Building a culture of business analytics: a marketing analytics exercise

The purpose of this paper is to describe how brief exercises in introductory and advanced marketing courses can help business students achieve a broader understanding of what Big data and data analytics mean in the workplace. These short analytics problems fit into the culture that we are building at our institution to create analytics cases for courses within our business curriculum.

A database of 1,500 customer reviews for a fictitious sporting company was created. Two exercises based on text mining and sentiment analysis were developed to be tested in introductory and advanced marketing course. Students were introduced to the basic concepts used in data analysis and the creation of R code for extracting sentiment words was demonstrated. Students then used pivot tables to identify patterns in the given data set. Students in the introductory course completed a short exercise while the students in the advanced class developed a detailed memo.

Results suggest that students in the introductory course are significantly more aware of the use of data in the industry as well as methods to deal with Big data after completing the exercise as compared to their knowledge at the beginning of the exercise. Students in the advanced course are able to identify patterns, detect shortcoming and propose strategic plans based on their analysis of the data.

Proposed exercises in the study are developed with an aim to help business schools develop a culture supportive of analytics. The purpose of these exercises is to make students aware of the importance of Big data and analytics early on in their curriculum and reinforce their exposure in an advanced course.