Ishaq Ali

BBA203033
Section 3

BUS-M 528 CRM and Digital Analytics

This course is designed to meet the increasing demands from the industry
and recruiters for the application of quantitative and analytical skills to
support sophisticated marketing decision making. The content of the
course is based on cutting-edge research in optimization and interactive
marketing to study customer relationship management. The goal is to
apply optimization tools to derive analytical solutions to more customized
and proactive marketing decisions, such as relationship pricing, promotion
and inventory management, cross-selling campaigns and service
allocation. The students learn how to make state-of-the-art marketing
strategies and relevant analytical techniques that can be used to support
these decisions. We aim to package the hard core strength of our students
(quantitative techniques) in appealing and attractive business applications
(relationship marketing). This course meets the imperative demands from
the industry and enhances the comparative advantages of our MBA
students.

This course is based on four case studies designed to give students

the opportunity to analyze real-world marketing problems. The
course provides students with the opportunity to practice problem
formulation, develop problem solving and communication skills and
to enhance their understanding of institutional knowledge of some
emerging industries. The focus on real-world case studies gives
students a better appreciation of the value of the analytical
marketing tools in solving day-to-day marketing decisions. This
course introduces the students to recent marketing practices such
as:

 Customer relationship management

 Customer-centric marketing
 Proactive marketing and customer lifetime value analysis
 One-on-one interactive and dynamic marketing intervention
 Firm learning and analytical decision making

This course will be a combination of lectures and case consulting

projects. We invite students to work as consulting teams and work
out analytical solutions for a variety of marketing problems. We
believe that this format will highly motivate and involve the
students. This setup also allows us to help students improve their
institutional knowledge as well as professional presentation skill.
The marketing decisions addressed by our case projects are as
follows.

 Optimal design of two-parts pricing (which is increasingly adopted by software,

service, and subscription industries)
 Win-back strategies
 Cross-selling campaign management
 Optimal allocation of service channels

These examples are used to illustrate some basic optimization

primitives used in marketing including the following.

 Using regression analysis to predict consumption.

 Using discrete choice models based on the logistic function and estimating its
parameters using the Maximum Likelihood method.
 Setting up and solving the basic optimization decision problem for a firm.
 Employing the latent class approach to segmentation in marketing.
 Incorporating learning effects into optimization models using observed parameters
such as consumption and consumer reactions to firm actions.
 Adaptive learning of latent customer segments using a Bayesian update framework.
 Use of dynamic programming on a time-discounted utility model reflecting customer
lifetime values to solve the optimization model for the firm.

The case projects we assign are real world marketing problems, for which
the industries have turned to the instructor for business solutions. We
created slightly simplified version of these real business problems for
students to work as projects. In this way, we have created a consulting
experience for our students.