MBA Update: Market Analysis

School and work have kept me too busy to post for a while! I have finished one year of the MBA program so will try to catch up on class overviews while I’m technically on break before January’s classes begin.

What is Market Analysis?

Students employ market research tools to advance to innovative marketing solutions. Through cases and projects, the course focuses on current behavioral theories of marketing and emerging areas of marketing practice, including social networking, branding, value creation, customer lifetime value, new digital tools, and the analysis of the return on marketing.

The course goals:

The course focuses on advanced analytical applications of the marketing discipline, including marketing research, market analytics, and market planning. Students will develop a deeper understanding of markets and customers, a much better grasp of marketing models, and the increased capacity to develop innovative quantitative market solutions. By the end of the course, students will be able to:

Primary Objectives:

1. Analyze customer segments and track an organization’s success in achieving customer loyalty with specific groups of customer overtime.
2. Understand problem-solving in areas of market research, market planning, and marketing mix strategies, utilizing the behavioral core concepts of marketing, and employing marketing research tools to examine consumer behavior and develop customer insight.
3. Develop advanced marketing skills, including brand management, marketing research tools, digital marketing, and analyzing the return on marketing. This encompasses inter-disciplinary skills need to assess, design, and develop effective market-based sustainable global enterprises.

Secondary Objectives:

1. How to evaluate the customer centricity of an organization and make suggestions on how to increase focus on the customer.
2. How to determine customer loyalty and retention rates for specific segments of customers.
3. How to determine the lifetime value of a customer to the organization.
4. How to predict the likelihood of a customer purchasing as some point in the future.
5. How to estimate the likely sales of a new product.
6. The need to manage customers as segments and not just managing products and brands.

A few of the lessons:

• How Should Firms Spend Their Marketing Budget?
• Moving to Data-Driven Marketing
• Data Driven-Marketing: Designing Marketing Experiments
• Marketing Experiment Example
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Forecasting Demand for New Consumer Goods: Assessor Model
• Predictive Analytics

Materials:

Data-Driven Marketing: The 15 Metrics Everyone in Marketing Should Know by Mark Jeffery, Kellogg School of Management ISBN 9780470504543.

Target Stores: The Hunt for “Unvolunteered Truths”: When analytics sent pregnancy-related coupons to a teenager’s home, knowing she was pregnant before her father did because of her shopping habits

Mountain Man Brewing Co.: Bringing the Brand to Light
Should this traditional “tough guy” beer brand introduce a light version?

Diamonds in the Data Mine : About Harrah’s Casino loyal customers. Interesting since the property was currently rebranded to Funner California.

Advertising Analytics 2.0 : Programmatic marketing

Competing on Customer Journeys

Uncovering the message from the mess of big data: Machine learning (LDA)

Philips Healthcare: Marketing the HealthSuite Digital Platform

Case Study: A company manufacturing ready-to-cook refrigerated pasta and sauce was thinking about starting to manufacture ready-to-cook refrigerated pizza crust. Will it be profitable?

Case Study: A group of individually branded hotels owned by the same company is considering changing one corporate brand instead. Is this a good decision?

Pricing Simulation: Universal Rental Car V2 – like a decision-making video game where you manage a car rental company and allocate cars and other variables between 3 locations over a period of time.

I started the online MBA program at Montclair State University in January 2017.