Customer Analytics and Customer Insights

Marketing is about offering customers products that provide more value than competitors’ products. Firms must constantly focus on gaining and sustaining competitive advantages. Therefore, marketing has to ensure that firms develop and market superior products in the mind of consumers. Because consumer preferences for product offerings continuously change or evolve over time, firms have to engage in an ongoing process of delivering superior products to their customers or new customer groups. In this class, we will study core concepts and methods to better understand the firm’s actual and potential customers and their preferences. We will learn how to obtain quantitative measures and descriptions about customers and their perception of the market and estimate customer preferences for product characteristics of established and new products. Therefore, a large part of the classwork will focus on econometric and statistical tools to support firms in their marketing decisions. In particular, we will use the software R for statistical analysis and econometric modeling.