June 29, 2020

Master Student Interview: Marketing Analytics

Hello! My name is Sophie van Esch, I am 23 years old, and I am currently finishing the Master Marketing Analytics at Tilburg University. Prior, I studied the Bachelor Business Economics at Tilburg University after which I had really no idea what Master I should choose. Therefore, I decided to start working at an Accountancy firm to gain some work experience and to figure out whether I would like to work in Accountancy. However, I realised that Accountancy was not the direction for me. So, I started to think again about what courses I liked the most during my Bachelor and I went to the Master open day where I talked to several Master students. I realised that I was looking for a combination of both statistics and customer behavior, since I liked both the marketing, mathematics and statistics during my Bachelor. Therefore, Marketing Analytics seemed the perfect combination to me.

“This Master is a great study program with the possibility to choose from a wide variety of electives”

I started the Master Marketing Analytics last September and I am very glad with that decision. The Master Marketing Analytics consists of seven courses (6 ECTS) and one Master Thesis (18 ECTS). A pro of the program is the possibility to choose from a variety of courses. There is only one core course that you are obliged to follow, namely Introduction to Research in Marketing. This course uses several statistical and marketing research techniques that helps to analyse data and make supported marketing decisions. You need this course before you are allowed to start writing your Master Thesis. Besides this core course, you have to follow one managerial course. I decided to follow Marketing Channel Management, which was an interesting course about aspects of different Marketing Channels. The other five courses are more analytical. You can choose between 5 courses which are offered by the marketing department: Conjoint Analysis, Market Assessment, Survey Research, Customer Analytics, Experimental Research, Pricing and Revenue Analytics, Social Media and Web Analytics and Pricing and Monetization Strategies, or 4 statistical courses of the marketing department and 1 course which is offered by data science. I decided to choose 5 courses in the marketing department, because I was not much into programming. I wanted to graduate within one year. Therefore, I had to choose some courses over others because they were only offered in the second and fourth block.

I liked Customer Analytics and Pricing and Monetization Strategies courses the most. Customer Analytics was mainly about how to analyse data with different models. There was one lecture a week where the theory and tools were explained, which we had to apply in the weekly assignment. I liked this way of teaching because you had to use the tools learned during the lecture to complete the assignments. Because of this, it felt less abstract since you had to apply the content your learned directly. Pricing and Monetization Strategies was about different pricing models. Even though this course was offered online (because of COVID-19), the teachers made the best out of it. We had to use Zoom and needed to participate in the discussions. The course content was based on the 3 c’s: pricing based on customers, competitors, and the company.

I started writing my Master Thesis in the third block. I decided to write my Master Thesis at the University because I wanted to graduate within one year. I had 2 courses in the fourth block which made it difficult to write my Master Thesis for a company. Also, there are a lot of topics that you could choose from when writing your Master Thesis for the University, so there is always a topic you like. I ended up with the topic Word-of Mouth and my Master Thesis was about whether customers are more likely to refer to status-products online or offline.

The main difference with my Bachelor Business Economics is the depth of the courses. During my Bachelor I had a lot of very different courses, while during my Master most courses were focused on analyzing customer behavior. Also, for most courses you have to do several assignments either individual or in small groups that helps you understand the materials.

Hopefully this article helps you with making your decision for the Master you like! If you have any questions, you may always contact me via LinkedIn.