For informed business planning and sound decision making, marketers need comprehensive intelligence regarding their customers. This advanced market research course is based on the idea that to understand customer attitudes, sentiments, and behavior fully, both qualitative and quantitative research methods are required. Students will learn how to select and apply the right marketing research to obtain customer intelligence, make sense of it, and apply it to marketing problems. Throughout the semester, we will emphasize the complementarity of qualitative and quantitative methods, how combining them – tapping art and science – can yield brand-building marketing strategies.  

Among the questions we will address are those you would need to have answered whether you are leading a start-up or serving as a brand manager in a large corporation: How do I begin to understand the market for my product?  How can I segment my customers?  How do I know if customers need or want my products? How do I develop/modify my product and how can market research inform product design and UX? What are the best ways to position my product in the marketplace and against which competition? How do I generate insights for advertising and packaging and evaluate reactions to my messages? How do I price my product?  How many can I sell?  What ethical considerations emanate from qualitative and quantitative marketing research?

We will take an experiential approach in this course. Students will learn through cases and practice how to conduct deeply revealing focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic research, and ways to map customer journeys. Students will also learn how to conduct cluster analysis, factor analysis, conjoint analysis, and logistic and OLS regression. There will be numerous problem solving in-class breakout groups F2F and via Zoom. Students will work with real companies, conducting market research that can have near term application in the marketplace.

Course Prerequisite: 

R-Programming data camp: https://www.datacamp.com/courses/free-introduction-to-r and basic knowledge of statistics.

Kamel Jedidi

John A. Howard Professor of Business

Kamel Jedidi is the John Howard Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, New York.  He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from University of Tunis and Master and Ph.D. degrees in Marketing and Statistics from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.  Dr. Jedidi has extensively published in leading marketing and statistical journals.  His research interests...

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Robert Morais

Lecturer in Business

Robert J. Morais is an anthropologist with a 35+ year career in advertising and market research, and a Lecturer at Columbia Business School. He spent 25 years with advertising agencies, rising to Chief Strategic Officer, and 11 years as a Principal/Owner at a market research firm. He has worked with Procter & Gamble, GlaxoSmithKline, WD-40, Coca-Cola, Post Foods, Danone, Hain Celestial, Safeway, Sabra, Pinnacle Foods, Sunny...

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