Marketing professionals grappling with mountains of customer information welcome
information technology that helps them make sense of what customers want, but
finding people with the skills to use these tools effectively is a problem.
“There’s a real shortage of people that understand marketing management and
who also have the technical skills to take advantage of the latest information
technology,” says Dan Putler, an assistant professor of Marketing.
The range of IT applications in marketing continues to expand with tools for
data mining, salesforce automation, customer-relationship management, and e-marketing.
However, using these tools effectively requires developments on two fronts —
research and teaching, says Marketing Assoc. Prof. John Claxton.
On the research front, implementation issues continue to present pressing
concerns, he says, while on the teaching front, programs that offer both technical
and marketing perspectives are clearly in short supply.
It was this combination of research and teaching issues that led to the formation
of the Marketing@Techedge Teaching and Research Laboratory (m@te LAB), an initiative
of the Marketing division of the Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration.
The goal of the m@te LAB is to build teaching and research focused on IT applications
in marketing practice. Although formalized this year, these activities build
on faculty work started as early as the 1970s and an MBA-level course, Marketing
Tech Products and Services, that has been offered at UBC for the past five years.
A guiding principle behind all of the lab’s activities has been to consult
with the business community early on to identify the issues seen as critical
to their immediate and future business success.
“We’re asking practitioners for their views regarding both research and teaching
issues,” says Claxton. “We are particularly pleased to be working with a lead-user
advisory team.”
The team is composed of senior marketing professionals from BCAA, Bryant Fulton
& Shee, Future Shop, HSBC, Intra-west, Overwaitea Food Group, Rogers Video,
Seagate Software, TELUS, and VanCity.”
Another link with business comes in the form of alliances with software vendors.
The lab recently received the donation of Enter-priseMiner, leading-edge data
mining software from the SAS Institute. The company also installed and provided
training for faculty who will be using the software.
“Relationships such as this are absolutely essential if we intend to provide
a leading-edge environment for these teaching and research activities,” says
Chuck Weinberg, chair of the Marketing division.
For more information on the lab, visit the Web site at www.commerce.ubc.ca/m@te/.
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