Instruction: Design an experiment to measure the causal impact of different marketing strategies on consumer purchasing decisions.
Context: This question tests the candidate's ability to apply experimental and quasi-experimental designs in a marketing context, aiming to isolate the effect of marketing interventions on consumer behavior.
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To start, let’s clarify our goal: We aim to estimate the causal effect of different marketing strategies (e.g., email campaigns, social media ads, discount offers) on consumer purchasing decisions. To achieve this, we must design an experiment that allows us to observe differences in purchasing behavior that can directly be attributed to the marketing strategy employed, rather than to external factors.
The core of our experimental design will be a randomized controlled trial (RCT), the gold standard for causal inference. This involves randomly assigning a population of potential customers into two groups: a treatment group that will be exposed to the marketing strategy in question and a control group that will not....