The future of Marketing & Marketing Analytics

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##   Course wrap-up - The future of Marketing - Fall 2020
##        by Dr. Jimmy Zhenning Xu, 
##    follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/MKTJimmyxu
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Note

This course wrap-up is designed for both the Intro to Marketing and the Marketing Research courses. If you would like to learn R, please see the references I listed at the end of this course wrap-up.

I had a great pleasure to have you this past semester. You all have inspired me in so many ways, that’s why I decided to wrap up the course and summarize our topics in a blog post. Thank you for reading it. If you liked the article, you can follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/MKTJimmyxu) for the updates!

As a lead marketing practitioner, I help small businesses that need help. Usually, there are people who have a lot of ideas or opinions, but they don’t always have enough expertise. I help them by suggesting the best way of achieving what they need using the newest marketing technologies. I try to be on top of everything related to marketing analytics. You may first beging to ask yourself “do we actually need a model?”. Intuitively, it may turn out that we can solve a problem with a simple heuristic. However, the following wrap-up is not written for those of you who are looking for simple heuristics.

To summarize, we covered a variety of topics, including:

The work I have done with many of my previous colleagues and students

How kind of marketing tools or technologies can be used to improve your performance

What does a lead marketing practitioner do

How to become better at using different marketing principles and models What is a full-stack marketing manager

What motivated me to write technical blogs in marketing analytics Let’s start!

We use marketing extensively across many areas. One of the most important applications is digital marketing: we would like to use digital technologies to improve performance and optimize company growth by efficientlly matching consumers with their desired products and services. To do it better, we analyze customers, markets, and products and services and determine the best marketing mix (or the 4ps of Marketing).

Many of our marketing services rely on analytics and (hidden) AI applications (or algorithms), but with a load of billions of social media posts and more than 10 million images per day, serving the right customers with the right offerings at the right time is nearly impossible. One of the projects I worked on the past few years was building a repository for serving different marketing models (aka my technical repository:https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx). It took some time to get everything right, but now we can deploy many analytics or AI models in a matter of seconds instead of hours or days. You can read more about my projects in my technical repository:https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx.

Invaluable skills you all should develop now

Best cool jobs ever!!!The job market in the analytics industry is still booming during the pandemic. See the following new job post available for analytics professionals. For those of you who have taken the Marketing Research course, you might want to check out the following job posts available at Stackoverflow:

There were about 5000 high-paying jobs launched during the first two weeks of November 2020: https://stackoverflow.com/jobs. About 1000 of these jobs require some marketing skills. See the following sample job post from Morgan Chase (https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?id=462693)

Product Analyst II - Pricing and Analytics - Consumer:

• Ability to extract big data information directly from a corporate data warehouse ranging from aggregate to account level

Qualifications

• Confident oral and written presentation skills in dealing with Senior Management

• Demonstrated ability to develop solutions to highly complex and diverse problems

• 3-5 years in a similar role including Product Management, Marketing Analytics, or Data/Analytics reporting and/or Master’s degree in related field (MBA, MS Economics, or Analytics/Statistics)

• Advanced skills in database tools such as SAS (or SQL processing), Teradata SQL Assistant, Brio, R, Python, UNIX, etc.

• Advanced skills in Excel (with the ability to easily create Pivot tables, array formulas, and visualizations)

• Highly self-motivated individual with a strong solutions orientation

• Interpersonal skills - ability to cultivate and build strong relationships with peers and senior executives

• Ability to extract big data information directly from a corporate data warehouse ranging from aggregate to account level

According to a job post created on 4/30, Dynatrace is hiring a performance Analyst position in Fresno, CA - Who can bring business and technical people together? Requirement - Experience with tools: Google #Analytics, Adobe, Advanced Excel, #Tableau, SPSS, R, etc. BA/BS in marketing, stats, econ, etc.

https://twitter.com/MKTJimmyxu/status/1256584040674521088

In particular, this compnay is looking for candidates who have strong analytics and marketing research skills.

Even during this pandemic, there are about 200 new jobs every day for professionals who have skills in R (or Python) programming, analytics, and dashboard development, etc. You might want to explore the following job opennings which were made available during the pandemic if you have some cool skills like how to develop Shiny dashboards:

https://www.google.com/search?q=r+programming&rlz=1C1GCEJ_enUS866US866&oq=Jobs,+jobs,+and+&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l7.802j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&ibp=htl;jobs&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjus9rE4pXpAhWCHM0KHUSyD38Qp4wCMAB6BAgOEAE#sxsrf=ALeKk02C-9xB73mbdBYaE2EPg0NVek26Vg:1588442795786&htivrt=jobs&htidocid=bd3Z-jLtPLk91pm_AAAAAA%3D%3D&fpstate=tldetail

https://www.glassdoor.com/Job/r-and-shiny-developer-jobs-SRCH_KO0,21.htm

This PWC blog article probably tells you something about what is happenning in the analytics industry now and in the future.

https://www.pwc.com/us/en/library/data-science-and-analytics.html

These two gentlemen have a good understanding about the combination of AI and marketing: the future is here: Artificial Intelligence and Marketing: The Future Is Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XfvBb2L01Q

If you would like to learn R programming or develop skills in analytics, please contact me since I will be developing a few courses for the upcoming academic year.

10 Key takeaways in this wrap-up

Over one hundred years ago, John Wanamaker said, “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Can we really measure ROMI? That is actually a complex question unless we could measure people’s emotions accuratelly. Let’s start with some fundamentals.

This tutorial gives you an intuitive understanding of advertising and ROI

https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/abtesting

Avocado pricing at retail

Imagine you are working for an avocado producer in Kern County. I guarantee that you cannot wait to read the pricing worksheet I uploaded to week 15 and the pricing project repository I made available recently: https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/retailpricing. Based on the real-world data offered by the Hass Avocado Board, this repository will give a brief on the price of avocados in the US market.

Pricing is a revenue generator, most other marketing activities are costs Pricing’s impact on profitability is often more significant and more immediate than the impact of other elements of the marketing mix. Dynamic pricing is becoming the golden standard in many industries.

SEO, advertising, Communication, and NLP

Tipping point - The challenge for the marketer is to encourage the adoption of a product by early adopters and the early majority in order to reach that tipping point.

SEO & Advertising - How you say it can be as important as what you say. Think about the SEO and Google Ads tutorials we covered during the semester. A simple “title tag” could mean a lot to a business or organization. Do you agree? Why? See the first section of this tutorial:

https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/seobasics

Just in case you are interested in Google Analytics, I will usually introduce this topic in a upper level course:

https://marketingstatistics.wordpress.com/using-google-analytics-apis-and-r-for-automated-analysis-a-real-world-case-study/

We introduced a simple example of what NLP means for marketing communication and advertising (i.e., https://forms.gle/h9gzLMsHvkAu69W49). Just in case you are interested in NLP applications in marketing, you might want to visit this NLP app I recently designed:

https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/nlpapp

Additional readings:

5-Question Chatbot Session with Marketing Professor, Zhenning Xu https://www.introspectivesystems.com/5-question-chatbot-session-marketing-professor-zhenning-xu/

R-Shiny - probably your next adventure

Shiny is a Package available in R that allows you to build interactive web apps with real-time insights powered by data. Making marketing dashboard helps businesses make insights out of the existing data.

You might want to read the following example about developing a shinyapp for Bike Sharing Llc. With this app, a company could target different customers with different campaigns.

https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/big_data_and_business_intelligence/9781785280252/8/ch08lvl1sec43/creating-a-marketing-campaign-shiny-app

The following Shiny Apps are some Apps I designed recently. Have fun exploring.

https://utjimmyx.shinyapps.io/ShinyBCLiquor

https://utjimmyx.shinyapps.io/06_tabsets

Always think “Integrated Marketing Strategy” supported by data-driven evidences

I hosted a workshop on geo-targeting for my students last year. The workshop was about analyzing your AdWords Geographic report using Tableau. I would like to share this tutorial online for those of you who would like to learn this for fun. Read my blog article here: https://marketingstatistics.wordpress.com/analyzing-your-adwords-geographic-report-using-tableau/

Competitive Positioning

Integrated answer to: For whom am I? Who am I? Why buy me? and not the competition?

Positioning is not what you do to the product but what you do to the mind of the consumer!

See the following example:https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/perceptual-mapping

Perceptual mapping = positioning in the mind of the consumer

Perceptual maps are about “How our product is perceived by consumers relative to competition?” Link Segmentation, targeting, and Positioning. Two primary methods: Attribute rating and Factor Analysis, Similarity ratings, correspondence analysis, and multidimensional scaling See the following example:https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/perceptual-mapping

The importance of experimental design (AB testing), conjoint analysis, and data-driven decision-making

Now is the time for you to go back to the marketing topics we introduced during the semester. Some topics will probably mean a lot if you would like to work in the service industry or analytics industry.

The job market in the analytics industry is still booming during the pandemic. See the following new job post available for analytics professionals.

Dynatrace is hiring a performance Analyst position in Fresno, CA - Who can bring business and technical people together? Requirement - Experience with tools: Google #Analytics, Adobe, Advanced Excel, #Tableau, SPSS, R, etc. BA/BS in marketing, stats, econ, etc.

https://twitter.com/MKTJimmyxu/status/1256584040674521088

In particular, this business is looking for candidates who have strong analytics and marketing research skills. You probably learned about hypothesis development this semester. Now is the time for you to see how you could design new products and campaigns with action-driven hypotheses and experiments. You might want to visit the following tutorials I designed for the research & anaytics course:

https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/conjoint https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/abtesting

The idea of experimental design was introduced in the 1880s by several statisticians. The idea of conjoint analysis is introduced in the 1960s by a group of psychologists. Successful branding creates a “virtuous cycle” with data-driven solutions. That said, more and more brands and marketers are constantly using experiments and research-based ideas to launch new products, services, and advertising campaigns.

Marketing companies like Hypothesis.co, Optimizely.com, and CrazyEggs.com among others deliver experimental-based solutions with experimental design principles, data-driven thoughts, and AI technologies.
https://twitter.com/crazyegg https://help.optimizely.com/Ideate_and_Hypothesize/Design_an_effective_hypothesis https://www.hypothesis.co/

“One of the greatest minds in 20th Century statistics was not a scholar. He brewed beer.”

“Guinness brewer William S. Gosset’s work is responsible for inspiring the concept of statistical significance, industrial quality control, efficient design of experiments and, not least of all, consistently great tasting beer.”

Reference - https://priceonomics.com/the-guinness-brewer-who-revolutionized-statistics/

You might want to read this article if you would like to dig deeper: Conjoint Analysis is the real thing - from a Nobel prize winner http://ow.ly/suZGC

Product line design integrates pricing, product and segmentation

Identify the attributes/features that are highly valued by some customer segments yet are of little importance to other customer segments. Factor analysis is a statistical method used to identify variations among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower set of unobserved factors or dimensions. Marketers often have many variables (and therefore many dimensions) and it is helpful to examine the top dimensions or factors from a marketing dataset. In particular, marketers might be interested in customer services, product attributes, and service attributes among others. Checkout my technical article about factor analysis: ttps://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/Factoranalysis

Going to Market (placement - Google Maps, SouceMap, Amazon, eye tracking, apps, APIs, Geo-fencing, etc.):

Channel coordination is important for efficient retailer behavior. Channel decisions go hand in hand with the other elements of the marketing mix.

In the 4th Mini-project, you probably dabbled in the Geo-marketing field and explored different layers of information you could lay out on a Google Map. You might want to revisit the following case report I designed recently using the help you understand how Dunkin’ Donuts Inc choose their store locations:

https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/geomarketingbasics

If you would like to learn how to build custom dashboards for a business, you might want to visit my teaching blog on Tableau dashboard design: https://public.tableau.com/profile/zhenning.xu#!/

Dashboard Design

What type of online dashboard will work best for your data? If you would like to check out some dashboard design examples, you can find my recent Rpubs pages here:https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/NBA https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/Flexdashboard

People are important

“Marketing at Google starts with technology and ends with the user, bringing both together in unconventional ways.” - Google, 2018

The following is an adapted framework for marketing analytics in 2020. How everything has changed over the last decade?

See the original framework developed by Professor Iyer from UC Berkeley here:faculty.haas.berkeley.edu › giyer › ewmbafall09 › wrapup

Alt text

5 primary challenges and opportunities

Bridge the gap between data and actionable strategies.

Most businesses are sitting on a mountain of data already.

Although most marketing decisions are made based on intuition or heuristics, marketing is becoming more analytical or data-driven and more focused on digital marketing. That said, marketers should try to answer the formulated marketing questions based on data-driven solutions. You might want to checkout this technical article: https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/reproducible-research

Digital marketing and analytics is more and more important

You might want to checkout this technical article: https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/facebookads. The goals of the analysis is to identify which factors have the direct impact on the ad campaign, compare how the various ad campaigns are performing with respect to different companies, quantify how conversion rate varies with age, gender or interest, identify segments with high and low cost per acquisition and how segment the audience based on click through rates conversion rates, and predict conversion rates for each possible age/gender/interest segment.

https://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/llbean-rebrands-digital-direct-mail/309798

https://www.chiefmarketer.com/how-l-l-bean-mastered-a-sophisticated-measurement-strategy/

The value of business analytics http://analytics-magazine.org/the-value-of-business-analytics/ Why is Data Analysis Important In Business? https://www.getsmarter.com/career-advice/industry-advice/data-analysis-important-business Learn Data Analysis, A Beginner’s Guide https://ofdollarsanddata.com/i-have-always-been-a-big-fan-of-teaching-and-mentoring-and-this-is-my-attempt-at-making-a-short-44e6afcf8ac9

How to slice & dice my data?

You might want to checkout this technical article: https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/promotion_attendance. It is tough to make good predictions. The numerous factors or variables, independent and dependent, involved in many sporting events contribute to the unpredictability. However, using carefully-selected variables, it is still possible to make marketing promotions more accountable.

Google Trends, Google Correlate (https://www.google.com/trends/correlate), SEO (e.g. Moz.com), social network analysis, sentiment analysis (Voyant Tools, https://voyant-tools.org/), and Facebook crawling are useful and easy-to-use tools for marketing analytics. We have covered some of these non-programming tools this semester. They are all point-and-click tools with popular quick-start guide available on YouTube.

Fusion (data fusion->information fusion->knowledge fusion)

You can combine insights from Facebook with Google Analytics or other marketing channels. Using them together, you can see exactly what’s happening on your fan page AND your website! It’s a super combo!

You might want to checkout this technical article: https://marketingstatistics.wordpress.com/using-google-analytics-apis-and-r-for-automated-analysis-a-real-world-case-study/

This is a case study and a case study on how to use R to directly connect to and analyze data from Google Analytics using the Google Analytics API and the new “googleAnalyticsR” package.

Digital skills like effective data visualization and storytelling with data are important for the current workforce

Seeing patterns and creating beauty - data visualization has become an art form. According to Stikeleather (2013), an excellent visualization expresses “complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision and efficiency” and also tells a story through the graphical depiction of statistical information.

Tableau is a visual analytics engine that makes it easier to create interactive visual analytics in the form of dashboards. These dashboards help decision makers make real-time decisions.

You might want to checkout the following technical articles: https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/nlp-unigram https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/conjoint

Now what?

Having a growth mindset - The digital landscape is moving at lightning speed.Knowing how to learn is more important than knowing what to learn!

The value of grey thinking - There are very few black and white answers. How many times did you see the shades of grey this semester?

Find your niche - You cannot be everything to everybody. Be of use to 1 person and other similar ones will follow.

Are you a storyteller or data nerd?

90:10 rule - Do one thing really well; Focus on one thing/one platform/one niche/one strength and allocate 90% of your efforts; experiment with other projects/platforms/categories for the remaining 10%.

Enjoy what you do and do it well - http://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/scrapping

Some recent Tweets on marketing analytics I posted recently:

Cannot agree more with @seosteve about the four insights he shared at the @StukentApp networking panel today: 1) #SEO, #AI, and #Analytics will be the future for small businesses. 2)#AI powered platforms will be widely used for appointment booking, service inquiry, analytics, etc 3) Voice search will change digital marketing fundamentally. 4) Business students should learn more algorithms (e.g., Google’s newest search algorithm, BERT) and programming (R, Python, etc.) skills. What a small world! @seosteve is a partner with @randfish, the founder of @moz.

“A performance Analyst position in Fresno, CA - Who can bring business and technical people together? Requirement - Experience with tools: Google #Analytics, Adobe, Advanced Excel, #Tableau, SPSS, R, etc. BA/BS in marketing, stats, econ, etc: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1842635410/ [linkedin.com].”

“While #unemployment spikes during the #coronavirus #covid19 #pademic, there are many new #jobs available in the #tech industry. #Tesla is hiring supply chain specialists with expertise and hard skills in #supplychain, #rprogramming, #datascience & #stats”

“According to @HalConick (https://ama.org/marketing-news/the-past-present-and-future-of-ai-in-marketing/), #AI might soon dominate marketing. With the ever-increasing demand for talents in marketing & #AI, universities rush to launch programs in marketing #analytics -https://www.mastersindatascience.org/careers/marketing-analyst/ [mastersindatascience.org]”

“The most eye-opening program in marketing is probably the world’s 1st #transdisciplinary degree program in Computer Science & Advertising at the Uni of Illinois: http://catalog.illinois.edu/undergraduate/eng_media/computer-science-advertising-bs/. This new program is designed to educate #advertising students with #CS skills. #AI #Analytics”

"When I started explaining #AI years ago to my friends, they often asked me why it matters. Glad to see that some of my brilliant students were hired by tech companies like @WEXIncNews & #Idexx. According to #tableau and #adobe, #AI is fundamentally changing how we do #marketing

Agenda for you:

Write down two things that you have learnt in this course that you believe will be relevant in your work and which you think you will be applying in your job over the next two years.

Draw a mind map - write keywords on a scratch paper and then organize them.

True or false - successful marketers are usually good at creative desgn and communication, but are not good with numbers and statistics.

Why LinkedIn?

Employers now use LinkedIn to contact potential qualified candidates!!! It is time to build your professional hub!

The focus of having a LinkedIn profile is to be found; to make that happen it is important that your LinkedIn profile is keyword rich to support your geographic location, industry and profession.

Share your insights with me (@MKTJimmyxu) on Twitter or following me on LinkedIn