In this course, you will learn about the marketing process and examine the range of marketing decisions that an organization must make in order to sell its products and services. You will also learn how to think like a marketer, discovering that the focus of marketing has always been on the consumer. You will begin to ask, "Who is the consumer of goods and services?” What does the consumer need? What does the consumer want? Marketing is an understanding of how to communicate with the consumer, and is characterized by four activities:

Creating products and services that serve consumers
Communicating a clear value proposition
Delivering products and services in a way that optimizes value
Exchanging, or trading, value for those offerings
Many people incorrectly believe that marketing and advertising are one in the same. In reality, advertising is just one of many tools used in marketing, which is the process by which firms determine which products to offer, how to price those products, and to whom they should be made available. We will also explore various ways in which marketing departments and independent agencies answer these questions - whether through research, analysis, or even trial-and-error. Once a company identifies its customer and product, marketers must then determine the best way to capture the customer's attention. Capturing the customer's attention may entail undercutting competitors on price, aggressively marketing a product with promotions and advertising (as with "As Seen on TV” ads), or specifically targeting ideal customers. The strategy a marketing firm chooses for a particular product is vital to the success of the product. The idea that "great products sell themselves” is simply not true. By the end of this course, you will be familiar with the art and science of marketing a product/

This course will introduce you to business statistics, or the application of statistics in the workplace. Statistics is a course in the methods for gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data. If you have taken a statistics course in the past, you may find some of the topics in this course familiar. You can apply statistics to any number of fields - from anthropology to hedge fund management - because many of us best interpret data when it is presented in an organized fashion (as it is with statistics). You can analyze data in any number of forms. Summary statistics, for example, provide an overview of a data set, such as the average score on an exam. However, the average does not always tell the entire story; for example, if the average score is 80, it may be because half of the students received 100s and the other half received 60s. This would present a much different story than if everyone in the class had received an 80, which demonstrates consistency. Statistics provides more than simple averages. In this course, you will learn how to apply statistical tools to analyze data, draw conclusions, and make predictions of the future. The course will begin with data distributions, followed by probability analysis, sampling, hypothesis testing, inferential statistics, and, finally, regression. This course is mathematically intensive, and much of what you learn here will deal with things you encounter every day. This course also makes use of spreadsheets, an important tool for working with and making sense of numerical data.