Advertising is everywhere. Always transient, sometimes trivial, yet it can be incredibly powerful in changing our perceptions, beliefs, and behaviour. Our unique Master’s in Psychology of Advertising is designed to give you a competitive edge, offering an unparalleled interface between theory and practice. By providing a solid grounding in the psychology behind persuasion and its application in the communications industry, this program equips you with the skills to stand out and excel in an ever-evolving field.
Who is this programme for?
This MSc is perfect for graduates from diverse backgrounds who are eager to pursue careers in advertising, marketing, consumer research, and behaviour change. The course focuses on behavioural science, but no prior background in this area is necessary—just a passion to understand and shape the psychology behind consumer behaviour.
Looking ahead to employability
Graduate entry into the advertising and marketing field is highly competitive. This Master’s course provides a solid springboard from which to launch, as well as the key skills, language, and understanding needed for early career success and continuing development. With our strong industrial links to commercial, public and third-sector clients, our programme also gives you the opportunity to get hands-on, real world experience collaborating with industry professionals, providing you with practical expertise that is highly sought after by employers.
You will also:
Learn to apply a wide range of psychological theory (including behaviour-change and psychodynamic approaches) to practical business problems.
Discover how to influence the attitudes, perceptions, and behaviours of populations using highly effective, evidence-based techniques.
Collaborate with experienced researchers in both academia and industry, allowing you to access cutting-edge insights at the forefront of the field.
What to expect
Our course is designed to equip you with both a deep understanding of advertising and the psychological factors that influence it, providing a valuable foundation for your future career. Through a variety of core modules, you will gain essential knowledge about the fundamentals of advertising and its impact on cognitive processes, while also critically examining ethical concerns when targeting vulnerable audiences. You will also develop strong data analysis skills, which are key for success in the marketing and advertising industry. These modules will ensure you graduate with the practical competencies and theoretical insights that employers are looking for.
To further tailor your learning experience, our optional modules—ranging from speech analysis to digital behavioural data—allow you to dive deeper into areas of personal interest. This flexibility empowers you to take a more holistic approach to understanding the dynamic relationship between advertising, cognition, and human behaviour.
In your final term, you’ll have the opportunity to apply what you’ve learned in a dissertation project, working closely with an academic supervisor. This is a chance to demonstrate your ability to manage data, conduct research, and synthesize your findings, preparing you for real-world challenges. You can also enhance your professional profile by completing your dissertation alongside, or in parallel with, an industry placement. This hands-on experience will allow you to tackle real industry problems, giving you a competitive edge when applying for jobs. Many of our students have secured full-time employment through these placements, taking advantage of the valuable networking opportunities they provide.
Frances Jackson talks about why she came to Lancaster to study a Master's degree in Developmental Disorders.
Entry requirements
Academic Requirements
2:2 Hons degree (UK or equivalent) in Psychology, Marketing, Business Studies, Sociology,Advertising, Communications, Media, Journalism, Consumer Behaviour, Human Geography, or another related degree subject.
We also consider applications on an individual basis where you have a degree in an unrelated subject. In this case you should clearly demonstrate how your experience and skills have prepared you for postgraduate study.
If you have studied outside of the UK, we would advise you to check our list of international qualifications before submitting your application.
English Language Requirements
We may ask you to provide a recognised English language qualification, dependent upon your nationality and where you have studied previously.
We normally require an IELTS (Academic) Test with an overall score of at least 7.0, and a minimum of 6.0 in each element of the test. We also consider other English language qualifications.
Delivered in partnership with INTO Lancaster University, our one-year tailored pre-master’s pathways are designed to improve your subject knowledge and English language skills to the level required by a range of Lancaster University master’s degrees. Visit the INTO Lancaster University website for more details and a list of eligible degrees you can progress onto.
Course structure
You will study a range of modules as part of your course, some examples of which are listed below.
Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, but changes may be necessary, for example as a result of student feedback, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes, and new research. Not all optional modules are available every year.
Core
core modules accordion
An advanced understanding of concepts, models and theories relating to advertising and marketing, in addition to general skills in the critical analysis of theoretical concepts will be covered in this module.
Students will develop their knowledge in a broad range of areas within marketing, such as advertising strategy and positioning, integrated marketing communications, brand equity, global marketing and advertising and the importance of planning. In addition to developing a critical awareness of cultural issues and global marketing, students will learn how to critically evaluate theories and models relating to advertising. Regularly assessed coursework will enable students to engage in writing critical analyses of theoretical concepts and learn the process of synthesising points, ideas and arguments into a structured narrative.
Expanding upon previously taught skills, students will delve deeper into theories which they may already be familiar with, whilst harnessing new skills that are crucial to role of marketing and the essence of advertising, including an advanced understanding of how advertising works. Marketing communication such as brand promotion and general advertising will also be explored throughout the course.
This module will enable you to learn about the skills psychologists need to study human behaviour. The module will enable you to understand the main ideas behind some key scientific methods used in advanced psychological research, combining critical concepts with an introduction to the skills required to use these methods in practice.
You will study research methods from different topic areas in psychology: social, developmental, neuroscience, cognitive.
The module will: (1) ensure that you are furnished with introductions to a range of methods across topic areas; (2) provide you with flexibility over which topic area you will focus on; (3) enable the development of a range of research skills in depth; and (4) promote open science best practices.
This module focuses on developing the statistical understanding and practical skills required to analyse quantitative data using the modern and powerful R statistical programming language and environment. During this module, our students will learn how to apply a range of analytic techniques that are standard in professional practice in psychological research, how to apply statistical tests across a variety of settings, as well as how to analyse both qualitative and quantitative data types.
Students will apply and enhance their quantitative and qualitative research in a real-world environment, with potential to explore areas of ethical sensitivity and issues associated with advertising research, such as catering for vulnerable audiences, sensitive markets, regulation, codes of conduct and the collection and use of behavioural data.
The writing process will progress in stages, where students will be able to communicate views and opinions in both writing and discussions, and support these views and opinions with well-reasoned arguments. In addition to this, students will develop the ability to conduct and manage an advertising project throughout all of its key stages and demonstrate skills in quantitative and/or qualitative research methods by addressing research questions as part of a real-world advertising project.
Assessment will be both through focused practical work (market analysis and research, in addition to strategy development) and expert review sessions, offering professional feedback and advice from tutors and commercially based practitioners.
This module aims to develop skills in critical reading, review, thinking and communication, alongside an awareness of ethical concerns in psychology. Student will learn how to understand and accommodate for the moral and ethical implications of experimental and observational studies, complete literature reviews of scientific papers from across psychological domains, as well communicate experimental findings – in both written and oral mediums – in a format suitable for academic and non-academic settings.
Paired lectures and seminars will cover a wide range of indicative topics, including auditory and visual languages, psycholinguistic programmes and the subliminal power of advertising such as non-conscious effects, persuasion and emotional appeals.
Students will advance their skills in the critical examination of empirical evidence and theoretical arguments. They will examine the main cognitive psychological factors that impact on advertising success, ranging from lower-level perceptual, attentional and memory processes through to higher-level interpretational and inferential processes.
In addition, this module provides an understanding of the psychology of advertising from both a developmental and adult perspective, while also examining methodological issues associated with the study of child and adult cognition.
This module gives you the opportunity to apply your research and professional skills in an independent investigation. For most students this involves conducting a project in a workplace, applying your theoretical knowledge of psychology, advertising, and consumer behaviour with a practical topic in industry. For other students, the focus will be more theoretical, enabling you to explore how innovative techniques and research in psychology apply to key questions and challenges in commercial settings. Your write-up of the project will constitute a report, that shows how you have combined your practical work-placed skills with your theoretical knowledge gained throughout the whole study programme.
While carrying out research on your project, you will develop further essential skills in critically evaluating research literature, so that you can situate your own investigation against existing knowledge.
By the end of this project, you will have used empirical methods to collect original data or to select, prepare, and analyse secondary data, tailored to a question relevant in the workplace; conducted appropriate analyses of the data; shown an understanding of the research findings and presented that understanding effectively. This module therefore enables you to showcase your knowledge, bridging your master's studies with its application in a contemporary setting, demonstrating how psychology is not only effective, but essential, for marketing and advertising campaigns.
Optional
optional modules accordion
What are the current contemporary issues in developmental psychology, how do researchers address them, and how do we convert this research to make a real difference to children's lives? This module presents you with a series of the very latest topics in developmental psychology, with experts talking you through how research in that topic area is formed, how it is conducted, analysed, how then the research can apply in practical settings, and what the next stages will be in the research topic - what will be the next step in our understanding of development.
This module will provide you with an introduction to, and grounding in, both qualitative and quantitative approaches to the analysis of talk and text. It takes you through the process of conducting a research project using combined methods. By the end of the module, you will be able to generate and collect qualitative and quantitative data from both mediums suitable for analysis, apply a range of analytical methods to such data, as well as consider the ethical issues surrounding the collection and analysis of speech and text-based datasets.
Building on skills learnt in PSYC411, this module aims to equip students to conduct and present quantitative data analyses appropriately and effectively using advanced methods. Students will be introduced to popular, modern, data analysis techniques through a combination of lectures and practical workshops, learning especially how to utilise modelling techniques (such as linear and generalised linear mixed-effect models) across a wide range of psychological applications, as well as the importance of reproducibility within the psychological sciences.
This module involves a self-directed literature review, undertaken by the student on a psychological topic of their own choosing, under expert supervision. Students will be encouraged to develop an in-depth knowledge of a specific area of psychological research. This will include both classic theories and studies in the area, as well as up-to-date knowledge of current approaches and recent research findings.
Students will engage and develop skills in literature searching, in addition to the understanding they will gain in evaluating evidence, summarising findings from primary sources, and drawing conclusions on the basis of existing research. Students will obtain the practical knowledge and experience required to use electronic and other forms of library resources to identify published research in psychology, and will be aware of different traditions of theory and research in their chosen topic area.
This module is designed to explore meta-level issues that are important for work on psychology and behavioural analytics. Here, students learn a theoretical toolkit - and understand the implications for how they might use these concepts to explore or refine a psychologically-relevant question using digital data. To this end, the module discusses the current state of psychological science and the key tensions that exist as psychologists begin to embrace new forms of digital data. It introduces key psychological theories and explores which theories are best supported ‘outside of the lab’ by new forms of digital data. Beyond positioning psychology across this new digital plane, this module deals with issues of research ethics, morality, and scientific practice.
Education during the school years directly impacts further study and employment opportunities, and has also been linked to long-term physical and mental health. Understanding how individuals learn and engage in educational settings is therefore crucial.
This module will explore these important issues through the lens of psychology. You will gain an understanding of the key role of psychology in education. You will be introduced to contemporary research which has investigated how psychological concepts operate in educational settings. You will also critically evaluate research studies and methodologies, identifying both strengths and weaknesses, and apply this knowledge in a range of practical activities.
You will develop a range of skills during the module, including your ability to communicate complex information to non-specialist audiences, communicate effectively in both writing and orally, and develop strong and coherent critique of research studies and methodologies.
There may be extra costs related to your course for items such as books, stationery, printing, photocopying, binding and general subsistence on trips and visits. Following graduation, you may need to pay a subscription to a professional body for some chosen careers.
Specific additional costs for studying at Lancaster are listed below.
College fees
Lancaster is proud to be one of only a handful of UK universities to have a collegiate system. Every student belongs to a college, and all students pay a small College Membership Fee which supports the running of college events and activities. Students on some distance-learning courses are not liable to pay a college fee.
For students starting in 2025, the fee is £40 for undergraduates and research students and £15 for students on one-year courses.
Computer equipment and internet access
To support your studies, you will also require access to a computer, along with reliable internet access. You will be able to access a range of software and services from a Windows, Mac, Chromebook or Linux device. For certain degree programmes, you may need a specific device, or we may provide you with a laptop and appropriate software - details of which will be available on relevant programme pages. A dedicated IT support helpdesk is available in the event of any problems.
The University provides limited financial support to assist students who do not have the required IT equipment or broadband support in place.
For most taught postgraduate applications there is a non-refundable application fee of £40. We cannot consider applications until this fee has been paid, as advised on our online secure payment system. There is no application fee for postgraduate research applications.
For some of our courses you will need to pay a deposit to accept your offer and secure your place. We will let you know in your offer letter if a deposit is required and you will be given a deadline date when this is due to be paid.
The fee that you pay will depend on whether you are considered to be a home or international student. Read more about how we assign your fee status.
If you are studying on a programme of more than one year’s duration, tuition fees are reviewed annually and are not fixed for the duration of your studies. Read more about fees in subsequent years.
Scholarships and bursaries
You may be eligible for the following funding opportunities, depending on your fee status and course. You will be automatically considered for our main scholarships and bursaries when you apply, so there's nothing extra that you need to do.
Unfortunately no scholarships and bursaries match your selection, but there are more listed on scholarships and bursaries page.
The information on this site relates primarily to 2025/2026 entry to the University and every effort has been taken to ensure the information is correct at the time of publication.
The University will use all reasonable effort to deliver the courses as described, but the University reserves the right to make changes to advertised courses. In exceptional circumstances that are beyond the University’s reasonable control (Force Majeure Events), we may need to amend the programmes and provision advertised. In this event, the University will take reasonable steps to minimise the disruption to your studies. If a course is withdrawn or if there are any fundamental changes to your course, we will give you reasonable notice and you will be entitled to request that you are considered for an alternative course or withdraw your application. You are advised to revisit our website for up-to-date course information before you submit your application.
More information on limits to the University’s liability can be found in our legal information.
Our Students’ Charter
We believe in the importance of a strong and productive partnership between our students and staff. In order to ensure your time at Lancaster is a positive experience we have worked with the Students’ Union to articulate this relationship and the standards to which the University and its students aspire. View our Charter and other policies.
