Attendance related Queries and other issues

Update: Quick Announcement

The first half of session 5 will cover a holistic S-T-P (Segmentation-Targeting and Positioning) view. The emphasis will be on the segmentation part and the clustering techniques it relies upon. The second half will cover a primer on Demand Estimation techniques. This is coming up now because having done Sampling basics (in session 3) and Segmentation (in session 5), you are now, finally, ready to take a crack at the big question - "what is the likely demand for xyz product or service offering in the ABC market?". Will talk about this a little more in a later blog post introducing the background and motivation for Session 5 topics (along the lines of what I did for session 4 here.

Hi all,

Two points to elaborate upon in this blog post. Pls respond with your views and comments (if any) in the comments section.

Attendence related queries

There have a been quite a few queries in the past week relating to how a student may make-up for the attendence-CP points for a class that may have been missed for any reason.

The attendence component is 8% and 1% is allotted for each session fully attended. There will be a total of 10 such sessions (sessions 2-10 and the guest lecture session). So a student can peacefully miss upto 2 sessions without incurring *any* attendence penalty. However, if a student misses more than two sessions, for *whatever* reason, then I believe s/he should be ready to accept some nominal grade penalty (a 1% dunk is not the end of the world after all). Not imposing such a penalty would be unfair to other students who have diligently worked around their schedules to attend sessions.

Re the CP marks, they are aggregated across sessions. So its quite OK for a person to be very active in one session and relatively inactive in another - since the CP score is averaged over sessions. So, missing a session or two doesn't overly skew the CP points if you make up in the sessions you do attend.

BTW, the CP grade has both oral and quick-check written components. The oral components will get more weightage simply because it enlives the class and brings interaction value directly to bear. So, kindly don't work on an assumption that one CP form is a substitute for the other.

Regarding the Guest Lecture

Thank you for making the guest speaker session a success.

For the record, I don't agree 100% with everything Mr Singhal said. However, he is spot on in that the future MKTR challenges need a fresh approach and cannot reliably be extrapolated from past techniques, data and trends.

I hope you've noticed that MKTR@ISB also works on similar assumptions. The emphasis in MKTR@ISB is also on discerning emerging trends, gaining fresh perspective, honing problem formulation competencies, digging for insights beneath the visible surface, learning recombinatory methods on a super-versatile tools platform (R) among other things. To this end, I appreciate your feedback on how to sharpen and smarten the course components, contents and delivery.

Mr Singhal's slide deck will be up on LMS. A recording of the session should be available with LRC in a few days.

Regards,

Sudhir