"Marketing Engineering" - Digest 1

Marketing Engineering, Gary L. Lilien (Author), Arvind Rangaswamy (Author)
Bought in Amazon to prepare myself for possible interview for an marketing analyst position

Chapters read today. Chapter 5- strategy market analysis: conceptual framework and tools.

Thought 1: In simple English, think about big pictures before diving into data.Simple truth, but are not always reflected in actions. Big picture (in nowadays, is buzz word most of the time) here means corporate strategy, which might cover product innovation, markets to serve, personnel, R&D, and corporate image.

Thought 2: Rest of the chapter talks market forecasting, which totally makes sense because any manager focuses on pursuing big opportunity with limit resources. Here is the nice summary of classification of market forecasting approaches.

Judgmental	Market and survey analysis	Time series	Causal or correlational analysis
Sales-force composite Jury of executive opinion Delphi methods	Buyer intentions Product tests	Native methods Moving averages Exponential smoothing Box-Jenkins method	Regression analysis Economics models Input-output analysis MARMA

Digest 1: what method to use

• use structured methods rather than unstructured methods
• use quantitative methods rather than judgmental methods if enough data exist
• use causal methods rather extrapolation methods, especially if changes are expected to be large
• use simple methods unless substantial evidence exists that complexity helps
• match the forecasting method to the situation