This course aims to introduce participants to data science and applications of big data analytics technologies for business decision support. It provides a helicopter view of the full data analytical cycle to the participants involving problem definition, data mining, modeling, data analysis and its application to business decision-making. Along the way, it will also equip the participants with most relevant tools and skills in each of the phases of the data analytic cycle. Although the course does not involve or require programming knowledge neither does it goes deep into technologies like in-memory databases, artificial intelligence and machine learning, owing to the technical nature of the subject, participants are expected to be willing to invest time in learning several supporting concepts and tools to make full sense of the discussed topics.

The primary objective of this course is to provide students with foundational knowledge and a basic skill set required for a market analyst. This course objective is aligned mainly with “Creative Management Foundation”, one of the SolBridge’s five mission-based goals. It is also supplemented by a variety of real-world examples used in class lectures.

The dramatic increase of computing power in conjunction with the availability of accurate customer data opens up a new avenue of applying sophisticated database marketing technologies to customer analysis in various industries. Accordingly, over the last few decades the marketing paradigm has shifted from a product-driven to a customer-driven marketing in which the unit of analysis is an individual customer. Given this new trend in marketing practice, this course forwards an up-to-date overview of customer-centric database marketing in practice in tandem with the fundamental concepts of database marketing. Students then will learn about how and why companies in the real world use database marketing to better manage the relationship with their customers