THE SECOND YEAR SCENE : GMSC SERIES – Synthesizing Insights
Each spring semester 42 full-time Goizueta Business School students participate in the Management Practice elective, Goizueta Marketing Strategy Consultancy (GMSC). GMSC pairs student teams with corporate clients to solve pressing business challenges. The course culminates in a case competition judged by marketing and consulting leaders from across the country. The course is taught by Dr. Reshma H. Shah, Assistant Professor in the area of Marketing. This is the fourth post in a series about the experiential learning experience at Goizueta from one of the six team’s perspective about analyzing and synthesizing insights.
We launched our survey over spring break and we have received a lot of responses (more than 800)! Now comes the interesting part, analyzing it. We started by getting rid of unfinished and bogus responses, specifically focusing on removing people that answered the survey in less than 2 minutes (speedsters) and those answering the same option for all questions (free riders) so that we would have a clean data set. Once we completed this maintenance, we had 550 healthy responses.
Our analysis on these responses began with trying to find patterns and relationships. The team heavily used pivot tables to see how people’s behaviors are different based on demographics and psychographics. Factor analysis was also conducted in order to find out how people’s responses corresponded with certain categories. This helped us to group the similar responses together by running cluster analysis. Furthermore, our dive into the data included regression analysis. Based on responses about our product, we used a factor as a dependent variable and ran regressions with other variables in our data to understand which ones were the most influential. This was a fruitful exercise as we started to realize what was and was not important as well as what we needed to focus on when creating a strategy to get our product to market.
By conducting this quantitative analysis, our team has noticed that everything seems to be coming together as we prepare for the final push to create insights from our analysis and move towards making a recommendation.
