This course focuses on how to gather, analyze, and interpret data about markets and customers. Students learn about the types of marketing decision problems in which research information might prove useful — problems of selection of target market, new product or service introduction, customer retention, pricing, etc. The course has three objectives: (1) Learn to define the marketing decision problem and to determine what information is needed to make the decision and what is extraneous; (2) Learn how to acquire trustworthy and relevant data and to judge its quality (e.g, design, appropriate methods, sampling procedures); (3) Learn how to analyze the data to make certain classic types of marketing decisions (e.g., regression analysis, positional maps, conjoint analysis). Case and project based. Prerequisite: BUSI 521