Course Description
Marketers are blind without research. From learning unmet needs, to shaping solutions, to setting prices and optimizing creatives, input from customers is how you go from good to great. The aim of this course is not to teach you sampling, statistics, and analytics, but rather to be an expert in knowing what research to resource when, what quality looks like, and how to persuade change.
The instructors are two client-side researchers at Microsoft who do just that. Plan to learn about 20 different research approaches that the global market-research industry has grown to answer the most common questions, and that most marketers “buy rather than build.” Know when to ask for an ethnography, a pricing model, a journey study, or a campaign effectiveness study, among many others, and to know what makes them good, what “money slides” each produces, and the typical moves in persuading change with the results. Get your hands dirty in class with all the work needed to do research other than the math (making stimuli, writing survey questions, designing logical paths, and visualizing data with the best art and storytelling) and explore with us how AI can speed up and streamline much of it. We will build the class around a hypothetical tech product “an AI privacy defender” and by the end of the class, we’ll know what research to ask our VC to fund to bring it to market.
This class is a good match for students who:
• Know some fundamentals of marketing
• Want to create a pitch deck for venture capital funding of an incubation tech product
• Have little desire to do math, but want to wield its power
Meets Research Methods Requirement.
University of Washington
Department of Communication