Preface

Welcome to the wonderful world of marketing analytics! 

Marketing analytics is a booming field, with widespread applications.  Marketing analytics skills are highly demanded by employers.   If you are looking to enter the field, the concepts and techniques covered in this book will help you to land your first job; if you are already employed, you may find that marketing analytics can be applied to make you even more valuable in your position.  

A fun thing about studying marketing is that we can often directly apply its theories and ideas to the world around us:  when we talk about things like consumer behavior, or about consumer profiles, we are not just studying some abstract “other” – we are studying ourselves.  

For instance, as marketing students, or as marketing practitioners, we can analyze data to see which types of email campaigns are most likely to positively impact a company’s Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs.  Then, we can also frame questions about marketing decisions through our lens as consumers – after all, we experience email marketing every day, as recipients.  We know which types of marketing approaches annoy us, or appeal to us.  

Set against the backdrop of Lobster Land – a fictional, seaside amusement park in southern Maine – this book takes the reader through everything from summary statistics to A/B testing methodologies to random forest modeling – all while emphasizing fundamental marketing concepts such as customer lifetime value, brand development, and user retention.

Included in Marketing Analytics at Lobster Land are step-by-step, Python-based solutions for all the data visualizations, statistical analyses, and models contained within its pages – all of which assume no prior Python background on the part of the reader. Whether you are brand new to analytics and coding, or a professional with many years in the field, you will find value in the content here.