Peer Review

Virtual Customer Demonstrations

Material Detail page

Reviewed:: Jun 29, 2006 by Business

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:: MIT SLoan School of Business Professor Hauser has provided a savvy suite of SIMS
(simulations) to illustrate conjoing anlaysis techniques for market research
and psychological modeling techniques. It has a variety of methods based on
conjoint analysis, and the visitor can interact with them to understand how
consumer preferences and trade-offs are measured. It could be used to supplement
a marketing research class or section discussing conjoint analysis.
Type of Material:: Interactive (virtual web-based) computer simulations of social science-based
research techniques framed for marketing research survey modeling.
Recommended Uses:: Supplementatal teaching aid for statistics and marketing management graduate
level learning scenariois. This could also be used as an in-class
demonstration.
Technical Requirements:: Prior background or academic training in social science research and/or
statistical analyses. Browser considerations should note that some
demonstrations require that pop-ups be enabled.
Identify Major Learning Goals:: Develop higher level (level 6) Bloom Taxonomy of Learning deductive
problem-solving and adative thinking skills for behavioral and anlaytical
marketing research evaluation applications.
Target Student Population:: Second year MBA and post graduate higher education students and EMBA mid-upper
management level executive education learning programs. Definitely not for
beginning or intermediate undergraduate academic scholars or practitioners!
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: Pratical and theorethical knowledge of statistics, psychology, and marketing
management. Well suited for engineering, science-based, and social science
undergraduate majors matriculating into MBA and advanced management education
learning programs. The user should have a foundation of conjoint analysis.

Content Quality

Rating:
Strengths:: Robust collaborative teaching aid suitable for individual and/or team-group PBL
(problem-based learning) and/or SBL (solutions-based learning) applications at
the graduate and above level of business management education and training
level.
Concerns:: Some learners may lack the appropriate background academic and practitioner
career skills necessary to build knowledge and takeaway learning skills from the
applications.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:
Strengths:: Rich interactive web-based platform offers a more indepth and wider breadth of
learner involvment that theory-based instrucitonal delivery of marketing
research content.content
Concerns:: Combining social science and marketing thoery may be too taxing for learners to
link together into a seamless body of working grounding in researching consumer
decision-making!

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:
Strengths:: Powerful scaling and six configurations for different modeling applications.
The site is very professional-looking and attractive. The demonstrations are of
a high quality.
Concerns:: Could be too rich in higher order reasoning and inductive theory building for
some learners to grasp and apply to "real-world" marketing applications. Some
instructions were unclear. The site is interactive but does not provide
feedback to the user.

Other Issues and Comments:: A well framed and executed set of tools for creating a solid grounding in
consumer marketing research survey constucts. Well done, albeit perhaps
arguably too skewed towards the virtual vision of research rather than towards
creating paradigms for understanding hypotheses testing.
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