Marketing modeling is the discipline of linking marketing decisions to output measures such as market shares and sales in order to assess the effectiveness of these decisions. The aim of the course is to introduce you to basic marketing modeling. The course has two main goals:
- Teach you how to read academic marketing modeling papers and acquire academic knowledge that is already collected using marketing modeling.
- Taking first steps in marketing modeling yourself.

The importance of the marketing department’s role in a firm has been decreasing over the past three decades. As a result, marketing issues are receiving less attention in the boardroom, marketing is often perceived as a cost rather than an investment, and the role of the chief marketing officer (CMO) is under a lot of pressure. One of the main reasons behind this unfortunate trend, is that, in contrast to number crunchers as CFO’s, marketing managers are often very little accountable. Indeed, a lot of marketing decisions are still made on the basis of gut feeling without a lot of hard support for the effectiveness of these decisions. Especially in tough economic times, this management style is under a lot of fire.

This is where the art of marketing modeling can come in usefully. Market response models are used to assess the impact of marketing decisions on output measures as sales and market share. Although this discipline already exists in academia for years, a lot of companies still not use marketing modeling, although a lot of data are usually readily available. This course teaches you how to read academic papers that use marketing modeling to assess the impact of marketing decisions, and will also learn you how to build a good (basic) market response model yourself. As a result, you will learn how to make marketing investments more accountable, which will improve your position as an (accountable) marketing manager.

A detailed literature list will be available on the Eleum site of the course

All students who are admitted to the Master of Science in International Business can follow this course. In the assignments, students will have to use regression analysis and SPSS. So a background and/or interest in learning regression analysis and SPSS is strongly recommended.