Introducing the Marketing Engineering Quarterly Newsletter

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Marketing Engineering News, a quarterly newsletter aimed at current or potential users of the Marketing Engineering suite of teaching materials.  We anticipate that each issue will include:

• ME>XL News:  an update on what is new and what is planned for the ME>XL suite of offerings
• Teaching Tip: something we have found that instructors find useful
• Instructor Forum:  a commentary from a Marketing Engineering instructor, sharing some classroom experiences
• Features:  other topical items that instructors may find useful

We will also provide resource links, letters and comments as the newsletter evolves.

We hope you find the newsletter of use and we invite your reactions and comments.

To connect with us, please contact us through the support center.

Please pass this newsletter on to your colleagues who can subscribe by This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

All the best,
Gary Lilien
Arvind Rangaswamy

Arnaud De Bruyn

Marketing Engineering for Excel News

Release 1.1, a maintenance release, available Monday, December 24.

• Corrects a few minor issues discovered in our initial release
• Adds suppression of the ME>XL splash screen after software activation
• Adds a market trendline to the Bass model

Release 1.2, available in January 2008, adds several features requested by our users.

• ME>XL Program Group is added to the Start ->Programs list to allow users to activate/deactivate the ME>XL add-in
• Instructor materials, cases and solutions are revised to make students and professors more effective
• A new case is added (SyPhone) to allow instructors to better teach the Customer Lifetime Value model

Release 1.3, available in April 2008, will introduce the Latent Class option of our Segmentation and Classification model.  Watch for a complete list of new features in our next newsletter.

Teaching Tip

This space will feature a short "teaching tip" is each issue…and we’d like to hear from you.  If have discovered a tip or technique that makes the Marketing Engineering experience more interesting for your students, please send it along.  You may contact us through the support center.

Marketing Engineering for Excel was specifically designed to allow you to use locally developed cases and problems to allow your students to be more engaged in the learning process.  We distribute a robust set of cases with the software, and will be adding additional cases in 2008, but your students might enjoy using marketing analytics with a problem assignment using locally gathered data.  

Try this: ask your students to develop a list of several "attributes" about local restaurants. Ask them to poll 10 or 20 fellow students and friends. Have them analyze the results using ME>XL’s Positioning software. You could ask them to collect both Perceptual and Preference data (time permitting). Ask your students to analyze the results and determine what restaurants might do to change their "market position".

With the assistance of a TA, you could actually do this example in class, using your students as respondents where they will be part of the "market".

From ME 2.4 to ME>XL — The Washington University Experience

At the University of Washington, Bothell, I have employed one version or the other of the Marketing Engineering software primarily at the MBA level since the Fall of 1999. Consequently I am all too familiar with the glitches and software bugs in the earlier versions and have had to prepare various handouts to address these problems as and when the student groups encountered them. This year it was with some trepidation that I migrated to the Marketing Engineering for Excel (ME>XL) version (which has now become a tool bar within Excel), fully expecting a flurry of emails from students encountering new sets of glitches that I had not had to address before. Having field tested a couple of the modules this fall it is clear that this version has led to strongly positive user experience.

Student reactions in the MBA class of 2008, with an average work experience of over 10 years, ran the gamut from, "a fantastic product", "an easy way to put together data in a comprehensible format", "makes analysis simpler", "an incredibly powerful research tool that was intuitive to use", to "helps put results together that can be easily translated for upper management". This has made my work around handouts redundant. I have instead had to engage in discussion with students trying to do some advanced segmentation analysis.

Lilien and Rangaswamy (with their new co-author De Bruyn) have essentially created a disruptive innovation in the practice of marketing with this release of ME>XL. This is potentially going to cause a revolution in the way the best trained managers think and interact with data. It has the hallmarks of being "a great leveller," making it possible for smaller firms with smart managers but limited resources to compete with the big corporations with seemingly unlimited research budgets.

The Marketing Engineering team provided prompt support to any student question that was submitted, making software support issues a non-event. Thank you for a remarkable new version. My major concern is that I am almost scared to unleash these students on the world with access to such easy to use software.

By Prof. P.V. (Sundar) Balakrishnan

Coming Events — ME>XL Instructor Workshop at Winter AMA

February 15, 2008

If you are attending the AMA Educators Conference in Austin in February, consider joining us for a half-day, hands-on Marketing Engineering Workshop with Gary Lilien and Arvind Rangaswamy on Friday, Feb. 15, 2008 at University of Texas Austin (immediately before conference).