This is the capstone course in the Retailing and Consumer Sciences Program. Students in the course have academic and applied learning experiences along with retailing career aspirations. Students are trained as retail generalists with diverse specific interests in merchandising, marketing, product development, digital, sports marketing, entrepreneurship, and sustainable consumption. They have a rare combination of retail industry knowledge and a Gen-Z perspective that has allowed them to develop innovative and practical solutions to retailing challenges.

Is your social impact organization in need of a complete brand system? Is your promotional material out of date? Looking for a concept and design execution on a traditional or digital campaign? In this project, students will work in teams to function as a design agency. They will produce digital and/or traditional graphic design deliverables, based on your needs and industry opportunities.

This course will cover customer experience (CX) design, testing and evaluation, and management for real-world, digital, and omnichannel shopping environments. Students will use CX consumer research tools, including ethnography, video analysis, emotion detection, and digital usability testing (UX) incorporating professional UX applications, eye-movement tracking, and biometrics. Students will also explore CX management processes, including service quality evaluation and management, service blueprinting, customer journey mapping, customer lifecycle model analysis, and customer lifetime value. In this hands-on course, students will learn how to create customer journey maps, customer experience maps, touchpoint maps, service blueprints, and estimate CX metrics such as NPS, among others. Furthermore, students will use prototypes, test websites, mobile apps, and store experience concepts.

Students are ready to support virtually, research, analyze, and formulate community change activities and policies in this course. We are looking for projects where students can apply in practice the concepts and theories learned in the classroom and contribute to your organization's mandate in the process. Students are interdisciplinary and would like to work on complex social issues to work as a team to find solutions.