Nature and Role of Marketing Analysis (Byte Size Skills Course)

Nature and Role of Marketing Analysis The analysis of the market is an important part of any overall evaluation or implementation of a marketing strategy. The techniques employed by analysts can be used to assess the correct marketing mix, changing market structures, support or reject hypotheses that have been proposed and forecasting or estimating market potential, to name but a few. This course looks at the differences within data, the range of data that can be encountered in marketing analysis and some of the main techniques used in the evaluation of such data. A marketing analyst makes use of a wide selection of techniques from the quantitative methods in order to explain the market, forecast elements of the market and support management and corporate decision making. The course will examine techniques from the quantitative methods which find widest use in the analysis of markets, such as hypothesis testing, which can be used to examine data and statistics from samples with a view to supporting or rejecting assumptions about the market population. Regression and correlation will be examined as techniques that can be employed to assess the existence and strength of relationships within a market and also their use as a possible forecasting tool. Finally, an introduction will be made to a range of multivariate techniques, which have found widest use in marketing analysis in the analysis of data from questionnaires. It is quite common to link the multivariate methods to enrich analyses. The section covering these methods will make use of a case study to demonstrate this. Modern approaches to analysis make wide use of questionnaires to obtain primary data and computer software to analyse data. The first section of this course will therefore introduce different types of data and the approaches to coding data for analysis. There exists a wide range of statistical packages to analyse...