Customer and Marketing Analytics

Course Objective

The overarching objective of this course is to equip students with the knowledge and skills on how to approach marketing-related problems from a rigorous, analytical, data-based perspective. During the course, students will get acquainted with the various practical customer analytics questions that managers may struggle with useful (e.g., how our products or services are perceived by the market vis-à-vis the competition; how to determine customers’ preferences over product attributes and predict the market share of a proposed new product; how to evaluate the effects of various marketing mix efforts on marketing outcomes). They will learn to work with different types of data (e.g.; customer survey data, historical sales and marketing data, transaction data) and obtain rigorous knowledge of the data analysis techniques (e.g.; factor analysis, conjoint analysis, multiple regression, and logistic regression) for solving the salient customer and marketing analytics questions. Students will excel in applying these techniques in Microsoft Excel and the statistical software package SPSS or R; and in interpreting the output of such applications in terms of the marketing research problem at hand.

To summarize, on completion of this course, students will:

• Become acquainted with marketing research problems and the data used to address these problems.
• Obtain knowledge of the data analysis techniques that are commonly used by marketing (research) practitioners and marketing academics
• Know when and why various techniques are used
• Apply these techniques in SPSS/R/Microsoft Excel and interpret the results to generate actionable insights.

Course Content

The past couple of decades have witnessed an unprecedented explosion in the quantity and quality of information available to managers. To reach well-informed decisions, marketing research practitioners and marketing academics have developed and implemented a wide variety of analytical tools and models. This course will familiarize you with the state-of-art techniques and approaches that have become fundamental to marketing decision making in order to collect, analyze, and act on customer information. Through a combination of lectures and computer exercises, the course aims that you gain the expertise and confidence to analyze real marketing problems in rigorous manner, and support your analysis using appropriate analytical tools.

Additional Information Teaching Methods

The course uses a combination of lectures and tutorials. The lectures focus on probing, extending and applying the course concepts and methods. Importantly, the lectures discuss for which marketing problems the techniques are typically used and how conclusions can be made for marketing management. The tutorials enable students to practice the concepts and methods discussed during the lectures.

Method of Assessment

Individual Final Exam (80%)
Individual Assignments (20%)

Each to be completed with a minimum score of 5.0. In order to pass this course, your need a minimum overall course grade of 5.50.

Literature

There is no single textbook that meets the needs of this course.
However, a highly recommended reference book is Hair et al. (2014) book listed below.

• Hair, Joseph F., William, C. Black, Barry J. Babin and Rolph E. Anderson (2014), Multivariate Data Analysis (7th edition) – Pearson New International Edition, Harlow (UK): Pearson Education Limited.

Recommended background knowledge

Knowledge of SPSS or R and basic statistics