In late May 2023, Sarah Merino, the newly appointed manager of the Customer Insights group at Travelogo-an online travel booking platform-initiates a comprehensive analysis of clickstream data to understand the varied behaviors and needs of their users. In preparation for the upcoming marketing strategy meeting, Merino and her team delve into the extensive customer data collected by the platform as users search for flights, aiming to understand search patterns, trip characteristics, and clicking and purchasing behaviors. This deep dive is to identify distinct customer personas and actionable insights that will shape Travelogo's marketing strategies. The case provides students with a hands-on exploration of the fundamentals and benefits of customer segmentation, fostering an understanding of how to create detailed buying personas from complex data for strategic marketing purposes. Additionally, the case emphasizes the critical need for effective collaboration between decision-makers and data science teams, underscoring the importance of clear communication to ensure that data analytics are precisely aligned with business objectives, especially when crafting sophisticated strategies to engage and cater to a varied customer base with a deep understanding of their preferences.
What distinguishes people who consistently make smart, data-driven decisions? It's not just exceptional analytic skills. These decision-makers balance data, experience and intuition. The authors call this approach to decision-making Quantitative Intuition. 'QI' breaks the allure that an abundance of data is a crystal ball that leads to perfect decisions. They provide a set of tools to enable people to quickly interrogate and integrate data to make effective decisions.
To augment the growth of a restaurant's business, its owner began selling coupons on a New York City deals website. However, the owner wondered whether selling these steeply discounted coupons was a sound business decision. In this case, students are presented with a spreadsheet with 34 months of sales data and are asked to develop a regression model of sales as a function of key variables. This case is accompanied by a Solutions note that details the steps in developing a model of sales as a function of seasonality, a time trend, and current and past promotional activity.
Licensed foreign telecom operators in Myanmar were required to also provide mobile financial services (MFS). Due to a lack of trust in the banking sector, the government believed the adoption of MFS would boost financial inclusion in the country by enabling seamless money transfers, bill payments, and more. As they entered the MFS market, foreign telecom operators Ooredoo and Telenor grappled with fundamental questions that would determine their launch and customer acquisition strategies.
In June 2013 Ooredoo was awarded one of two telecommunication licenses to operate in Myanmar-where cellphone penetration was less than 10%. Less than 18 months later, Ooredoo launched voice and data services. This case includes information on the global telecom industry, focusing on services unique to developing countries, and asks students to consider how and when Ooredoo should launch mobile financial services in the country.
Apple Inc. sued Samsung Electronics for approximately $2 billion, contending that Samsung violated some of its patents by copying Apple's product features. Apple's expert witness team used a conjoint analysis in order to assign a value to the product features in question-thereby attempting to assess the magnitude of Apples' revenue loss as a result of the patent infringement. This case asks students to evaluate the design of this study as well as the pros and cons of its use in this context.
Apple Inc. sued Samsung Electronics for approximately $2 billion, contending that Samsung violated some of its patents by copying Apple's product features. Apple's expert witness team used a conjoint analysis in order to assign a value to the product features in question-thereby attempting to assess the magnitude of Apples' revenue loss as a result of the patent infringement. This case asks students to evaluate the design of this study as well as the pros and cons of its use in this context.
Companies have long struggled to get a handle on how consumers feel about brands and products in real time. Perceptual maps are often use to help visualize a product 's relationship to other products in the competitive arena, but the data referenced to build perceptual maps is often expensive to obtain or incomplete. This case introduces students to a new tool that mines and aggregates social media to support the development of more meaningful perceptual maps.
Marketing experts have long been frustrated by the limited number of tools available to measure the impact of communications campaigns. New tools are now being researched and tested that mine social media forums for information to track a campaign's efficacy. In this case, students will gain an understanding of this tool and its ability to measure the success of an advertising campaign launched to reposition the Cadillac brand.