An information sheet for a little idea I have to get some Marketing Science going at the Otago Business School.

1. What is Marketing Science?
As with many concepts, “marketing science” defies precise definition. A few descriptions may help:
• Using the methods and paradigms of the physical sciences for marketing problems
(especially independent replication, and the primacy of empirical fact over theory, primacy
of experiment over observation)
• Using Data Science for Marketing problems
• Methods of marketing research that focus on actual customer behaviour, as opposed to
thoughts, feelings, intentions etc. (So: no questionnaires, focus groups, interviews etc.)
• Whatever the Marketing Science Institute or the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing
Science do
Some typical Marketing Science questions:
• Which creative execution works better, A or B? (And what is it about A vs. B? The colours?
The font? Humour? Sex appeal? Functional benefits? Social success?)
• What’s our ROI on marketing actions? (Which of our actions cause sales, and how much?)
• Can we predict which customers will churn or defect?
• Which of our sales leads are most likely to buy?
• Which of the metrics that we track actually matter?
How can the Otago Business School help with Marketing Science?
• Our students can spend six months to 1 year (Master of Business Data Science), 2 years
(Master of Commerce) or 3 years (PhD) of their lives thinking about your problem deeply,
and use the latest, state of the art, analytical methods, especially machine learning and
artificial intelligence. But you’ll have to supply the data, of course.
• Our faculty can take a similarly extended and deep approach to addressing your questions,
and recruit students to take an even deeper look.
• Students will graduate more job-ready, i.e. familiar with real business problems and
solutions
• An ongoing relationship with researchers allows addressing more strategic rather than
tactical issues, and allows a longitudinal and many-sets-of-data approach to research, as
opposed to one-off studies that have debatable generalisability.
It sounds too good to be true! What’s the catch?
• We want your money, of course. But only so we can work more closely with you, i.e. travel
from Dunedin to Auckland, and run one or two symposia per year for partners. If you can
fund all that in kind, you don’t need to give us anything!
• We also want to publish our analyses in academic journals. We’ll ensure you’re happy with
that, i.e. we won’t use real company names (unless you want us to), or any other way you
could be identified (e.g. NZ’s largest retailer of consumer electronics by volume)