Objectives

Marketing as a management discipline is concerned with managing exchanges between buyers and sellers to achieve an organization’s objectives. It comprises developing a marketing strategy and implementing it with marketing actions to prompt a desired reaction from customers. This requires information about customers, competitors, the organization, and the external environment and an understanding of a market’s reaction to marketing actions. Marketing as an academic discipline is concerned with developing theories and methods and building models to provide this information using the disciplines of economics, operations research, psychology, sociology, and statistics.

The Marketing Science course has two related goals. The first goal is to learn how to develop knowledge and insights about markets, customers, and competitors by applying the scientific process. It teaches how to combine theories and models with relevant field, lab and survey data and appropriate analytical and statistical methods to make good marketing decisions. It addresses the following four interrelated challenges:

• Insight Analysis: How can we find customer problems? Are they real?
• Opportunity Analysis: Where could we compete? How could we win?
• Predictive Analysis: What action generates what likely reaction?
• Performance Analysis: What has happened? Who has reacted? How? Why?

The second goal is to learn the marketing research process to provide students with the skills to plan and conduct their own empirical investigation and prepare them for their master’s thesis in marketing. These skills include the ability to:

• formulate a marketing-relevant research question,
• carry out appropriate data analysis.
• conduct a systematic literature analysis,
• select proper research methods,
• draw samples and collect empirical data, and

The Marketing Science course complements the Strategic Marketing course with the former being more academic/analytic and the latter being more business oriented and applied.

Contents

The course uses different pedagogical approaches. Lectures and cases are used to introduce the analytic challenges behind designing, implementing and evaluating a marketing strategy for a brand or business unit. The lectures build on the readings from the assigned textbook and posted articles while the cases illustrate the managerial challenges and the application of methods and models in real-world settings.

Overview of sessions:

1. 22.09.2021: Marketing Science: What is it?
2. 29.09.2021: Sales Analysis: Understanding demand
3. 06.10.2021: Choice Analysis: Understanding customer choices
4. 13.10.2021: Funnel Analysis: Understanding customer decision process
5. 20.10.2021: Insight Analysis: Understanding customer needs
6. 27.10.2021: Segmentation: Understanding customer heterogeneity
7. 03.11.2021: Market Structure: Understanding the competitive landscape
8. 10.11.2021: Market Sizing: Forecasting new product sales
9. 17.11.2021: New Product Design: Measuring customer preferences
10. 24.11.2021: Pricing: Measuring customer willingness to pay (WTP)
11. 01.12.2021: ‘Marketing’: Activating customers
12. 08.12.2021: Controlling: Evaluating a marketing campaign
13. 15.12.2021: Research Presentations: Marketing in the digital environment
14. 22.12.2021: Summary: The value of information

The plan is to teach the course in presence of campus. However, if the situation demands it, the course may be moved online via Zoom. A hybrid model with classes and simultaneous Zoom-casting is not planned.

Moodle will be the communication channel for this course: Kindly make sure you register on Moodle before the course starts.

References

There are three different types of course material required for the course:

• Platform: Enginius from DecisionPro, Inc. Enginius is a simplified statistical packaged specifically designed for marketing research. It also includes access to the textbook as well as different cases along with their data. On Moodle you find a link to purchase a license.
• Textbook: Lilien GL, Rangaswamy A, De Bruyn A (2020), Principles of Marketing Engineering and Analytics (3rdEdition), DecisionPro, Inc. (included with Enginius license).
• Readings: Cases and articles to be discussed in class (will be provided on Moodle).

Pre-requisites

A basic understanding of both marketing and marketing research methods.

Evaluation

First attempt

Exam:

Written 2h00 hours

Documentation:

Allowed

Calculator:

Allowed

Evaluation:

The evaluation is based on three components:

• 55% open-book exam (individual)
• 35% case report and research presentation (group)
• 10% individual exercises (individual)

Retake

Exam:

Written 2h00 hours

Documentation:

Allowed

Calculator:

Allowed

Evaluation:

Retake exam: An insufficient individual component will be replaced by a written exam, comparable to the initial exam. An insufficient group component will be replaced by an oral exam.