Beyond simple pivot tables

You might wonder why we need a book on Marketing Analytics Using Python. Surely you can do the same thing using the trustworthy combination of Excel, some VLOOKUPs, and some PivotTables. This is a widespread misunderstanding, and the problem stems from not realizing what the entire analytical process should look like and why. The following diagram shows the process in a simplified way:

Figure 1.3 – Analytical process

As an analyst, you should have the preceding workflow that will generally go through the following tasks:

1. You should, first and foremost, scope out the question. You need to understand what is being asked of you clearly. Remember that your stakeholders have immense business knowledge and a problem they need to solve, but more often than not, the question might not be clearly defined.
2. You must extract the correct datasets to explore the problem space. This might be as easy as extracting a CSV from...