The focus of the lectures will be on the role of the Higgs boson in the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking, both in the Standard Model and in models of New Physics. In particular, I will discuss how a determination of its couplings to matter and gauge fields can give important information on the nature and origin of the Higgs boson. I will thus review the picture on Higgs couplings implied by the current experimental data and examine further interesting processes that can be measured in the future.