2,500 words:
This is a strict limit not a guideline: any piece submitted with more words than the limit will result in the excess not being marked
Question 1: Designing a Customer Analytics Project [30%]
Please put yourself in the position of the manager of the Café.
The Cafe’s objective is to provide food and drinks to students on a profitable basis while providing an enjoyable atmosphere during the visit of the Café. The Café plans to introduce a new coffee brand, which should replace the old coffee brand. You as manager of the Café should manage the introduction of the new coffee brand so that it will become successful [= higher profit when compared to old coffee brand].
Please explain in detail how you as manager of the Café could implement [1] descriptive analytics, [2] diagnostic analytics, [3] predictive analytics, and [4] prescriptive analytics to make four different marketing decisions regarding the introduction of a new coffee brand in the offering of the café.
Each decision should relate to a different marketing mix element [product, price, place, promotion, people, processes, physical evidence]. For each decision, you should describe which data is needed, how you would collect/obtain the data, and what analytical approach you would use to analyze the data.
Please make a justified recommendation how each analytics project will contribute to the successful introduction of the new coffee brand and which would be the most valuable analytics project to ensure that the introduction of the new coffee brand will be a success.
Question 2: Evaluating an Analytics Project [20%]
A retailer of tools that serves 30,000 business customers in 13 different industries wants to make more customers purchase through its e-commerce channel. Therefore, Richard, the company’s data scientist, aims to analyze what makes customers use the e-commerce channel to purchase. Richard collects data of all 5,000 customers that purchased via the e-commerce channel in the past year, in which the e-commerce channel was introduced. Richard then runs a logistic regression analysis on these 5,000 customers with data from the past year. He selected revenue in the e-commerce channel as the dependent variable and the following independent variables:
- Number of overall purchases across all sales channels.
- Number of purchases in the e-commerce channel.
- Number of times the salesperson visited the customer.
Richard finds a significant negative relationship between the number of visits and the revenue in the e-commerce channel. He presents his key finding to the retailer’s CEO: “My analytics model shows that visiting customers often makes them decrease in their e-commerce revenue. Therefore, we need to tell our salespeople to restrict their customer visits. This will improve our e-commerce revenue.”
Please critique Richard’s approach and explain in detail what he should have done differently.
Question 3: Performance driver analysis [50%]
A bus services provider would like to improve its revenue. To this end, the bus provider has collected answers of 1,000 customers on the following ten survey questions indicating satisfaction scores with the bus provider and additionally obtained revenue data matched to the survey responses of the 1000 customers:
| Variable Survey question | Scale | |
| V1 | Revenue of the customer | In GBP |
| V2 | The routes the bus provider offers satisfy my needs. | 1 [“Fully disagree”] to
7 [“Fully agree”] |
| V3 | I am satisfied with the operational performance of the bus provider. | 1 [“Fully disagree”] to
7 [“Fully agree”] |
| V4 | I am very satisfied with the prices of the bus tickets. | 1 [“Fully disagree”] to
7 [“Fully agree”] |
| V5 | I feel safe when I travel on the bus providers buses. | 1 [“Fully disagree”] to
7 [“Fully agree”] |
| V6 | The buses are always on time. | 1 [“Fully disagree”] to
7 [“Fully agree”] |
| V7 | The bus drivers are very friendly. | 1 [“Fully disagree”] to
7 [“Fully agree”] |
| V8 | I am satisfied with the cleanliness of the buses. | 1 [“Fully disagree”] to
7 [“Fully agree”] |
| V9 | I am satisfied with the in-bus experience. | 1 [“Fully disagree”] to
7 [“Fully agree”] |
| V10 | I like the looks of the buses. | 1 [“Fully disagree”] to
7 [“Fully agree”] |
| V11 | I am satisfied with the seating comfort of the buses. | 1 [“Fully disagree”] to
7 [“Fully agree”] |
What should the bus services provider do to improve the revenue with customers [V1]? Please analyze the dataset and produce a written management summary of your recommendations, followed by a methodological appendix that clearly explains, justifies, and details all steps of your analysis including R codes used.
General Notes
The upper word limit is 2,500 words. This is a fixed limit. Material over the word limit will not be read or marked.
The work submitted must be original and all works and sources used within the assignment must be correctly cited and referenced. You must adopt the Harvard referencing style.
Formatting should be [A4, 2.54 cm margins, 11pt Arial, 1.5 lines spacing.
Illustrations [diagrams, tables, graphs, etc.] are not only permitted but encouraged, however, make sure that they are clear and self-explanatory.
Appendices must be used with care, must be appropriate, and must be referred to within the body of your work. Although excluded from the word limit, they cannot be used to circumvent the word limit.
