Ideas to teach Marketing Research #1
In this series, I am planning on documenting my journey as I build a course on marketing research.
Over the course of the last one month, I have been thinking about how best to deliver the marketing research course next year. I am clear about two things here. One, the students will have to be made to shed their fear of coding. While this may be a for non issue MBA students at the IITs and IIMs, in most private colleges, a majority of students are from BBA, BMS, and BCom backgrounds and have no prior experience with coding. Two, students will have to experience the joy of exploring data and getting insights that they can use from data. These aforementioned factors have caused me to be on a constant lookout for useful anecdotes, interesting datasets, and other tools that can make the teaching process more fun for the students.
In that spirit, I stumbled upon the shark tank dataset compiled by user: shivavashishtha at Kaggle (you can find the dataset here: https://www.kaggle.com/shivavashishtha/shark-tank-india-dataset). The dataset contains the following information:
- Episode_number – Number of the episode
- Pitch_number – Number of the Pitch
- Idea – behind the brand building Deal
- Deal – done or not ; 1 – YES, 0 – NO
- Pitcheraskamount – Amount asked by the pitchers
- Ask_equity – Equity offered by the pitchers
- Ask_valuation – Valuation asked by pitchers
- Deal_amount – Final Deal Amount
- Deal_equity – Final Deal equity percentage
- Deal_valuation – Final Valuation of Company after Deal
- Totalsharksinvested – Number of total sharks invested in the Company
- Amountpershark – Amount per shark invested
- Equitypershark – Final Equity gained per Shark
And information about the presence and absence of individual ‘sharks’.
Although I had not watched shark tank myself until last night, I had heard a lot about it from my friends and family members. I also learnt that similar programs have broadcast in the west. Given that Shark tank India is a fresh new series (that my students watch with rapt attention, according to the class representatives), I thought it would be a nice idea to start the course by digging into the dataset and making them ask questions and answer them from the data we have.
My plan is to start the class by showing the students the following tweet.
And ask them what they think the show is like, and understanding the items they like and don’t like about the program,
After a little bit of discussing the show, and sharing having some fun, I plan on delving a little bit into somewhat more serious questions. Specifically, questions like “what deal sizes do they think the sharks like to invest on” and “Is there a relationship between the ask and deal equity”. (Special note, if some of these terms sound new to you, I recommend that you watch one or two episodes to get a hang of it. That is precisely what I did last night. You may also have a look at this useful article that sort of explains the program in some detail: https://startuptalky.com/shark-tank-india-benefits-to-sharks/ ).
Here are some of the charts that I just created to talk about various aspects of the data.
I also thought I should put up some logistic regression into the mix, and introduce them to the concept (should work on how to explain this to them later on in the course). In the first episode of Shark Tank Season 1, Ashneer says something along the lines of “others don’t make offers until he makes an offer” (this is actually how far I got before dozing off last night). I thought I would check that out. This is what the data shows. Looks like Ashneer was right. Seems like Asheer offering a deal does mean something (Aman too*).
As always, any thoughts and suggestions are welcome. I really want my students to shed their fear of data and start embracing it and learn to gather insights from it.