Marketing Engineering - Business Intelligence through Customer Insights

In the course we will cover the following topics (preliminary agenda):

1. Introduction to the course contents and the data (Week 1)

2. Descriptive analytics: Gaining a first intuition of (Week 2)

3. Regression essentials and related assumptions: How can we determine the optimal marketing mix? (Week 3)

4. Logistic regression & counterfactual simulations: How to predict the outcome of managerial actions? (Week 4)

5. Segmenting, targeting, and positioning: How can we divide the market into meaningful segments that should help us in prioritizing the most valuable customers? (Week 5)

6. Website scraping: How to access publicly available data? (Week 6 & 7)

7. Wrap up (Week 8)

Assignments

Will be announced during the course. You’ll be given data on a specific problem and receive for each report specific questions and hints on the analysis. Reports will likely have a length of about 3-5 pages each (the concrete length will be announced during course). Groups sizes will also be announced during class (very likely up to 3 students per group).

Marketing Engineering is an organized way of gathering and analyzing information for decision-making purposes. In making these decisions, managers choose from among alternative courses of action in a complex and uncertain world. Eventually, they enable the creation of business intelligence through customer insights, i.e., better decisions through a better understanding of the customer behavior. Using various types of data sources, models, and related exercises tied to recommended software components, course participants will develop marketing plans in various decision contexts.

The content of this course is mainly based on the lecture slides. Selected articles are provided, but the main resources for learning are lecture slides, exercises and hands-on sessions on the software Excel, JMP (SAS), and Grepsr.

During the course, we will use three types of software: To better understand the underlying logic in the analysis, we are going to use Excel. For deeper business ingishts, we are going to use JMP (belonging to SAS). Licenses for JMP will be provided free of charge to course participants. For web site scrapping, we are going to use Grepsr. This course is designed such that participants without any experience in Gepsr or JMP will be able to complete all assignments.

90 points can be achieved in the course in total, of them:

• 45 points through the reports of three group assignments (very likely after week 2, week 4 and week 6)
• 45 points through the exam (of 60 minutes).

150