Ultimately, the course provides students with strategic and analytical skills to:
1. Describe the implications of the digital revolution for business model formulation.
2. Develop a digital marketing program for a given organization.
3. Explain and work with the basic concepts of several methodologies (e.g. market response models, field experiments, observational studies) used to evaluate digital marketing actions.
4. Explain and understand the basic digital marketing concepts and methodologies published in the academic literature.
5. Select and apply a suitable method to address a specific digital marketing problem
6. Interpret the results of (own or prior) digital marketing research.
7. Report in writing about the solution to a digital marketing problem, and its managerial implications.

Marketing Intelligence is the practice of transforming marketing data into insights that describe the marketing mix and its impact on consumer behaviour. The goal of marketing intelligence is to understand market responses to marketing mix actions initiated by firms, and using these insights to improve strategic decisions. For example, understanding the effectiveness of various marketing channels can help firms decide how to allocate scarce budgets most efficiently. While the practice of marketing intelligence has been around for decades, the transformative impact that digitalization has had on the opportunities and possibilities to conduct marketing intelligence is unmistakable. Therefore, the course explicitly focuses on different digitally driven opportunities for marketing intelligence, and strongly emphasizes the new opportunities and challenges (e.g., measurabilty) that digital marketing offers. One noticeable impact of digitalization is the vastly increased amount of data available for evaluation of the effectiveness of marketing actions. Given the inherent digital nature of many marketing actions taken, it has become commonplace to evaluate the effectiveness thereof using market response models, field experiments and observational studies. A particular focus has been on causal analysis: How does a change in some marketing action X impact marketing outcome Y? Thus, this course will not only review the strategic implications that marketing intelligence insights have for businesses, but also equip students with the (statistical) tools to evaluate the causal effectiveness of marketing actions. To achieve this, students will get hands-on experience running statistical analyses during two assignments based on real-life data. The course is based on a set of readings from the academic literature in the marketing intelligence domain. Beyond the basic insights these readings provide with regard to successful marketing intelligence initiatives, they also provide an introduction to the academic literature on marketing modelling and causal methods. An explicit objective of this course therefore is also to become familiar and comfortable with this literature and type of analyses involved.

A set of readings from the academic literature will be made available to students.

This course is in transition for the master Business Research.
See the Master Education and Examination Regulations for more information.

The following rule applies to master Business Research students who started the programme prior to academic year 2024-2025.
TRANSITIONAL REGULATION (EBC4267):
The master Business Research has been discontinued.
Courses of the Business Research master’s programme will continue to be offered until and including academic year 2025-2026 with exam opportunities running until and including 2026-2027.