By Natalie Mizik and Dominique M. Hanssens

Marketing is both a science (academic discipline) and a managerial practice. Its basic tenet is that marketing decisions and actions—including product, pricing, communication, and distribution decisions—should generate value for the target audiences and for the firm. Because marketing actions are generally costly, value creation efforts by the firms have to result in customer response (such as consumer purchases) that is strong enough to justify the costs and generate value for the firm. Many factors influence consumer demand, and not all of these factors are under control of the marketers. As such, disentangling the effects of multiple factors and assessing the top-line and bottom-line impact of marketing has been and remains a critical challenge.

The academic discipline of marketing has developed and adopted a number of scientific techniques that enable the assessment of marketing impact. Implementation of these techniques in the academe is often referred to as marketing science. Many of these scientific techniques have been transferred to the world of marketing practice, where they are now generally referred to as marketing analytics.  Importantly, the range of applications has reached beyond the marketing function in companies and non-profit organizations to include the domain of public policy and to serve as means to conflict resolution in litigation. While the goals of the intended beneficiaries in marketing (managers), public policy (regulators), and litigation (plaintiffs and defendants) differ, the challenges facing the marketing scientist, policy analyst, and expert witness are rather similar, be it predicting consumer response to a new product introduction or information campaign, assessing the value of an intangible asset, or establishing a causal link between firm or policy maker’s actions and consumer behavior. 

For example, advertising informs consumers of the benefits of purchasing and using a certain product or service. Advertising is costly to the firm, and a typical marketing analytics task is to determine to what extent the additional revenue generated by the advertising campaign exceeds its cost. In a public policy setting, marketing analytics may be used to address a similar question when the target audience is society at large: did a communications campaign to educate citizens about the advantages of vaccines make a meaningful difference in health outcomes in the population? Finally, in a litigation support setting, marketing analytics may be used to assess the loss of revenue and profitability of one brand as a result of false advertising initiated by a competitor. 

‘All practitioners of marketing analytics should seek to leverage the great work that precedes them. Mizik and Hanssens centralized a generation of noteworthy work into one volume. It’s an absolute must for any bookshelf.’

–  John Wallace, Co-Founder and CEO, LiftLab Analytics, Inc., USA

Marketing analytics has been successful in adopting and refining techniques from several academic disciplines, including economics, econometrics, operations research, statistics, psychology, sociology, and computer science. In particular, marketing analytics is equally adept at using primary and secondary data sources, and is equally motivated by research objectives of description, prediction, and causal inference. This multi-disciplinary nature of the field has motivated us to showcase the various analytical marketing methods and their high-impact real-life applications in this Handbook of Marketing Analytics.

The Handbook has thirteen methods chapters that provide an overview of specific marketing analytics methods in some technical detail and twenty-two case studies and applications that present thorough discussion and examples of the use of these methods in marketing management, public policy, and litigation support domains. The contributing authors are recognized authorities in their area of specialty.

The Second Edition presents twenty-six new authors and entirely new or significantly updated content in most of the chapters. For example, in the Methods chapters section, the Machine Learning chapter by Yoganarasimhan and Rafieian and the Meta Analysis chapter by McShane and Bockenholt present all new content. Further, we have added several new applications and methodological reviews in the Marketing, Public Policy, and Litigation sections that testify to the growing importance and use of marketing analytics in practice. The Public Policy and the Litigation Support applications sections present almost all entirely new content chapters.

The section on Litigation Support applications, in particular, has become more prominent in the Second Edition, with many new contributions discussing the applicability and use of analytics. For example, an entirely new chapter on causal inference in litigation, “Causal Methods to Assess Economic Harm” is offered by the 2021 Nobel Prize laureate David Card, with coauthors Daniel Rubinfeld, Samid Hussain, and Matteo Li Bergolis. The collection of chapters focusing on Conjoint methods in litigation is significantly expanded with three provocative new contributions by Akemann, Reed-Arthurs, and Zona, Reibstein and Vigil, and Befurt, Eggers, and Hauser.

Why do we see more interest and more contributions in the litigation domain now? Empirical methods discussed in this volume offer reliable tools that can address important questions that have increasingly arisen in litigation, and, in recent years, courts have become more open to and accepting of empirical methods and marketing analytical techniques to help answer these questions. While similar to the marketing management and public policy applications of analytical methods, where intellectual property, competitive intelligence, or privacy concerns typically prevent public sharing of the data, findings, and analytical models, applications of analytical methods in litigation support can be publicly disclosed once a case goes to trial. As a result, litigation is one domain where we can see the scope and the value impact of the analytic techniques reviewed in this Handbook.

We hope that this collection of outstanding contributions on methods and their applications will be educational and inspirational to our readers, whether they are academics or practitioners in the areas of marketing, public policy, or litigation. 

Natalie Mizik is a Professor of Marketing and the J. Gary Shansby Endowed Chair in Marketing Strategy at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington, USA

Dominique M. Hanssens is the Distinguished Research Professor of Marketing at the Anderson School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Handbook of Marketing Analytics (publishing June 2026 – TBC) is available to pre-order in hardback here.

The eBook version will become available to purchase once published here.