- Why Marketing Analytics?
- What Is in This Book?
- Organization of the Book
What Is in This Book?
This book functions as a how-to guide on practical and sensible marketing analytics. It focuses on the application of analytics for strategic decision making in marketing and presents analytics as the engine that provides a forward-looking and predictive perspective for marketing dashboards. The emphasis is on connecting marketing inputs to customer behavior and then using the predictive models (developed using historic information, experiments, or heuristics) to develop forward-looking, what-if scenarios.
After reading this book, you will be able to (1) understand the importance of marketing analytics for forward-looking and systematic allocation of marketing resources; (2) know how to use analytics to develop predictive marketing dashboards for an organization; (3) understand the biases inherent to analytics that derive from secondary data, the cost-benefit trade-offs in analytics, and the balance between analysis and intuition; and (4) learn how to conduct data analysis through linear regression, logistic regression, or cluster analysis to address strategic marketing challenges.
This text places a big emphasis on practical guidance and striking the right balance between technical sophistication and managerial relevance. This is accomplished by real-life cases and real-life data connected to the cases that allow you to take a hands-on approach to the analysis. The book emphasizes all three aspects of marketing analytics: statistical analysis, experiments, and managerial intuition. The website http://dmanalytics.org provides videos on implementing the analytics techniques discussed in this book using commonly available statistical analysis software.
This book emphasizes that (1) analytics needs to support broader strategy; (2) inferences are inherently biased by available data, information, and techniques; (3) managers constantly make cost-benefit trade-offs in analytics; and (4) not every strategic question is answered by analytics—smart managers know to balance analysis and intuition.