Notes On Marketing Experimentation

Excerpt from Notes on Marketing Experimentation The successful conduct of marketing operations requires good information about market behavior. Such information comes from many sources--from historical sales data, personal experiences, surveys, and various special studies. We shall here take up a specialized but valuable method of learning about the market, namely, experimentation. Principally, we shall consider experiments involving the active intervention in the market by a company to measure the effect on sales of variables under the company*s control. For example, quantities such as advertising, price, salesman's calls, packaging, and display might be varied to estimate their effect on sales. Presumably, once the sales effect is estimated, appropriate calculations will convert this into an effect on profit or other relevant measure of effectiveness. Although the discussion will focus on sales experiments, most of the principles discussed apply to any response variable. The term, experiment, will be used to imply a controlled comparison of alternatives. In other words, two or more experimental treatments are applied in a situation where the experimenter is able to decide which experimental units receive the treatment. Thus, an experiment might compare promotions A and B by using them in different sets of cities. The experimenter decides which city receives which treatment (probably doing this by a random process). A more passive approach is to analyze historical data in which marketing variables have varied in the normal course of company operations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from Notes on Marketing Experimentation If the change is drastic enough, say a price cut or the introduction of a new product, there are sometimes special opportunities for analysis. An example of this is Henderson and Brown's study of the effect of a promotional campaign on the sales of frozen orange juice. Although the analysis of historical data is often very valuable, experiments offer several special advantages. If you make an experimental change and observe an effect, it is frequently more convincing than if a change and an effect occur together in past data. In the latter case, you are likely to worry that a deeper mechanism may be causing both the change and the effect, since changes in marketing variables are usually made for some reason. A serious difficulty in econometric analyses is that the variables of interest may have substantial correlations with each other and with other explanatory variables. This may lead to instability in estimates of the important regression coefficients. In designing an experiment a deliberate effort is made to have small correlation among experimental variables and between them and other explanatory variables. Finally, of course, experiments can be directed at questions of immediate interest and can examine more different alternatives than would normally occur in regular Operations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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This book gives students, practitioners, and managers a set of practical and valuable tools for designing and analyzing experiments, emphasizing applications in marketing and service operations such as website design, direct mail campaigns, and in-store tests.

Don't fly blind. See how the power of experiments works for you. When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book. It guides you through best practices in business experimentation, illustrates how these practices work at leading companies, and answers some fundamental questions: What makes a good experiment? How do you test in online and brick-and-mortar businesses? In B2B and B2C? How do you build an experimentation culture? Also, best practice means running many experiments. Indeed, some hugely successful companies, such as Amazon, Booking.com, and Microsoft, run tens of thousands of controlled experiments annually, engaging millions of users. Thomke shows us how these and many other organizations prove that experimentation provides significant competitive advantage. How can managers create this capability at their own companies? Essential is developing an experimentation organization that prizes the science of testing and puts the discipline of experimentation at the center of its innovation process. While it once took companies years to develop the tools for such large-scale experiments, advances in technology have put these tools at the fingertips of almost any business professional. By combining the power of software and the rigor of controlled experiments, today's managers can make better decisions, create magical customer experiences, and generate big financial returns. Experimentation Works is your guidebook to a truly new way of thinking and innovating.

This is a book targeting actors in the field of marketing academic researchers, practitioners, market analysts, teachers and students with an interest in how customers are influenced by marketing. The main argument is that the experiment constitutes a powerful method for revealing the influence of various marketing activities. Basically, an experiment means that individuals are randomly allocated to groups, which receive different treatments, followed by a comparison of the groups reactions after the treatments. To conduct experiments along these lines, however, involves several choices and challenges, and the ambition with this book is to offer guidelines to experimenters who wish to come to terms with influence-related issues in a marketing context.