Marketing Research

Introduction

Due to technological developments and the proliferation of high-quality data, marketing is becoming an increasingly quantitative profession. This means that marketing professionals should not only be creative, they also must have a solid background in marketing analytical tools in order to make sense of all the available data. In this course, you will learn how to analyze secondary data using multivariate techniques with the purpose of enhancing marketing decisions.

The focus in the course is to be able to determine which marketing problem requires which particular analytical approach. The students will solve real-life marketing problems through the analysis of secondary data. They will have to come up with managerial recommendations based on their findings and they will learn how to communicate these findings effectively to a management audience with the use of Powerpoint presentations and by means of a written report. Hence, this course is not just a statistics course; the emphasis is on the managerial aspects of the statistical tools.

Given the rapidly changing technological environment, as indicated by the buzzwords "Big Data", marketing accountability, data science, etc., this course will summarize the most recent developments in marketing research in general and introduce the students to state-of-the-art analytical methods in particular.

Students should have working knowledge of SPSS before the course starts.

Course content

1. A refresher in inferential statistics
2. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and related methods
3. (Logistic) Regression analysis
4. Principal components analysis
5. Cluster analysis
6. Conjoint analysis
7. Presentation and write up of findings

This course outline may be subject to changes.