Principles of Marketing Engineering and Analytics

The 21st century business environment demands more analysis and rigor in marketing decision making. And the business press is abuzz with the wonders of analytics. Increasingly, marketing decision making is becoming like design engineering— putting together concepts, data, analyses, and simulations to learn about the marketplace (analytics) and to design effective marketing plans (engineering). While many view traditional marketing as art and some view it as science, the new marketing increasingly looks like engineering (that is, combining art and science to solve specific problems). We offer an accessible overview of the most widely used marketing engineering and analytics concepts and tools and show how they drive the collection of the right data and information to perform the right analyses to make better marketing plans, better product designs, and better marketing decisions. We have designed this book primarily for the business school student or marketing manager, who, with minimal background and technical training, must understand and employ the basic tools and models associated with marketing engineering and analytics. The interested reader can go beyond the conceptual material in this book and learn how to apply these concepts using the software tools, cases and exercises available at www.DecisionPro.biz. That material, in concert with the descriptions here will both inform the reader and translate the concepts here into context-specific decisions and actions.