Database Marketing: A New Semester

I am going to blog here about database marketing and on our NING social network for Marketing Technology. We began with a simple exercise called PC's unlmited to familiarize or refamiliarize the class with descriptive statistics in SPSS, how to create a new variable, perform cross tabs and other basic tools. Smart students will go back to this handout throughout the course of the semester for looking up tasks like how to create deciles and quintiles, etc. Students were asked to recreate the information listed and then to provide a marketing interpretation of the graph or table. For example, if most of the company's customers are men does it mean the firm should focus on men as customers or branch out to serving more females? We then had a review of direct marekting and linked direct marketing to database marketing through the use of customer information. It is the database that underlies most direct marketing campaigns that allows DM practitioners to measure, adjust and re-launch their campaigns. Finally, we concluded the two week period with a brief statistics review, focusing on mean, standard deviation, correlation and other descriptive tools like histograms and bar charts. An important concept here is categorical versus continuous data. Categorical data cannot be used to calculate means but can be used in a cross tabs. With continuous data and two groups, a t-test can be conducted.