With the fall semester upon us, this is a good time to consider how Marketing Engineering can bring skills and insights to your marketing students. The Marketing Engineering team is busy developing our next release as well as new cases… which will be available for the Spring term.

We appreciate your continued support and always look forward to your suggestions to further improve Marketing Engineering.

This issue contains:

• ME>XL Release 1.5 Now Available:
  • Release 1.5 is now available to your students. This release introduces a new model, Latent Class Segmentation, along with several other minor enhancements to other models.
  • A new case, Ford Hybrid Car, is included in Release 1.5 giving students exposure to new product forecasting using the Bass model.
• Marketing Engineering for Excel Newcomers:
  • We welcomed 21 new Universities as users of Marketing Engineering for Excel during the last academic year.
• Instructor Forum: License Renewal and New Cases:
  • Software license renewal
  • Call for case submission
• Upcoming Events:
  • Our popular Instructor Webinar Series is being continued this year. Enroll now by visiting the webinar registration page.

To connect with us, please contact us through the support center.

Please pass this newsletter on to your colleagues who can subscribe by sending a subscription email.

All the best,
Gary Lilien, Penn State University 
Arvind Rangaswamy, Penn State University
Arnaud De Bruyn, ESSEC Business School

ME>XL Release 1.5 Now Available

We are pleased to announce Marketing Engineering for Excel Release 1.5 is now available to everyone and will be the version that students download this year. (This release was available to instructors as of April 2009).

Included in this release is the Ford Hybrid Car case, a topical case which allows students to work with our Bass forecasting model for forecasting the time path of adoptions of products and technologies. If you missed Dr. Rangaswamy's webinar on Bass model (March 18) you'll find it at our website under Archived Webinars.

While several minor enhancements are included with this release, of particular note is our new Latent Class (LC) Segmentation model. This model may be advanced for some of your students, but we hope it may be useful for your research, or use by your more advanced students. Latent class segmentation techniques reveal segment structures among customers that are unknown a priori. Thus, LC segmentation is particularly useful for determining unexpected groupings of customers that may point to new ways of identifying and targeting customers. Our implementation of LC supports variables of mixed scale (both nominal and interval-scaled variables), not available in our standard segmentation. Also, it allows you to explore numerous segmentation solutions with a single run, which enables automatic determination of number of segments, as well as identification of niche segments in the market. However, typically, LC segmentation requires more data (more respondents) than traditional segmentation methods.

Marketing Engineering for Excel Newcomers

We are pleased Marketing Engineering and Marketing Engineering for Excel is being adopted by new faculty and students and are working hard to ensure our offering brings enhanced value to the teaching/learning process.

Over 3,000 students used ME>XL during the last academic year and many new instructors were added to our growing list of users.

The following Universities are among those that adopted ME>XL during the past year. We are pleased to welcome them to the ME>XL family:

Instructor Forum: License Renewal and New Cases

With the start of the new academic year, it is a good time to check the status of your complimentary Marketing Engineering for Excel license. Our faculty colleagues are free to use our software in their academic pursuits, but need to renew their license every year. You may check the status of your license by clicking on "About Marketing Engineering for Excel" under the ME>XL menu in Excel. If you need to renew, please visit the instructor portion of www.decisionpro.biz, download the latest version, and complete the activation process to renew your license for the year.

While we strive to improve and refine our marketing models, current business cases keep the learning experience vibrant for your students. We invite our colleagues to submit any cases they have developed and would like to share with their Marketing Engineering colleagues. We will do the editing, formatting, etc. but would appreciate any efforts you would like to share. Please contact us in the support center for more information.

Upcoming Events

Our Instructor Webinar Series continues this year, with a slightly different format. Several of our webinars have been split into two sessions (45 minutes each), theory and implementation, to allow instructors to better choose their area of interest. New adopters will enjoy the theory session designed to help understand the use of a particular model and how it might fit into a planned academic offering. Current users who need to see the software in action can choose to join the implementation segment of a model (feel free to enroll in either or both the 2-part webinars).

You may enroll in all your selected webinars by visiting the webinar registration page. You will receive a reminder several weeks prior to each session.