Customer and market analytics
In this course you will learn how to improve your business strategy by understanding and employing data, with the goal to make effective strategic marketing and business development decisions.
What you will learn:
- Understanding your customers and markets, identifying future high value customers and strategies to improve your competitive advantage.
- Understanding how investments in your product offer, price changes, distribution channels and promotion affect your bottom line-profitability.
- Exploring your brand positioning against competition and evaluating how to optimally allocate resources across different products, customers and channels.
In this course you learn how to increase the effectiveness of marketing and business development decisions using samples of data and hands-on examples. We use an “Explain-Show-Do-Practice” approach to teaching. The intuition about analytical approach to data exploration is given in lectures with strategic implications discussed in class, followed by concrete case study analysis guided through a hands-on approach and applied to Excel.
We do not go deeply into the mathematics behind the methods and tools, but rather take a strategic manager approach to understanding which data you need, which method can be used, how to simply apply Excel to leverage the data insights and act strategically based on the output of analytical models.
The course will use the concepts and marketing analytics software from Enginius (a widely used executive instructional material developed at Penn State University, US). Student's individual licence for the software as well as all the books, case studies and materials are included in the price of the course. We will also explore some of the current AI solutions that could help improve your strategic skills and decision-making (using freely available solutions like ChatGPT and similar).
"This course immediately gave me valuable insights I could apply in practice. The field of marketing is evolving significantly, and I wanted an updated and better understanding of data and marketing analysis - crucial for developing effective strategies in this field."
Who is this programme for?
For those reading analytic reports:
- Executives in leadership positions who want to understand how analytics could be used to improve business performance rather than blindly trust into outputs of analysts
- For business development professionals and management consultants who need to understand how analytics can create value for their clients.
For those who do analytics:
- Product, brand and marketing managers who need to understand how to better leverage data and run analytic models in intuitive, simple way.
- Professionals who already have background in analytics or computer science, but whose roles and projects are becoming increasingly strategic, so they need to develop further strategic skills to bridge the gap between analytics and business strategy.
Admission requirements
- You are at least 25 years old
- You have completed a bachelor's degree
- You have four years of full-time work experience (three years if you already have a master's degree)
Students without a completed bachelor's degree can, in some cases, be admitted based on prior learning and work experience.
Take the course or build a degree
This course can be integrated in an Executive Master of Management.
The course awards 15 credits, and a master's degree consists of 90 credits. Should you choose to take more master's level courses later, you can accumulate a complete master's degree. The combination of courses is up to you, based on your learning goals and career plans.
Modules and course content
This course is conducted through a combination of campus and online learning process. The campus module will consists of three modules of two days each over the course of one semester. All modules takes place on campus in Oslo. The online module will combine online content, videos and exercises to support the learning, both individually and in groups.
The syllabus is made available as soon as you have been admitted to the course.
Exams consists of a term paper and a set of individual home assignments. The term paper counts for 60% of the total grade, and can be solved individually or in groups of maximum three students. The individual home assignment counts for 40% of the total grade. It is a collection of case study solutions on which students work throughout the course. Both are based on the application of the concepts and tools learned in the course and provides an opportunity to implement the learned skills on your firm’s data in the final project.
Modules
- Understand the market and needs of your customers. Identify how to profile different customer types and which groups of customers are the most profitable to serve in the long-run. How to use existing data and available AI solutions to understand your customer requirements?
- Explore how customers view your offers relative to competitive products and how you can position your strengths against competition. Devise your competitive strategy against competition based on your actual competitive advantages.
- Practice segmentation of customer, targeting of the most promising groups and positioning of your brand relative to competitors on actual data and cases.
- Learn how to develop successful new products based on preferences of your customers. Measure, analyze, and predict customers' responses to new products and/or to new features of an existing product that you wish to change – e.g. which price to charge.
- Forecast sales/market share of different product choices based on the analysis of the offer that competitors have and your analysis of customer needs.
- Predict whether customer will buy next and understand which elements drive customer decision to buy your product offer or not?
- Practice data-driven design of a product offer on real customer choices with datasets and cases led by the instructor.
- Explore the business and marketing phenomena that are seen as a current “hype” to distinguish between the popular “buzz” and the actual evidence. Investigate how to optimize your investments between different types of products, across diverse sales representatives and trade-offs in profitability when you allocate resources on different product offers, price changes, distribution channels and promotion affect your bottom line-profitability. Practice on actual data.
- Discuss the newest developments in AI, what are the issues of the current AI applications, their outcomes and how regulation is going to affect your business. What are privacy paradoxes, how harms affect the benefits and improvements of AI and how AI affects decision-making of firms and experiences of customers.
- Discuss in class the impact AI will have on businesses with recent examples from AI Act regulation and cutting edge evidence from social science and computer science research.
Faculty
Matilda Dorotic is an Associate Professor in the Department of Marketing at BI Norwegian Business School, and a research associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has recently completed a sabbatical research stay at Harvard University and MIT, in the USA. Her research interests lie at the intersection of social behavioral science, data science and technology, with a particular focus on outcomes and regulation of Artificial Intelligence. Her research investigates the effects that emerging technologies have on citizens, firms and societal wellbeing.
She worked with and has presented her work at a number of organizations and industry partners such as: United Nations Centre for Robotics and AI (UNICRI), European Commission (EC), International Centre for Parliamentary Studies, American Marketing Association, European Marketing Association, NTNU, University of Agder, Dell Technologies,, Datatilsynet, Kripos and Skatteetaten.
Time and effort required
All our courses are designed to be combined with a job and a personal life. Still - you'll need to dedicate some time.
You'll spend a total of 6 workdays on modules. Additionally, you'll need to make time for reading the course material and writing the term paper.
How much time this takes varies widely from student to student, and you can adjust this to fit your other commitments.
Read more about balancing part-time studies with work and personal life.
Tuition fee
The tuition fee is invoiced per semester and adjusted annually. It includes access to lectures and the standard examination fee.
Want to know more?
We regularly host informational webinars that you can join. There you will meet a guidance counsellor and have the opportunity to ask questions.
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