Marketing case competition delivers insights using data visualization tools

Tuesday, January 11, 2022

Three students in the Krannert School of Management’s MS in Marketing program took home the top prizes in December’s Marketing Insights Case Competition, which was judged by alumni working in the field.

The students were tasked with creating a platform or system that can capture marketing insights, sharing the platform or system using data visualization tools, and delivering actionable recommendations on how to use the tools.

Among the publicly used platforms that competitors could choose from were Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager, and database systems such as MySQL, MS Access, and AWS. Some examples of the data visualization tools used were Tableau, Power BI, and Google Data Studio.

“This prepares the students to not only have marketing knowledge, but also the software skills, use platforms, and present with a visualization tool to find marketing insights,” says Clinical Assistant Professor Jinsuh Lee, who coordinated the event with support from Erin Britton, assistant director of academic programs for the MS Marketing and MS Global Supply Chain Management programs.

Winning first place and the $500 top prize was Ayushi Sheth, who serves as president of the Krannert Graduate Marketing Association.

“The Marketing Insights Case Competition was a very hands-on experience to cascade the functionality of my classroom learnings,” she says. “I wanted to take the opportunity to get into the nitty-gritty of marketing data and try to mine insights from it.”
For her project, Sheth chose a dataset that was focused on customers and sales of a coffee store chain.

“To me, the challenge was to understand which data points are critical to the objective I had set,” she says. “While I learned the hard skills of the software tools, my key takeaway was how to make the data digestible and talk business. Conversations with the judges and Professor Lee’s guidance pulled it all together.”

Second place and a $300 prize went to MS marketing student Ziyan Tang, while the $200 third-place prize went to fellow MS marketing student Gauri Mathur.

“I learned that it’s convenient to utilize coding to uncover business situations behind data,” says Tang. Business and marketing knowledge are also important to help determine the relationship between data and guiding the analysis.”

“I think this competition emulated real-life challenges with data that we face at work,” says Mathur. “This challenge allowed me to apply myself and think of new ways to analyze and convert insights to business-impacting action items. What I loved most was presenting our projects to alums who are renowned industry professionals themselves. They gave us meaningful feedback that I am sure will help me when I join the workforce."