Elective course

1 course unit

The overarching purpose of this course is to convey the ample benefits of a systematic, analytical approach to marketing decision-making, and to build skills /knowledge / confidence in undertaking such analyses on your own. An analytical approach will enable you to: (1) identify appropriate marketing options and actions, (2) calibrate costs and expected returns associated with each, and (3) choose those with the highest likelihood of achieving one’s business goals. That is, you will be on the happy path to “Marketing ROI”, which companies are increasingly obsessed about (for good reason). “Why Marketing Engineering? Don’t I know enough about Marketing already?” This course zooms onward from the Marketing Core course in several concrete ways, but mainly in terms of how to actually “do” marketing concepts like segmentation, targeting, positioning, and marketing resource allocation. By the end of this course, you will learn how to extract information in the ways marketers are increasingly required to, for example, to: segment customers and markets, identify attractive targeting prospects, determine the best brand positioning in customers’ minds, develop new products that add value to consumers and firms… and more. But, most of all, you will become adept in systematizing decisionmaking based on powerful, proven modeling methodology. We will also manage to cover a lot of ground typically bundled under “marketing analytics”, including such fun stuff as factor / cluster / latent class / conjoint analyses, heterogeneity, hierarchical models, multidimensional scaling, etc. We will NOT be approaching these topics theoretically, that is, via equations, proofs and other things most people hate. Instead, we’ll learn how they work, when to use them, and what they tell marketers.