What Marketing Analytics Skills Do We Want from an MBA Student? An Inquiry to Both Educators and Managers

• Activity Number: 563
• Type: Roundtables
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 7, 2013 : 12:30 PM to 1:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Marketing
• Author(s): Xiaojing Dong*+
• Companies: Santa Clara University

Abstract

Marketing has been traditionally a "soft" field. Recently, however, talents of analytical marketers are called for by the practices in various industries due to the proliferation of data and its great uncovered potential. In responses to that, MBA programs started to offer courses in marketing analytics, trying to fill the gap between marketing and statistical skills in analyzing business/customer data. As an instructor, I have recently developed this new course at Santa Clara University. It is a popular course by its name, but every student has his/her own expectations when registering the course. The biggest challenge to me was how to best balance the two important sets of skills that are trying to be put together: (1) understanding the marketing concepts and relevance of data in business decisionmaking; (2) capable of executing statistical analysis using relevant data analytics techniques. The proposed round able would like to invite academia and industry experts to discuss the best balance between these two skill sets in a marketing analytics course.