Marketing Research with SAS Enterprise Guide

Kristof Coussement, Nathalie Demoulin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138440852
• eBook ISBN: 9781351919722
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Many marketing researchers, companies and business schools need to use statistical procedures and accurately interpret the result, that's why the SAS® Enterprise Guide software, which uses a user-friendly drag-and-drop menu to extract statistical information, is so popular. Marketing Research with SAS Enterprise Guide includes 236 screen shots to provide a detailed explanation of the SAS® Enterprise Guide software. Based on a step-by-step approach and real managerial situations, it guides the reader to an understanding of the use of statistical methods. It demonstrates ways of extracting information, collating it to provide reliable knowledge, and how to use these insights to solve day-to-day business and research problems. SAS ® offers a stand-alone marketing research tool by means of the SAS® OnDemand Enterprise Guide solution for academics and business professionals. This straightforward, pragmatic reference manual will help: -

Chapter 1

Getting Started with SAS Enterprise Guide

Objectives

1. Introduce the SAS Enterprise Guide software and its requirements.

2. Understand the structure of the SAS Enterprise Guide work space.

3. Understand the usefulness of creating projects.

4. Learn how to create and add data sources to the SAS Enterprise Guide environment.

5. Describe the different types of data one can use.

6. Learn basic data manipulation tasks like filtering data, creating new variables by using an expression, recoding variables and sorting data.

1.1. What is SAS Enterprise Guide?

SAS is the leader in business and statistical analytics software and services, and it is the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 45,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW®.

SAS Enterprise Guide provides a SAS graphical interface that helps the marketer exploit the power of SAS and publish dynamic results in a Microsoft Windows client application. This solution is the preferred SAS interface for business analysts, programmers and statisticians and it is the key application in SAS Business Intelligence offerings.

The benefits of using SAS Enterprise Guide are threefold:

1. Provide a self-service environment for analysts and statisticians. Only SAS Enterprise Guide integrates the extensive array of analytics with the power of SAS software in an efficient, friendly graphical user interface application. Business analysts can produce the analyses and distribute reports they need, freeing IT to focus on other strategic projects.

2. Provide easy access to data sources through a SAS graphical interface. SAS Enterprise Guide is the only front end that provides a guided mechanism to access data across multiple platforms, operating systems and databases. A centralized system for managing access to corporate data ensures that users have appropriate access privileges while empowering them to react quickly to evolving business conditions.

3. Make reporting and analytics available to everyone. The ability to develop and deploy customized tasks enables users to extend the core functionality to create custom wizards, which can be distributed easily as needed. Information can be delivered through an established publishing framework with the ability to publish dynamic, interactive content to Microsoft Office and Web users.

1.2. Software Requirements

The computer on which the SAS software runs is referred to as the SAS server. Usually the SAS server will be the same computer as the SAS software is installed on, referred to as the Local Computer. This book assumes that the technical environment has already been set up. Below you will find a short overview of the different IT requirements necessary to install SAS Enterprise Guide. The SAS Enterprise Guide software can run on different operating systems such as Windows (x86-32): Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7 (Enterprise, Business, Ultimate and Home editions supported). Additional SAS software, that is, Base SAS, is required to get SAS Enterprise Guide installed. More detailed information can be found at http://support.sas.com/documentation/installcenter/.

The examples in this book are shown using SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3, running SAS 9.2 under Windows 7 Professional. Slight differences could be observed compared to previous and future releases of SAS Enterprise Guide.

If you have any additional questions or remarks concerning the technical requirements of running SAS Enterprise Guide on your computer, we advise you to contact your local SAS representative or to visit http://support.sas.com.

1.3. Touring the Environment

When one launches SAS Enterprise Guide, the software opens with the Welcome to SAS Enterprise Guide window. At this step, an existing project can be opened or a new task (project, SAS program or data) can be created.

The SAS Enterprise Guide environment stores all relevant information about a specific analysis in a Project (.egp extension), which bundles the different data sources, the different analyses or Tasks that were run and the results output to the user. It contains further user-specific information on how and why particular decisions are made at a given point in the analysis flow. The authors suggest creating a separate project answering a specific research question. This habit will facilitate the analyses by delivering a better project structure to the marketing analyst. Project files can be saved, copied, reopened and adapted if necessary.

The default SAS Enterprise Guide interface as shown below consists of three different parts...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Author Biographies
• 1 Getting Started with SAS Enterprise Guide
• 2 Descriptive Analysis
• 3 Exploratory Factor Analysis
• 4 Cluster Analysis
• 5 Hypothesis Testing
• 6 Correlations
• 7 Regression Analysis
• 8 Discriminant Analysis
• Index