Marketing Analytics Responses
Introduction
There have been numerous responses to Sue Umashankar's question about a new course in Marketing Analytics
: : : Posting
Marketing Analytics Course
Department of Marketing
Eller College of Management
University of Arizona
Tucson AZ 85721
My decision after input from Colleagues around the world:
I have decided to split the class into two parts:
- SPSS (15.0)
- Marketing metrics
The SPSS part will go over basic statistics through Multiple Regression with an emphasis on data analysis. The students will purchase the student version of SPSS 15.0
The Marketing Metrics part will go over the financial ratios. I have chosen a trade book for this called ‘Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master (Wharton School Publishing). The idea is to make sure the students have a grasp of all the basics.
Sue Umashankar, Ph.D.
Academic Director, GBP
Senior Lecturer, Marketing
Eller College of Management
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
(520) 621-1023
Responses from ELMAR to request for help with Marketing Analytics Course from Tim Ambler, Mukesh Bhargava, Hope Corrigan, Sam Cousley, Gopala "GG" Ganesh, Angela Hausman, Roselinde Kessels, Jamie Murphy, Satish K. Nair, Ed Rigdon, Abhik Roy, and Elizabeth Wilson.
We have developed a new course, Marketing Analytics and Tools, first offered in Fall 2006. Students take this course as early as the sophomore year (after Principles). It is in place to become a required course for marketing majors and a pre-req for our Marketing Research class. Topics covered include marketing metrics and statistics basics (with SPSS). The intention is to give strong grounding in quantitative skills so that BSBA students come to the Marketing Research class ready to "hit the ground running" on a client-based experiential project.
In addition, as part of curriculum revision in the Department, we have revised our Principles course to include exercises on marketing metrics throughout. A supplemental text in use is "Measuring Marketing" by John Davis (2006). For more information, please email either myself or my colleagues Dr. Catherine McCabe (mccabe@suffolk.edu) and Dr. Zhen Zhu (zzhu@suffolk.edu).
Glad to hear that you are going to teach students marketing analytics. I recommend the book, Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten, by Stephen Few. Students need examples and a lot of practice to take data and be able to tell clients, their boss, or funding organizations a meaningful story. Good luck with your class.
Your course in Marketing Analytics sounds interesting. I am considering including a segment on analytics in our Principles of Marketing class. If you could provide info your class (text, syllabus, etc.), I would appreciate it.
You may like to look at Marketing and The Bottom Line, 2nd edition, as a source book. It’s a bit solid for undergraduates but has a structure that may be useful. I attach an MSI paper you may have seen. Good luck with your new course.
I have read about your request for ideas on establishing a Marketing Analytics course. Maybe the topic of how to properly set up marketing experiments may be of interest to you. My research has been on the optimal design of choice-based and rating-based conjoint experiments.
You can still find my PhD thesis on the website of my previous University in Leuven, Belgium:
http://www.econ.kuleuven.be/public/NDBAE42/
I have also created some workshop material using JMP as a software package.
I read about your Marketing Analytics course with interest. We at Quinnipiac University have been mulling over the idea of an undergraduate course that prepares marketing students for the Marketing Research course and at the same time emphasizes the financial aspects of marketing decisions. We have thought that, while margin calculations and the ability to read and project income statements (in marketing plans) is important, it could possibly be covered through the inclusion of cases in existing courses (many marketing cases include P&L statements as you know). We thought that an entire semester long course devoted to financial analysis might be too much and would have to be supplemented with basic statistics, maybe forecasting methods and/or database marketing.
Could you provide us with details of the proposed course when these become clearer to you? Are you going ahead with an emphasis on financial calculations or is it going to be "financial calculations +"?
We’re thinking of teaching this at the graduate level. I’d be interested in what resources you find, if you’d be willing to share. Thanks in advance.
I am happy to attach a description of Marketing and Money, an undergraduate class that I developed from scratch here at UNT, precisely to address Marketing Math weaknesses of our undergraduates. Staring Fall 2003, I have also offered the class online via our WebCT. This Internet class won the ÂÜÀòÉç¹ÙÍø’s innovative excellence in Marketing Education award in 2005.
My basic approach in M and M is: about 10 Marketing Math concepts, about 50-60 one page mini cases (I have a resource base of about 200), 12 content modules where the concepts are explained and many of the minicases that incorporate those concepts solved "by hand". Later I have students repeat the analysis using my Excel blank worksheets. In addition, I also have two "How to" modules, one on designing an Excel workbook for analyzing a case and then solving it, and a second one on turning the complete Excel into a PowerPoint presentation.
I have given a presentation about this class at several conferences and some schools at the invitation of colleagues. If your department would be interested, I shall be happy to make a day trip to Tucson.
Just FYI, my university, and I am sure yours too, has a licensing program for online courses developed here. Therefore, one of your options would be to use my course, instead of developing everything from scratch.
Please let me know what you think. Best regards,
Here is a course outline for a course that I teach, would appreciate your syllabus when it is created, too. (This is a grad course)
We are in a similar process of designing a course.
The standard text and material that others have used are from Lillien and Rangaswamy (Marketing Engineering).
Some other person largely focused their course on econometric methods focusing on new and more robust methods (Bayesina etc.).
However, that leaves out topics such as data mining (including text mining).
The course will require a focus – it may depend on who your students are and what their competence and interests might be.
We ran one course jointly with a colleague in the Math/Stat combining the MBA class with graduate students in the Math department.
I am attaching the course outline for the course. We used a data mining tool from a local company (and some data sets) to flesh out the topics.
Please let me know what you decide – this is a very worthwhile effort.
I have been working on something similar here at Georgia State–a course that I’m calling "Marketing Metrics, Analysis and Problem-Solving (MAPS)," which aims to help students develop the tools to use quantitative evidence effectively in making decisions and addressing marketing problems. I have been thinking that (limited) case analysis and marketing metrics are also parts of this, but it’s hard to find the right materials. You know about the "Marketing Metrics" text from Wharton, which is a reference guide, not a textbook. I ran across a funny little book ($90 at Amazon) titled, "Pushing the Numbers in Marketing: A Real-World Guide to Essential Financial Analysis," by David Rados, which you could view as a nicely expanded version of that "Marketing Math" note from Harvard. Speaking of which, I really, really like William Ellet’s (2007), The Case Study Handbook: How to Read, Discuss, and Write Persuasively about Cases, from Harvard. I have been thinking that this text, plus some of the new brief cases that Harvard is publishing, plus a LOT of handholding, could really develop students’ ability to process information, use quant tools effectively, and make and defend decisions. There’s also some pricing stuff I’d like to wedge in there, but that may just reflect my own department’s weakness in pricing.
I imagine you’ve seen the "Marketing Engineering" books from the folks at Penn State. I can’t really decide if this one course gets that far, or if that materials needs to be saved for a Marketing Models class.
I’d sure appreciate hearing your thoughts. Building a course from scratch, without ready source materials, is an immense challenge.
this is in response to yr posting in yesterday’s elmar.
i’d suggest the book "marketing payback: is your marketing profitable" by robert shaw and david merrick (pearson education2005) as an interesting reading, if not a "textbook" for this course. robert shaw’s article that appeared around that time (‘how to demonstrate marketing profitability’) is appended h/w – might be considered for a reading (in case the book is not used as a core reading).
additionally, the two chapters titled "financial analysis for product management" and "marketing metrics" in the textbook, "product management" by donald lehmann and russell winer (mcgraw-hill) might serve as good reading material, appropriate to the ‘positioning’ of your innovative course.
of course, you might hv already considered prof thomas davenport’s article "competing on analytics" (harvard bus rev, jan 2006) for a difficult-level reading.
an article i got fm the zibs.com site is also attached h/w that might be of some help to you.
Thanks for your post to ELMAR about Marketing Analytics. Non-traditional courses are always good. Although I have never taught such a course, I am helping Google organize a student competition this might interest you and align with your course.
In the Google Online Marketing Challenge student teams get Google AdWords vouchers and compete on optimizing their spend to drive traffic to an existing small to medium sized business. AdWords is Google’s flagship advertising product and revenue source.
The competition should be a great hands-on assignment for undergrad and graduate students in classes such as emarketing, advertising, ecommerce, integrated marketing communication, management information systems, marketing, new media technologies and perhaps Marketing Analytics. The competition provides a foundation for advanced class exercises such as using Google Analytics to examine outcomes of the AdWords campaign.
The contest runs for any three consecutive weeks from late February to early May 2008. Google will launch a competition website in late October.