Short Course Description
The course setting: Companies must understand their business environment and stakeholders to create value and a competitive advantage to succeed. Understanding the market in which they operate, may help managers make informed, data-driven, decisions that tend to be objective and reliable, and avoid reliance on intuition, or choice heuristics.
The course goal: The main goal of this course is to provide individuals who may have their own venture and limited research budget with tools that will allow them to conduct basic research in order to understand their business environment, to test basic hypotheses, and to critically examine research findings. For larger businesses that hire the services of a market research firm, the knowledge and skills taught in this course will assist in understanding the company?s research needs, in choosing between different market research firm, and in identifying the best practices in market research. The knowledge you gain in Statistics will help you to analyze problems that you will encounter across business domains (accounting, finance, etc.).
How? The course will focus on both qualitative and quantitative aspects of market research, and how they help executives deal with managerial challenges such as: market segmentation, market potential assessment, forecasting, advertising and pricing policy development, and new product design and positioning.
To achieve these goals, the course will combine lectures, case studies, exercises, and guest lectures. The case studies will illustrate the application of the ideas learned in the real world. I expect you to arrive ready for these discussions. By doing the exercises you will gain practical experience dealing with real issues related to market research.
We will use Excel to analyze data.
Upon completion of the course, you will be able to:
1. Understand the basic tools available for systematic and integrative problem analysis.
2. Translate and synthesize managerial challenges into business research questions.
3. Critically evaluate market research, as well as its contribution and limitations.
4. Use statistics to analyze business related questions.
5. Lead and conduct the entire business research process: formulating the research question, planning the research, collecting data using various methods, analyzing data, and applying the findings to business-action.
Full Syllabus