BUS5PB Principles of Business Analytics Report 1 Sample

BUS5PB Principles of Business Analytics Report 1

Assignment Brief

The first assignment aims to assess analytical thinking as well as technical skills in the use of self-service analytics software packages to develop an analytics solution. You are required to understand the business context, apply the analytics software packages to explore the given dataset to unveil the business insights, and make analytics recommendations. You are also tasked to develop an analytics report to convey your findings.

The Context

In the past two decades, the pharmaceutical, personal care, and nutritional industries have converged to address growing demands in the beauty, health, and wellness market. This convergence has resulted in the formation of the new industry segments – Nutraceuticals, Cosmeceuticals and Nutricosmetics.

• Cosmeceuticals: topical cosmetic products that have medicinal or drug-like benefits (creams and fortified syrups).

• Nutricosmetics: supplementation of nutrients that are formulated for beauty care (both oral and topical).

• Nutraceuticals: products derived from food sources that provide extra health benefits, in addition to the basic nutritional value found in food (dietary supplements and functional food).

These three new segments are mainly driven by an increasing awareness and need for preventive healthcare, natural therapies, and anti-aging products. The annual global growth rate of all three segments is approximately 4%–8%. A noticeable geographical dominance is observed in different segments – China and Japan are key Nutricosmetic markets accounting for 90% of global sales, while the USA dominates the Nutraceutical category at approximately 45%.

You have recently joined a start-up analytics consultancy firm as an Insights Specialist. The first task is to analyse the emergence of these industry segments in Australia. An end-user survey has been already conducted and the data is available for your perusal. Your line-manager has not laid out any specific expectations; however, he has re-iterated the need to ‘understand these industry segments, consumers, the potential markets and opportunities’.

The Survey

Are you a regular consumer of beauty, health and wellness products?(Data was only collected from regular consumers of beauty, health and wellness products.)

Your Tasks

Task 1:

Conduct a critical review of the survey and its outcomes. Suggest improvements to the survey in terms of data coverage and data metrics. You may refer to external sources of information to justify your evaluation.

Task 2:

Develop two analytics solutions to analyse the dataset using data visualisation software packages.

• It’s mandatory to use MS Excel as the first software to build the first visualization dashboard

• It’s mandatory to use Power BI as the second software package to build the second visualization dashboard It is recommended to explore insights among data to pinpoint characteristics of each segment – for example, age or gender distribution for product type.

Task 3:

Based on the insights obtained from the analytics solutions and any external sources of information, recommend effective marketing strategies (market opportunities, targeted customers, channels for campaigns, etc.) for a potential client intending to enter these new industry segments in Australia. You need to decide on the number of recommendations with a brief justification for your choice. Recommendations should refer to visualisations (a combination of diagrams and charts) from your analytics solutions and external references. (Note: You are free to make reasonable assumptions and justifications given the educational nature of this case study.)

Report Guidelines

1. The report should consist of a ‘table of contents’, an ‘introduction’, logically organised sections or topics, a ‘conclusion’ and a ‘list of references’.

2. Choose a fitting sequence of sections or topics for the body of the report. Three sections for the three tasks are essential, you may add other sections deemed relevant.

3. You must include diagrams, tables and charts from the analytics solutions to effectively present your recommendations. (Consider using Alt + Print Screen or Snipping to capture screenshots).

4. Page limit: At least five (5) pages for the main report writing but not more than ten (10) pages.

5. Reports should be written in Microsoft Word (font size 11) and submitted as a Word file. (The PDF file is acceptable.) 

Solution

Introduction

In response to the growing demand for wellness, beauty, and health, the personal care, nutritional, and pharmaceutical industries have combined during the past two decades or so. Three new industry segments have emerged. These include nutricosmetics, cosmeceuticals, and nutraceuticals. Nutraceuticals are nutritional supplements for skin care, whereas cosmeceuticals are topical cosmetics with medicinal or drug-like qualities, such as lotions and supplemented syrups. According to Raja (2016), Nutraceuticals, or food-derived products, are the most recent category. They provide health advantages beyond their basic nutritional value. These three market niches are very new and are primarily being driven by increased awareness; hence, marketing and sales objectives in these respective fields should be addressed. To accomplish this, a survey was sent to 360 respondents, whose replies have been documented and will be further analysed for marketing and sales reporting.

In order to better comprehend ideas linked to such forms of market survey, this report will analyse existing web resources and literature. It will also identify the benefits and drawbacks of the existing survey parameters that has been utilized in this project and, in the end, use MS Excel and PowerBI to analyse data in order to provide answers to specific analytical queries. A completed marketing strategy for the businesses that are operating in this industry will be presented using the documentation of the analysis's conclusions for MBA assignment expert.

Task 1: Critiquing the Survey Method

There are several aspects that need to be explored regarding some of the benefits and drawbacks of the survey that was carried out in order to comprehend the market linked to the provided case situation and its collected survey data. When the survey is modified for visualization and analysis of data in order to carry out a market study, its benefits become evident. Nevertheless, it is first required to draw attention to the survey's shortcomings in order to improve the process of collecting information for market analysis and forecast better outcomes for future sales and research. Among the most significant shortcomings of this specific survey methodology are the following:

Inadequate Survey Queries related to Health Factors: It was vital to get information on the participants' suitable health states because the survey is focused on diet, skincare, and health. It would be beneficial to know whether the respondents had any skin conditions at the time of the survey or if they had any other health information they would want to provide like information related to allergies, preferential dislikes and so on. This would have provided a clearer picture of the health-related factors influencing customers' interest in a specific product category or their respective choice for mode of consumption.

Missing well-defined Data Metrics: The obtained survey records contain several attributes of the respondent’s choices, however, some crucial data metrics are not well defined, that include their income, age and monthly spending prowess. The income and spending amounts being recorded as a range is understandable, however, age should have been recorded as proper whole number values. Also, the range for the spending amounts should have been smaller. It would be ideal to have precise information about each participant's age and a smaller range for their monthly expenditure in related categories in order to conduct a more thorough survey (Cooper and Johnson 2016). This would enable the assessment to be more flexible and precise in terms of screening particular data requirements for responding to specific issues pertaining to sales or marketing.

Lack of detailed Demographic Information: The survey gathers information on participants' gender, income level, age, and state or locality in order to conduct a market study. However, these are considered broader filters that are problematic when it comes to carrying out thorough data analysis for the sales and marketing of any product-based businesses, especially with the size of the nutrition and cosmetics sectors. Gathering more specific demographic information, such as employment and ethnicity, is crucial (Gibson et al. 2017). It might be interesting to learn about the forms of consumption or the type of products that various specialists in the fields of healthcare, beauty, and other relevant occupations are interested in. This can be helpful in providing a more first-hand idea of what the experts are looking for, and hence assist in growing the business through increased acceptance and spread.

Task 2: Data Analysis

MS Excel Data Analysis Dashboard

The dashboard that is presented above was made with the help of MS Excel. The dashboard's layout and style aim to address a few key analytical queries, with the idea of maintaining simplicity in design and focus on analytics. The rationale behind selecting each of the four dashboard views and the results of the visualizations will be referenced to further explain the in-depth study of each view in the table below:

PowerBI Data Analysis Dashboard

Task 3: Marketing Recommendations

Here are some recommendations for clients looking to enter this business based on the dashboard data that have been created, and analysed taking into consideration each of the viewpoints obtained through the insight analysis of the dashboards.

• The most favored products are nutricosmetics. Additionally, as women are the survey's most interested demographic (as per Visual-5), they are also primarily interested in nutricosmetics.

• Additionally, Visual-6 states that those falling in the highest income brackets also like Nutricosmetics. According to (Visual-3), these are also the best-rated product categories in the survey. Therefore, this might turn out to be the most lucrative business.

• Females under 40 years of age, who make more than 50,000 AUD should be the target market for the new business.

• Visuals through 1, 6, and 7 include references to this data.

Social media would be the favoured marketing channel for the target audience stated above. Nonetheless, email and post-channel marketing will be favoured in order to reach the somewhat older demographic as referred to from Visual-8.

• It is important to acknowledge that in terms of product form preference, Cosmeceuticals are most suited in food form. Visual-2 states that nutraceuticals are better as beverages and that nutricosmetics are better preferred by people in the form of pills.

• The states of Victoria and South Australia would be the best places to do business in Australia since, according to the Visual-4, these states have the post respondents having the most interest in practically all product types.

Conclusion

It can hence be concluded that it is possible that the merger of the personal care, nutritional, and pharmaceutical businesses has revolutionized the industry and attracted interest from all areas. A survey was done to learn more about the interests of the consumers, and analysis was done using the survey results. Future suggestions for improving the survey included broadening the scope of data gathering and emphasizing more detailed demographic parameters. Nevertheless, according to the analysis of the current survey, visualizations have been generated using two of the most common Microsoft tools for data analytics that are MS Excel and MS Power BI, and the insights support the assertion that the most popular and appropriate product type is nutricosmetics; females should constitute as the target market; the target age bracket is under 40; and social media should be the marketing channel for this demographic.

References

Cooper, I.D. and Johnson, T.P., 2016. How to use survey results. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 104(2), p.174.

Gibson, D.G., Pereira, A., Farrenkopf, B.A., Labrique, A.B., Pariyo, G.W. and Hyder, A.A., 2017. Mobile phone surveys for collecting population-level estimates in low-and middle-income countries: a literature review. Journal of medical Internet research, 19(5), p.e139.

Raja, R.R., 2016. Nutraceuticals and cosmeceuticals for human beings–an overview. American Journal of Food Science and Health, 2(2), pp.7-17.
Spironelli, C., 2019. Cosmetics industry: an analysis of marketing and mass communication strategies.