Using Student Experiences as the Basis for a Consumer Behavior Learning Exercise

Abstract

Unlike some courses taught in the business curriculum, students enter the consumer behavior course with an inherent head start on the subject matter. Because part of a student’s behavior is that as a consumer, he/she brings to the classroom some years of experience in this role. As a result, concepts discussed in lecture and in the text has an added degree of salience, and are more quickly learned. Rather than being indifferent to the fact that students do bring to the classroom an accumulation of consumption experiences, consumer behavior instructors should consider using those experiences as a basis of further learning. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to offer a means of converting this latent knowledge into an opportunity for an experiential learning exercise.