Many basic concepts of mathematics are used in everyday life. But you will also find that many Elementary and High School math concepts come in handy if you have chosen a career in marketing and market research. To give you a sneak peek into some of the concepts that are learned in school and applied in marketing later, consider some that we have put together. These are beyond the basic concepts like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, the application of which is fairly obvious.

1. Linear equations – While algebra may not entice you a lot with all the ‘x’ and ‘y’ variables, it is used to a large extent in everyday marketing. Whether it is plotting the sales of specific products and brands over a period of time or calculating the ROI of a campaign, if you have learned to solve linear equations in school and internalized them, you will not have to grapple with these calculations. While you may not use quadratic equations to a large extent, you will find that some complex situations may lead you into the use of simultaneous equations as well.
2. Percentage change – The most basic of all concepts and yet you will find that there are people who end up calculating the percentage change based on the wrong figure. Those who understand how to use the delta over the previous number and to convert it into a percentage do not have to struggle with calculating the increase in sales, revenues for a ‘year on year’ or a ‘percentage increase over last month analysis’. Calculating the CAGR (Compounded Average Growth Rate) also requires an understanding of percentage change in addition to interest calculations that are taught in high school.
3. Scales – For those in market research, a revision of the scale concept comes in handy when they have to devise and create scales. Only when you know about the nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio scales can you decide the right kind of analysis that can be performed on the data. For example, perceptual mapping requires that the data be captured in a nominal ‘yes/no’ or association data format. On the other hand, if the market researcher wants to use factor or cluster analysis, the data should have been gathered using an interval scale.
4. Statistics – One of the most used areas of mathematics in marketing and market research, concepts like statistical testing, hypothesis, probability and correlation and regression are used very often in analyzing data. T-tests and probability is used in assessing whether the response of one group is actually different from another group. Regression is one concept that is often used to understand the cause and effect relationship among various independent and dependent variables, like assessing the effect of salary, office environment, a good appraisal system, a friendly boss and other such attributes on overall commitment of employees.
5. Indices – Used less often but often in the development of models, indices and exponentials are often used to understand the growth patterns that are being observed in various parameters in marketing. This could apply to revenue, advertising spend or other data collected through primary research as well.

So before you start thinking about the futility of what you studied in school or have tots who question the relevance of the syllabus, remember these concepts and appreciate that you are using what you have learned.

To keep of the changes in marketing analytics, one needs to spare some time to self developmental activities so that the latest trends can be used for clients. Here is a list of 10 marketing analytics and market research blogs that you may want to subscribe to or at least visit regularly to keep up with the latest news in the industry. Each of these has something unique to offer and therefore the list should not be considered as a ranking.

1. Vault Analytics is a company that is dedicated to one of the most difficult aspects of marketing analytics, namely predictive analytics. The team of professionals offers a range of services that include creating an algorithm a specific marketing problem, contracting analysts and training employees to be able to use predictive analysis. Given that the company is involved in training people in the marketing analytics arena, their blog has extremely valuable tips and latest news about marketing analytics.

2. The Forrester Blog for Market Research Professionals covers a large variety of topics. Published by a company that is known for its expertise in market research and richness in secondary research, this blog can provide you valuable data on various niches, tickle your mind with new and emerging thoughts on models and helps you with various market research methodologies and industry trends too.

3. Research Live not only provides you with the latest trends in data gathering and analytics, it also keeps you abreast with the movements of research professionals. The blog is nicely divided into sections like the latest polls, young ones, media, research technology, social media and various cases of specific surveys that have been conducted on respondents with regards to market research itself.

4. For a complete rundown on almost anything that you may want to know about analytics starting from statistics and software to methodology and analysis, the Market Research World helps you get all the details that you may have otherwise missed out in your busy schedule.

5. The Google Analytics Blog is a great place to understand web analytics and the manner in which you can use the valuable data that you gather to understand your customer, segment the funnel and understand bounce rates, keywords and other interesting analytics information for the ecommerce guy or the Internet marketer.

With a large amount of completion in every industry, there is hardly anyone who does not keep a close watch on the basic financial parameters of a business. Some of the key parameters that every business measures include volume, revenue, profitability, investments, return on investment, volume growth, revenue growth, conversion rates or trial rations, retention and more. This aspect of the task takes care of the measuring and monitoring of the business parameters. Tracking these parameters over time gives the managers an idea of the progress of the business.

However, despite this level of analysis there is an element that is missing. While these reports help in understand the state of the business as it is, they do not provide any insight into what steps should be taken if the sales are low. Neither can these tell you the specific parameters to be changed so as to ensure better acceptance of the product or service in the marketplace. This aspect of managing these parameters can only be achieved if you know the factors that affect these parameters. Basically, you need to know the key factors that drive purchase to be able to ensure higher sales for your product.

What is Driver Analysis?
Key driver analysis is a statistical tool that uses multiple regression to identify the specific parameters of a product or a service that drive a particular action. Some of the questions that driver analysis answers are:

• What aspects of my restaurant business results in higher customer retention?
• What are the specific product features that lead to purchase?
• What are the specific areas that I can choose to ignore without losing out on my current clientele?
• Is recommendation for my brand occurring due to the product performance or service satisfaction?

The interesting aspect of key driver analysis is that you could use it to understand any of the variables that you need to understand. This means that you could understand what drives loyalty, purchase, repeat purchase, satisfaction or recommendation.

It is important to understand that direct questioning does not provide accurate results all the time. While some respondents are likely to give politically right responses, there are other issues too. Direct responses result in hygiene factors being confused as drivers. This is mainly because these are factors that are never really stating as ‘not important’.

How does Driver Analysis work?
Driver analysis should be used with care since inadequate understanding of the manner in which the statistical tool should be used can result in wrong deductions. It is extremely important to ensure that all the relevant parameters for the product or service are covered in the overall data collection. In addition to that the wording of the parameters is also important.

Driver analysis includes a dependent variable and various independent variables. The dependent variable is the aspect that you need to understand better. So when you want to check out the factors that drive purchase, the response to purchase become the dependent variable. Other variables that you have captured data on like performance on specific attributes can be considered to be independent variables. It is assumed here that these independent variables shall in some way drive the dependent variable. The whole idea is to understand the manner in which these factors drive purchase and the extent to which they do.

The key output of a driver analysis that uses regression models is a score out of a total of 100 indicating relative importance of each of the independent variables that have been tested. A table of importance that immediately allows you to understand the features and parameters that are truly important helps you in deciding where to focus your monies.

Benefits of Driver Analysis
The main benefit that key driver analysis lends for your business is an understanding of the factors that you need to tweak to make things turn. For example, an understanding of the features of a product that drive purchase can help you devise a communication strategy around the feature ensuring better sales. If you are concerned about customer retention for your business, driver analysis to understand the factors that drive retention can help you better service levels.

It is practically impossible to allocate funds towards improving all areas of product features or service in a business. Careful prioritization is essential. Driver analysis helps you prioritize the aspects that you need to concentrate on for short term and long term success.

Customer service professionals will tell us that each individual is different and therefore needs to be treated accordingly. While this is definitely true, retailers and marketing personnel cannot service this individuality when they are marketing mass products. Competition has made it necessary to ensure that your product is not a jack of all trades. Differentiated products for the specific needs of different kinds of people are a necessity today.

Market segmentation is a process that has helps in splitting and grouping customers into various clusters. The customers belonging to a single group are considered to be homogenous and comparable. A market segment is homogenous within and heterogeneous without. If the marketing segmentation has been carried out properly, a market segment is expected to react similarly to a market stimulus.

According to Philip Kotler, an effective marketing segmentation exercise should result in segments that are measurable, relevant, accessible, distinguishable and feasible. These are aspects that ensure that the marketing segmentation has been done on relevant parameters and that further action on these groups is practical.

Marketing segmentation helps marketers understand the otherwise extremely heterogeneous market so that the strategic and tactical marketing decisions can be taken in accordance with customer needs and desires.

Understand the market

At the first level marketing segmentation helps in a better understanding of the market in relation to the industry in question. When each individual is grouped, it is easy to understand the common characteristics of the group rather than assessing each individual customer (something that is quite impossible too) or treating everyone as a single group with similar needs and preferences.

Create product variations effectively

Once you have a certain number of groups that define your market, product variations can be launched depending on the specific needs of the group. So while those who treat a bath as a time to pamper themselves would buy soap with a moisturizer added in, those who feel that a bath is for cleansing may well prefer to have one that fights germs. An insight such as this can help you develop relevant products for specific people.

Perfect your positioning

Not only does marketing segmentation help in creating new products but it also aids in the creating of the appropriate positioning. The words used in the body copy and tag line of the advertisement can be modified based on the expected reaction of the targeted demographic too.

Create customer empathy

With targeted and more relevant products and positioning, the marketer can be sure to create an empathy with the customer; a bond that is difficult to break, thereby encouraging higher customer retention.

Identify need gaps

Conducted for exploratory research, marketing segmentation can allow you to identify need gaps in the market so that the research and development division can be given specific parameters to work with. Sometimes the gap identified can also be used for repositioning of an existing product.

Focus your resources

When the resources are limited, identification of the relevant market segments that are showing growth can be used to ensure that the budgets are allocated in an appropriate manner.

Targeted media selection

An understanding of the customers in each segment can help in better media selection, media scheduling

Using Cluster Analysis for Marketing Segmentation

Cluster analysis is a multivariate statistical tool that is used for marketing segmentation. It helps in identifying groups of people from the sample that have similar responses with respect to any of the parameters that are used for clustering.

Cluster analysis can use any data that has been collected to segment customers into various groups. Some of the broad parameters that can be used are:

• Behavioral parameters like purchase history, amount of product bought, product usage details, brand loyalty, shopping behavior and more.
• Attitudinal parameters that can be used in cluster analysis include (among others) reaction to various belief statements, likes and dislikes measured on a scale and general tendency towards innovation.
• Psychographic variables like lifestyle, values, personality and more can also be obtained using pre tested scales for the same. Customized ones can also be developed depending on the category.
• Demographic data is a key part of the analysis because irrespective of whether it is used in the cluster analysis and segmentation analysis or not, this data linked with each respondent helps in identifying the kind of target audience that you are looking to cater to.

With Mineful all that you need to do is the upload your database with the survey details and the clustering will be done with a few clicks. You can expect to get the specific clusters, cluster sizes, cluster naming and a detailed understanding of each of the clusters in terms of the relevant parameters. Not only will you get an understanding of each cluster but also the sketch of a typical customer in each group.

Most market research focuses on understanding customers — their wants and needs, their likes and dislikes. A relatively new tool takes a different approach. Instead of focusing on customers themselves, the buying process model studies the steps that customers go through in making a purchase. Buying process research attempts to identify steps in the process where problems occur, so that marketers can create strategies to overcome roadblocks.

The steps in the process
Most descriptions of the purchase process include five steps:

1. Problem recognition. The consumer identifies a problem that could be addressed by making a purchase. The problem could be anything from “My feet are killing me” to “I don’t have anything to wear.” In fact, the “problem” might not be a problem at all, just a response to a marketing stimulus, such as a billboard or a television ad.
2. Information gathering. The consumer collects information about products, including such things as price, availability, options, and features.
3. Evaluation of alternatives. The consumer weighs the pros and cons of each alternative. Decisions at this stage of the process may be affected by budgets, personal likes or dislikes, and recommendations from family or friends.
4. Purchase decision. The consumer commits to the purchase.
5. Post-purchase behavior. The consumer takes some action related to the product. A satisfied customer might tell friends about the product. A dissatisfied customer might experience buyer’s remorse and return the product.

Not every purchase will proceed through all five steps. For example, impulse buys might move directly from problem recognition (“I need that candy bar”) to purchase decision.
Some consumers might decide to drop out of the process at one of the steps. These are the decisions that are especially important for marketers to understand.

Identifying roadblocks
A well-designed survey can identify potential roadblocks at each step in the buying process. Consider this example: You operate a web-based business that sells engineering software. You want to understand the process that customers go through in deciding to purchase your products. You could create a survey with questions like these:

• What kinds of engineering projects do you typically undertake? (problem recognition)
• Where do you get most of your information about engineering software? (information gathering)
• Rank the following features in order of importance to you. (evaluation of alternatives)
• How would you rate the convenience of purchasing products through our website? (purchase decision)
• Would you recommend our products to other people in your field? (post-purchase behavior)

By studying the responses to these and other similar questions, you can discover where the “sticking points” are in the buying process, and make the necessary corrections.
As an alternative, if you suspected that most of the roadblocks to purchasing were concentrated in one step, you might focus most of your questions on that step.

Why focus on the process?
The main reason to use the buying process model, as opposed to more traditional types of consumer research, is that it provides a more sophisticated understanding of consumer behavior. The model gives marketers a new way of thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of their campaigns so that they can keep doing what’s working well and change what isn’t. In this respect, it helps provide a greater return on a company’s marketing investment.

Business analytics are turbocharging the engine of business intelligence. Traditionally, business intelligence involved collecting data and using it to answer some simple questions:

• What’s happening in the business?
• What’s working well?
• What problems are we having?

Business analytics go a few steps further. Using statistical business analysis, they answer questions like:

• Why are these things happening?
• Where are these trends headed?
• What are the likely results of our actions?

The answers to these questions can help guide decisions about everything from manufacturing to marketing.

Changing the Odds
The gaming industry offers a good example of how business analytics can turn the odds in a company’s favor. The big casinos collect data about customers from many sources on the casino floor itself. Player cards and slot machines are just a couple of examples. They also conduct surveys and gather data from call centers and online reservation systems. Harrah’s, which operates 26 casinos in 13 states, decided to use business analytics to put their data to work.

First the company used its player card system to discover who its best customers were. It found that 26% of gamblers generated 82% of revenue. It also found that these folks were not the typical “high rollers” that casinos have always courted. Instead they were people who spent modest amounts of money on a regular basis.

Then the company conducted some experiments, using business analytics, to determine what would motivate their best customers to spend more. It found that free chips worked better than free rooms or meals to prompt more spending. This surprised some company executives, who assumed that “comping” meals and rooms was the best way to increase gambling revenue. The company took this experiment one step further, using business analytics to design a three-tiered rewards program based on customer spending.

Harrah’s has had sixteen straight quarters of revenue growth, and company executives believe that business analytics are one of the main reasons for this success.

Business Analytics Become Affordable
At first business analytics were used mainly by large corporations that had the expertise and the budgets to make major investments in these powerful tools. Now, companies like Mineful are making analytical engines widely available to small and medium-size businesses as well.

Basically, analytics allow a business to use its data in new ways. For example, a chain of donut shops could use analytics to predict how opening an hour earlier would affect sales. A hotel chain could use analytics to predict how occupancy rates would be affected by offering a free breakfast. A home improvement store could apply analytics to survey results to determine why sales of appliances have declined.

Effective use of business analytics requires careful planning of the whole process, including:

• What data to collect.
• How to collect it.
• What questions to ask about the data.
• How to use the answers.

A well-planned effort in business analytics can generate a large return on a relatively small investment.

It’s one of the most basic laws of marketing: Your best source of additional business is your existing customers. But how do you keep them coming back? The key is customer satisfaction.

Marketers have always recognized the importance of customer satisfaction, but in the past it was a fuzzy concept, hard to measure and analyze. Fortunately, retail marketing software and analytics have made satisfaction metrics widely available to businesses large and small.
What marketers are finding is not surprising: There is a direct correlation between customer satisfaction and repeat business. In addition, satisfied customers come back more often and a more likely to move up to more expensive product offerings.

Measuring Satisfaction
The first step in measuring customer satisfaction is to create a survey. Drawing on your business knowledge and business analytics, develop a list of questions that address customer concerns. Customer satisfaction surveys typically use Likert-scale questions. Responses to a Likert-scale question typically range from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. For example, customers might be asked how strongly they agree or disagree with a statement like this: “The restrooms at Bob’s Burgers are well-maintained.”

Once you have surveyed a significant number of customers, you need to decide what do with your data. Survey responses will tell you what customers think about a range of specific issues, but how can you get a broader sense of what customer satisfaction means for you? A statistical tool called factor analysis can help you see the big picture.

Basically, factor analysis reveals relationships between survey questions, so that instead of considering thirty different specific issues, you can focus on four or five common themes. By grouping questions, factor analysis lets you see how specific issues come together to form a pattern. For example, factor analysis might group five questions that are all related to your facilities. If most people strongly disagree that you have adequate parking and they strongly disagree that your facilities are convenient, then you can get a sense of how you can improve customer satisfaction — expand your parking lot. This is an oversimplified example. A real factor analysis can give you a valuable picture of your strengths and weaknesses in terms of customer satisfaction.

The Big Picture
One widely used template for grouping responses to customer satisfaction surveys is the RATER model, which includes the following factors:

As a leader in online survey software, Mineful helps you use marketing technology to make better decisions for your business. We have the software, the services, and the people to help you keep your current customers and attract new ones.

Mineful Software — Market Research Results in Real Time
Our online survey software lets you see how well your business processes are working and how they can be changed to do a better job of meeting your customers’ needs. Once you decide on a change, our software helps you monitor your initiative to see if it is achieving the intended results.

This process works smoothly with a minimum of effort and expense. It’s easy to customize your data gathering and analysis to gain the specific business intelligence you need to make more informed decisions. You don’t need to hire expensive market research consultants and wait for their reports. You can conduct your own analysis in real time and put your findings to work right away.

In simple terms, Mineful lets you do more with less. Since it is a web-based tool, you can skip the expense of installing, maintaining, and updating someone else’s software. Mineful’s well-designed interface is intuitive and easy to use. You can try it out for free before you subscribe.
Mineful makes the power of marketing technology available throughout your business. You can set different permissions for different users. It’s easy for users to collaborate and share the results of their analyses. Users can choose from a variety of powerful analytics, such as frequency distributions, cross tabs, and correlations. Reports are available in real time, so it’s easy to keep in touch with what customers are thinking.

Keeping in touch with people — maintaining relationships — is what surveys are all about. Improving customer relationships is the key to improving business performance.

Mineful Services — A Tech Savvy Team Working for You
Market research consultants can be prohibitively expensive, especially for small and mid-sized businesses. And too often they take a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t respond to your particular needs. Large companies can afford to hire tech-savvy employees to gather and analyze survey results, but for most businesses this is just not feasible.

Mineful offers a powerful and affordable alternative to hiring outside consultants or additional staff. For the cost of less than one employee, we can provide you with the technology and analytics you need to keep in touch with what your customers want and need. Our Strategic and Analytical Services team can help you define, develop, or redesign a successful program quickly and economically. We take a simple but effective approach to this task: set clear objectives up front, design a program to meet these objectives, and then test and learn.

Mineful People — Smart, Dedicated, and Experienced Professionals
Our staff have many years of experience in statistics, survey methods, and market research, enabling us to tackle even the most complex projects in marketing technology. We not only perform advanced analytics, but we communicate the results in an understandable, visually effective way. Our worldwide customer base includes Allstate, the American Society of Clinical Pathologists, KWT, MediaBank, and the Chicago public schools.

We have the resources — the software, the services, and the people — to help you keep in touch with your customers and gain a greater understanding of their wants needs.

Market research reports and customer satisfaction surveys provide truckloads of valuable data. The challenge for marketers is to make sense of it all and present their analysis in a clear, useful way. Dashboard reports help marketers meet this challenge. They provide simplified data analysis that allows decision makers to see at a glance what’s working and what needs to be changed.

Dashboards Display Key Indicators
The dashboard in a car allows the driver to see at a glance key indicators such as speed, RPMs, and engine temperature. The dashboard in a management information system works the same way. Any organization collects an enormous amount of data. The problem is that all this valuable information is not easily available to the people who need to use it — the people in the driver’s seat.

Dashboard reports provide key indicators that show how well an organization is functioning. Specialized dashboards have been developed for all sorts of business operations, everything from sales to security. They are especially useful for data-intensive operations such as survey analysis and market research.

Here’s how they work. Programmers use efficient software tools, such as those developed by Mineful, to create customized displays of data gathered from customer satisfaction surveys or market research reports. These displays might include bar graphs, pie charts, or other visual representations that are easy to interpret. Different displays can be created for different types of users. For example, high-level executives might see a summary of customer satisfaction data for different parts of the business, while product managers might see results just for their own operations.

Key Features
Dashboards are showing up on more and more desktops because they offer a number of valuable features. For example:

Social networking sites such as Facebook have given marketers a new approach to Internet advertising — something called viral marketing. Viral marketing is really just a high-tech form of word of mouth advertising. Here’s how it works.

Suppose you own a bakery. You have lots of loyal customers, but, like any business owner, you would like to have more. You create a free page on Facebook describing your business, and you update it frequently with news about special promotions or new product offerings. You encourage your customers to visit your page and become “fans” of it. When they do, you can send them automated updates, and they can visit your page with just one click from their Facebook accounts. To increase traffic to your page, you might decide to buy targeted ads on Facebook.

So far this approach is rather conventional. It is really no different from the way businesses have used the Internet for a number of years. But something else happens when people become fans of your Facebook page: the name of your business is added to their personal profile. Now all their Facebook friends see that they are fans of your business. Some of them become fans, and the process (you hope) just goes on and on. This is the essence of viral marketing: encouraging people to pass on a marketing message to others. If your message is appealing, it has the potential to spread exponentially throughout your community and beyond.

Facebook has actually taken the concept of viral marketing one step further. Suppose you decide to run a Facebook ad targeted to everyone in your local area. Suppose, also, that you have a Facebook page with 100 fans, and each one of those fans has 50 Facebook “friends.” When those friends see your ad, it will say something like this: “Sample our delicious baked goods. Your friend Adam Smith is a fan.”

Clearly the potential for viral marketing is enormous, but how do you measure its effectiveness? Earlier approaches to Internet marketing used some traditional methods of measuring how well an ad worked. For example, each ad might have a unique 800 phone number for responses. Or each ad might have a link to a coded discount coupon that customers could print out or use online. But these traditional methods don’t lend themselves to social media marketing.
Marketers have developed new approaches to measuring the effectiveness of a social media campaign. They measure such things as: