Forecasting Models for Marketing Decisions

How will customers act in the future? What will demand for our products and services be? How much inventory should we order for the next season? Beyond simply forecasting what customers will do, marketers need to understand how their actions can shape future behavior. In Developing Forecasting Tools with Excel, learners will develop an understanding of the basic components of a forecasting model, how to build their own forecasting models, and how to evaluate the performance of forecasting models. All of this is done using Microsoft Excel, ensuring that learners can take their skills and apply them to their own business problems.

• Basics of Forecasting Models
• This module will discuss how to identify the necessary components of a forecasting model based on patterns in the history data. You will also be able to evaluate the performance of a forecasting model using both in-sample and out-of-sample metrics.
• Customer Analytics: Predicting Individual Customer Behavior
• "Meaningful Marketing Insights," This content will be familiar for learners who completed the first course; please think of this portion of the class as a review.
• Managing Customer Equity: Linking Customer Analytics to Customer Value
• This module will discuss managing customer equity, acquisition, retention, & market value, and customer valuation. You will learn how to decompose customer value into its underlying components.
• Marketing Mix Modeling
• A common task in developing forecasting models is to use them to make decisions regarding the marketing mix activity. With a marketing mix model, organizations can assess the efficacy of different marketing actions. Included is a sample of data for a popular frozen food category. In addition to weekly sales and pricing, for the focal brand we have information on whether the product was featured in the store’s advertising (e.g., newspaper circular) and if the product was on display in the store. We also have pricing information from competitors. In this module, we will build a series of regression models to evaluate the impact of the brand’s actions and competitors’ actions.