Business Development Analytics

Course goals

Learning objectives

At the end of the course, the student is able to:

• Understand relevant concepts, theories, and models to deal with common, practical business development and marketing problems. 
• Can apply and synthesize a number of models and metrics to solve problems in business development and marketing. 
• Can evaluate and work with a range of typical software packages available to conduct data analysis for managerial decisions.
• Understand the limitations of business development analytics and the importance of managerial judgement.

Content

Businesses are increasingly using (big) data as a cornerstone to make informed decisions. As such, the development of skills and expertise to harness the value of (big) data is in high demand. The aim of this course is to provide an analytical approach to business development and marketing. Common issues in the field will be introduced and elaborated uponin the lectures . To obtain practical knowledge to develop solutions to these issues, statistical methods, models, metrics, and different computer software packages are applied to inform managerial decision-making. The primary focus of the course will be on understanding customers, markets and consumer behavior. As such, application areas related to for example market segmentation, assessing customer value, , advertisingand sales forecasting. Individual data analysis exercises will serve as the base for utilizing a number of available software packages that are commonly used for business analytics and visualization (e.g., Excel, SPSS and Tableau) and introduce the students to new data analysis techniques that can be further implemented in the final assignment. The students are expected to draw inferences from multiple datasets and use them as a foundation to come up with a suitable research question that could further facilitate business development.

Assessment method
Project Proposal. This is worth 20% of the grade for the module. You will provide a short  (600-word) description and justification of your chosen marketing analytics research problem and selected method of investigation.
Individual Report. This is worth 80% of the grade for the module. The project will consist of a final report detailing your research problem, analysis and results. Write the document for a senior manager. Thus, they will be most interested in your research findings and their implications for business.

Entry requirements
Taking this course requires prior knowledge and skills with analyzing data. Students taking this course

• should be able to conduct basic data set cleaning procedures
• should be able to apply statistical software (e.g., Stata, SPSS) to generate descriptive statistics, statistical tests (t-test, chi-square) and regression analysis.
• are advised to have completed the Empirical Economics (USEMEE) course.

In case online access is required for this course and you are not in the position to buy the access code, you are advised to contact the course coordinator for an alternative solution. Please note that access codes are not re-usable meaning that codes from second hand books do not work, as well as access codes from books with a different ISBN . Separate or spare codes are usually not available.