Introduction to Psychology by Paul Bloom at Yale

Although psychology courses are not required in many undergraduate marketing programs, psychology has tremendous applications in marketing. Understanding motivations, behavior, and how people think are critical to being an effective marketer. Professor Bloom is a tremendous lecturer and I think you will really enjoy his lectures and learn a lot. Full videos of all 20 lectures are available at Academic Earth. The lecture above is one of my favorites and discusses what studies have uncovered about what makes us happy.

Psychology 156 – Human Emotion by Dacher Keltner from UC Berkeley

This course focuses on the science of human emotion and discusses topics like rationality and the role of emotion in decision making. Professor Keltner is also a tremendous lecturer, one of the best I’ve ever listened to.

Psych 160 Social Psychology by Dacher Keltner from UC Berkeley

This course looks at how people behave in social situations and discusses topics like social pressure. Marketers who understand how social influences can affect our behavior can apply this knowledge to marketing campaigns when appropriate. Some of the lectures in this series are missing, but there are several other social psychology lecture courses available online.

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders from Stanford

This is an ongoing lecture series at Stanford that features a successful entrepreneur each week to share advice and lessons about starting and growing their business. Many of the talks discuss how they were able to grow their customers, since no startup can survive without customers. Here is a page with the talks that focus on sales and marketing.

Inbound Marketing University from Hubspot

This is a series of online marketing webinars from marketing thought leaders like Avinash Kaushik, Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, and Gary Vaynerchuk. These 16 “classes” cover a wide range of online marketing topics like email marketing, SEO, marketing analytics, viral marketing, and social media. You can also take a multiple choice test after viewing the classes and earn an inbound marketing certification that comes with a nice badge that you can put on your website.

SEOMoz Whiteboard Friday

If you would like to learn about how search engines work and how you can use search engine optimization to increase the relevance and importance of your website in the eyes of search engines, check out these series of videos. Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SEO software company SEOMOz, gives a short whiteboard presentation each week that lasts about 10 minutes (sometimes he is replaced by sidekick Danny Dover). There have been over 100 of these presentations, which you can view here.

The Ries Report

This series of video presentations by authors Al and Laura Ries discusses topics in branding and brand positioning. Al Ries is a marketing legend, as author of the classic marketing book Positioning, and presents some great concepts that can lead to marketing success.

Do you know of any lectures or presentations that you would like to recommend? Please add them to the comments.

I would define Wiki Branding as empowering your customers to build your brand. This is an excellent presentation by Sean Moffitt in which he describes some really innovative things companies are doing to engage their customers. For example Jones Soda has put thousands of photos of their customers on their labels and you can have your soda customized with your own photo.