Analytics for all marketing majors: sparking interest in the uninterested

Abstract

Marketing analytics has an impact on the role of every marketer in some way. However, faculty members often face challenges when recruiting students for courses focused on analytics, and many marketing students tend to avoid quantitative courses due to fear and hesitation. The lack of marketing pedagogy with classroom activities designed to help educators showcase marketing analytics as engaging, interesting, and practical adds to the problem. To meet this need, this paper presents a classroom activity focused on building interest in marketing analytics, designed to be completed in a single-class period in any marketing course by any instructor, regardless of expertise in analytics. Administered in four different marketing courses at three universities, results show that students experienced a significant increase in their awareness of, interest in, and excitement for marketing analytics. Students also experienced a significant decrease in how intimidating they perceive analytics to be. Qualitative comments provide more detail related to fears or hesitations that were lessened by the course activity. Overall, the results support that this activity provided students with a significant increase in their awareness of, interest in, and excitement for marketing analytics.