Software for Excel : Marketing : Diagnostics, Forecasting & Much More

Now in five languages, English, German, Italian, French, and Spanish, Marketing Manager for Excel, MM4XL, is an Excel add-in program designed by marketing experts, statisticians, and mathematicians that fosters strategic thinking in business decision-makers. The new release 5.0 introduces Decision Tree and four new analytical tools. Some tools available in MM4XL include Forecast Manager, CrossTab, Sample Manager, Proportion Analyst, Descriptive Statistics, Cluster Analysis, Semantic Differential Chart, Four-Dimensional Chart, Brand Mapping, Brand Switch Analysis, Positioning Maps, and Product Portfolio Analysis (both BCG Share Growth Matrix and McKinsey/GE Business Assessment Array). Moreover, two kinds of quadrant analysis (bubble maps with lables), extremely helpful in marketing, are also built in to the software

Functions

Use the BCG analysis to look at the performance of the products your company has already launched and actively sold. If your company has many products in its portfolio which have not yet been launched, you may prefer to use the McKinsey array.

BCG Interpreter reads and evaluates the output of the BCG Portfolio Analysis built into MM4XL. It looks, in an objective manner, at the product portfolio in order to highlight strengths and weaknesses. These help managers to take corrective measures, were necessary, and aid consistency in pursuing the envisaged portfolio policy. BCG Interpreter returns a numerical summary report, three charts and a verbal report, highlighting the most relevant aspects of the analysis.

The Mckinsey analysis is more flexible that the BCG and allows the analysis of products which are not yet launched. It is sometimes criticized for being dependent on the judgment of the analyst and therefore too subjective. We suggest running both BCG and McK to reach plausible results.

Brand Mapping produces a picture of a market. This picture, or map, shows which products compete in the consumer's mind, and it is used to stimulate strategic reasoning, of how a product could be positioned to maximize preference and sales.

Brand Mapping is a tool customized for business analysis. It uses correspondence analysis, runs fast, shows a detailed output report, and its map, while being rich in information, is both clear and easy to interpret. Many business people realize that the relationships between numbers are often far more interesting than the numbers themselves. These people will find Brand Mapping of great benefit.

Brand Switch Analyst is a tool that fosters strategic thinking in managers interested in the analysis of brand switch behavior, which is the tendency of consumers to change preference between products offering comparable benefits. The market share of a firm is seen as a major means of determining its competitive position. Professor Kotler said, "Marketing executives must watch their market shares just as much as their profits. Present customers can never be taken for granted." Although written in 1963, this statement is still of great actuality, and in part has inspired the development of Brand Switch Analyst.

Three factors determine a company's market share structure:
1. The management's ability to retain present customers, also called Retention Rate or Brand Loyalty Index.
2. The management's ability to draw customers away from competitors, that is the Switching-in Rate.
3. The tendency for a brand to lose customers, that is the Switching-out Rate.

Brand Switch Analyst makes low-cost estimates of switch and retention rates, which otherwise would have to be estimated using expensive market research surveys. Our tool applies quadratic programming as described by Theil and Rey (see MM4XL help file).

A classic work in market analysis was published by William J. Reilly under the title The Law of Retail Gravitation. Inspired by the formula for gravity, Reilly proposed that a similar formula could be used to calculate the point at which customers will be drawn to one or another of two competing centers. In other words, Reilly's formula allows us to determine in Km, for instance, the area within which an outlet is more likely to draw its customers from. In the map below the line connecting all whiskers delimit this area. Retail Gravitation Analyst applies the Law of Retail Gravitation as originally postulated by William J. Reilly.

This analysis can be of great help to marketing and sales managers when segmenting territories for assigning budgets, planning surveys, measuring advertising, circumscribing area test markets, assessing performance, and more.

Smart mapping is a pure bubble chart which overcomes all limitations of the bubble chart tool available in Excel. Labels are input automatically, bubbles can be grouped by color and the horizontal axis can be set to mean, median or manual values.

Comparative mapping is a special kind of bubble mapping, sometimes referred to as quadrant analysis. It allows great flexibility when working with several variables measured using different scales, e.g. percentages, units and values. MM4XL allows users to rescale quadrants and to set the horizontal axis at mean, median and manual values. Labels are displayed automatically and bubbles can be assigned different colors.

When investigating attitude, analysts typically use rating scales such as Likert's one. Osgood's semantic differential scale goes one step further because it links the measurement to the connotative meaning of words placed on a bipolar scale such as "Expensive-Cheap", "Clean-Dirty", and so on.

The tool Semantic Differential Chart built in MM4XL draws attribute charts in form of vertical lines as shown in the one below.

This charting technique can be of great help to marketers when analyzing profiles, attitude, performance, satisfaction, or any other dimension relevant for connotative analysis.

Cluster analysis is used for segmenting items or people in homogeneous groups. In marketing, segmentation needs arise often linked to differentiation matters, which relate to positioning and require data on behavior and attitude. But it is also often used when analyzing performance, for instance of affiliate companies, points of sale, distributors, etc.; for clustering satisfaction of internal and external customers; and also for treating profiles of products, companies, geographic regions, and so on.

The many available clustering methods divide essentially in two main groups:
- Hierarchical methods, which group data row by row and do not require specifying in advance the desired number of clusters.
- Partitioning methods, which assign items to a user defined number of clusters.

MM4XL makes available the most popular method from each of the above groups, Ward's clustering method and Centroid method (also known as K-means clustering method), respectively. The former is typically run first, so to get an understanding of the data structure, and the latter method is used for refining the clusters.

4D Chart draws a bubble plot in a 3D environment. We made this feature possible in Excel by rotating the plane and distancing the bubbles from it. When relationships between numbers are far more important than the numbers themselves, this is the chart you need.

4D Chart is a mapping tool conceived for displaying a larger amount of data on the same picture than Excel allows. This adjunctive data may help the acute analyst to identify relevant information apparently sheltered in the data itself. It is again the miracle of the picture being worth 1000 words.

Forecast Manager runs 14 most common and effective short-term forecasting methods and it can model time series in terms of special events such as promotional actions.

Thanks to Solver, the software is enriched with the power of linear optimization, which means reaching the best solution for every fitted curve. Each method is run, in seconds, hundreds or even thousands of times, every time trying new parameters. The curve that best fits the data is then shown in a succinct and yet well detailed report rich in charts, coefficients, and indices that highlight all major aspects relevant to the forecasting manager for taking his or her decision.

Forecast Manager has been written according to nowadays-popular MBA textbooks. It is accurate, cost-effective, easy to learn, and thought for business decision-makers. Last but not least, all computations are shown by means of common Excel formula that is: we opened the Black-Box for you.

CrossTab produces contingency tables that are the joint distribution of 2 variables, described by a limited number of distinct values, such as the one below, and it can test:

- proportions for significance (Z-test),
- rows and columns for independence ( test)
- variables for correlation (R and R squared coefficient).

If chosen to do so, CrossTab adds user-defined labels to row and column variable codes. These are important features to business analysts because they allow quickening the data interpretation work and they help focusing on the relevant part of the data. An expert eye using CrossTab may truly get the goal faster.

This powerful tool and its statistical measures allow making a detailed and accurate exploration of any data set by means of 2-way contingency tables.

CrossTab is part of the Survey Analysis suite, which comprises Sample Manager, a tool for determining sample size, and Proportion Analyst, a tool for testing for significance the difference between two proportions.

How many people prefer brand A? How many households have a black and white TV? How many patients progressed on drug X? What proportion of electors voted candidate Y? Are all questions we can answer surveying samples of individuals with the characteristics.

In order to design a sample that makes sense, one important thing is determining the number of required interviews. How large should be the sample? The answer can be found with Sample Manager, quickly, accurately, and objectively. It is indeed the objectivity of probabilistic assumptions, rather than 'gut feeling' assumptions, which helps companies saving money and carry reliable survey studies.

According to your input data, Sample Manager prints in output a sensitivity analysis, but those who do not need a printout can see results directly in the user form.

Proportion Analyst is useful for determining if a significant difference exists between two proportions, which is a recurrent question when interpreting, for instance, results from marketing survey studies rather than from promotional campaigns or sales results.

Applying a two-tailed Z test for homogeneity, Proportions Manager tests equality and determines whether there is any difference in the proportion of successes in two samples. It interprets results and shows conclusions written in plain English, both on the sheet and in the user form as shown in the picture below.

This tool is part of the Survey Analysis suite, which comprises also Sample Manager, a tool for determining sample size, and CrossTab, a professional tool for running complex contingency table elaborations.

What is the typical [price] for a certain product? How many of these products fall within a certain [price] range? What is an unreasonable [price] for this product category?

Questions such as these can be answered with Descriptive Analyst and the brackets around the variable name price underline the fact they can be asked for any variable that can be expressed on a categorical or continuous scale. Answering these questions could offer very useful hints to the manager challenged with making performance ranks, looking into industry sector records, or comparing product profiles rather than competitor performance.

Descriptive Analyst makes Pareto curve (ABC) analysis, descriptive statistics, and box-whisker plots, which are tools typically used when exploring data for answering questions such as these.

Benchmark Analysis is a simple and easy to run tool that can be used to draw a picture of the competitive power of a company, a product portfolio, or a single product against its respective counterparts. The competitive power in this case is taken as the function of the market growth, and of the product or company.

The map works this way:
- Products placed below the diagonal grew more than the market, and therefore have won market share.
- Products placed above the diagonal grew less than the market, and therefore have lost share.
- Products placed within the dotted lines grew slightly more or less than the market - they retained share.

This map helps managers ranking performance, investigating trends, or clustering groups, and it can compare any pairs of items, not product versus market only.

Advertising campaigns, direct marketing actions, and promotional plans are some of the activities that require marketing managers to identify groups of people, which are homogeneous in terms of given characteristics. When the need arise, managers can use one the segmentation techniques that in the past 40 years have blossomed from William Belson's original work on matching and prediction, such as AID (Automatic Interaction Detection) and CHAID (Chi Square Automatic Interaction Detection), THAID (Theta AID), and CART (Classification and Regression Trees).

MM4XL's tool called Segmentation Tree applies Belson's original algorithm to a set of data that can be gathered, for instance, but not only, by means of a sample survey. Say, we were interested in identifying the demographic factors that most highly relate to the purchase of vitamin tablets, and a marketing research agency ran a sample survey for us. We can use the dataset for drawing a segmentation tree like the one below, which shows in pictorial form the number of people belonging to one segment (tree leaf) and which variables relate most to the use of vitamin in that group. In our example it is the social class that generates the first split, followed by the geographic location where respondents reside. The size of the identified groups can be then inferred to the overall target population.

Professor Kotler suggests that marketing managers evaluate models drawn with the same modelling technique applied by Profile Manager when they want to make explicit the individual effect variables exert on brand switching behaviour.

The typical application of Profile Manager is when planning new product development (NPD). Marketing research suppliers often suggest running Conjoint Analysis for highlighting the combination of, say, product attributes that maximize customer preference. When, however, one cannot afford the investment for a new study or, even better, if one has dated data, which may still hold, running Profile Manager could supply an understanding of the behaviour of market shares according to the preference of customers that can help choosing among alternative concepts, such as new products, new claims, new target audiences, and more.

Stacked Charts is another simple to run and useful tool MM4XL offers to managers interested in plotting more readable charts in MS Excel. The peculiarity of stacked charts resides in the fact that we see different data series displayed on the same chart but each in its own portion of the plot area. Series never overlap and you get a very clear picture of the information.

Stacked Chart can also plot data expressed with different scales of measurement on the same chart in a readable manner. For instance, a column of values referring to sales in value and a column of % changes in market share.

When you share information with colleagues and clients, stacked charts may help to make your findings clearer.

Decision trees provide a framework for analyzing decision problems that involve uncertainty. They present all important aspects of the problem in a concise and structured pictorial representation showing: decision alternatives, expected outcomes, probabilities of occurrence, and chronological order of events.

Common problems in marketing management approached with decision trees include new product launch, marketing research go/no go, investment planning and allocation, pricing issues, strategy selection, and any other decision that may put the business @risk.

Trees are made of nodes, decisions or chances, and nodes are made of branches. Filling out the tree structure with your own values returns an analytical view of the decision problem. This view can help fact-and-data driven managers to make better-informed decisions because problems are framed in a well organized manner, they are evaluated objectively, and they can be easily modified.

Decision-makers can be risk averse, neutral, or risk takers. Thanks to utility functions, MM4XL's Decision Tree allows you to incorporate risk attitude in the model, so that the end result reflects the propensity toward risk of the decision-maker.

MM4XL has been equipped with a new floating toolbar that makes much easier and more intuitive the control over the many available tools. The new floating toolbar allows showing only the relevant portion of tools you really need when analyzing your business data.

System Requirements

Platform : Windows Vista, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP, Windows 98, Windows ME, Mac OS 9/Classic, Mac OS X.

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Language : English, German, Spanish, Italian, French, English, German, Italian, French, and Spanish

Note: if you are full-time student or professor, you have an abilty to buy MM4XL education edition for just E245.00. Simply click a "Buy Online" and "Download" buttons.

Additional Information: Marketing Manager for Excel (MM4XL)
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Additional Information: Marketing Manager for Excel (MM4XL)