- Why Marketing Analytics?
- What Is in This Book?
- Organization of the Book
Organization of the Book
This book is a reflection of the authors’ experience of teaching graduate-level business students and executives, insights from academic research, and exposure to the practical aspects of marketing analytics through consulting engagements. The topics covered in this book represent the authors’ impressions of the analytics techniques that are widely used in practice. This book is not intended to be an exhaustive review of marketing analytics techniques, but instead is intended to provide you exposure to how marketing analytics relates to strategic business issues.
Resource allocation provides a strategic and unifying framework for the wide-ranging purposes of marketing analytics within an organization; we therefore build marketing analytics around the resource-allocation framework. You can view analytics as the engine that provides a forward-looking perspective for marketing dashboards. The chapters in this book are organized around primary marketing functions. Section II, “Product Analytics,” starts with analytics that relate to product management decisions, such as market segmentation and pricing. Section III, “Marketing-Mix Analytics,” then moves to media or marketing-mix management decisions where the focus is on obtaining reliable estimates for price and advertising elasticity. Customer lifetime value is then presented as an organizing framework for customer analytics in Section IV, “Customer Analytics.” Here you learn about tools to predict customer retention and profits. The emerging and popular field of analytics related to digital marketing is the focus of Section V, “Digital Analytics.” It introduces design of experiments, search engine marketing, and mobile marketing. The book concludes by revisiting resource allocation and ties the different analytics tools with a case study that deals with allocating marketing resources for cross-selling products. Section VI, “Resource Allocation Revisited,” then presents a forward-looking perspective on marketing analytics and provides an action plan for implementing marketing analytics in organizations and developing a learning organization that systematically includes insights gained from analytics in their strategic decisions.