? How do you build reward?
Session 2
Foundations: Attention. System 1 and 2, filtering, salience, distinctiveness
Session 3
Foundations: Reward and pain. Knutson's purchase formula. Emotion as the value-tagging system
Session 4
Foundations: Memory and cognitive load. The forgetting curve, fluency, the cost of confusion
Session 5
Foundations: Trust, identity and context. How trust forms, breaks and compounds
Session 6
Foundations: The line and reading the evidence. Autonomy, manipulation risk, contested science
Session 7
Wing 1: Lead Generation. Winning attention and earning permission. Teardown
Session 8
Wing 2: Nurture. Building memory and trust between interest and intent. Teardown
Session 9
Wing 3: Sales and Conversion. Making the decision easy for the right buyer. Teardown
Session 10
Wing 4: Retention and Growth. Protecting and compounding the relationship. Teardown
Session 11
AI as amplifier: machine-scale persuasion, dark patterns, and manipulation risk
Session 12
The behavioural audit: method, rubric, and project workshop
Session 13
Audit clinic: group crits of work in progress
Session 14
Final Presentations
Session 15
Final Presentations
Course materials
Books
Prerequisites
NA - only an understanding of what marketing is broadly.
Methodology
Students will learn via lectures, exercises and a combination of group/ individual work. Grades will be determined by presentations and the individual and group work.
Each class will begin with a lecture, then a discussion of the lecture content. In relevant lectures there will be exercise breakouts where students can apply their learning. Their final presentation will be set in the beginning of the course: to design a customer journey, with relevant campaigns planned and strategies outlined. Exercises will work towards this final project. And grading will take into consideration their exercise work and their final presentation.
The course is roughly split into three sections: Behaviour - an overview of the neuroscience behind the purchase process and how this and cognitive bias affects interactions with marketing automation content. The Customer Journey - using life cycle marketing to plan and execute a behavioural customer journey and it’s relevant campaigns. Content and Segmentation - how content is pivotal to the success of marketing automation and how to plan for the engagement of this content so that you’re learning about your audience and using this understanding to increase conversion rates These 3 areas will help student understand the why, how and what behind best-in-class marketing automation journeys. The course will be practical so that students can apply this to a project and know how to implement this immediately.
Grading
Kenda Macdonald is a forensic psychology major, a multi-award-winning founder, and the author of the bestselling Hack The Buyer Brain. She is an international keynote speaker and a doting cat mum.
Years spent building an award-winning agency around behaviour and intent led her to fuse marketing practice with psychological expertise, and to develop the behaviour-first approach that made her the UK’s leading behavioural automation expert.
See full profileApply for this course
Behavioural Marketing
by Kenda Macdonald
Total hours
45 Hours
Dates
Feb 01 - Feb 19, 2027
Fee for single course
€1500
Fee for degree students
€750
How to secure your spot
Complete the form below to kickstart your application
Schedule your Harbour.Space interview
If successful, get ready to join us on campus
FAQ
Will I receive a certificate after completion?
Yes. Upon completion of the course, you will receive a certificate signed by the director of the program your course belonged to.
Do I need a visa?
This depends on your case. Please check with the Spanish or Thai consulate in your country of residence about visa requirements. We will do our part to provide you with the necessary documents, such as the Certificate of Enrollment.
Can I get a discount?
Yes. The easiest way to enroll in a course at a discounted price is to register for multiple courses. Registering for multiple courses will reduce the cost per individual course. Please ask the Admissions Office for more information about the other kinds of discounts we offer and what you can do to receive one.