Imagine you graduate from UAB and get your dream job with your dream company. You have a six-figure salary plus some pretty awesome benefits and company perks. Also, you working directly with the Chief Marketing Officer of the company. Congratulations, you did it! You have a great job and you're making tons of money right out of college doing the thing you love at a place you love. I am so happy for you!

Now, imagine on your first day at work, the Chief Marketing Officer walks into your corner office and tells you Help me understand our customers better so that we can market our products to them in a better manner! Put it in a report and bring me what you have by the end of the day."

Yikes!!! What do you do? Where do you start? What did you learn in school (and can remember) that will help you solve this problem? Hurry, you only have until the end of the day!! Okay, now stop imagining, it's not real and the nightmare is over :)

But seriously, this can happen to you. This is the type of broad question companies commonly ask their marketing employees all the time, and many newer employees don't know where to begin to solve the problem. Not you, however. You will be prepared on day one because you are going to learn how to perform a cluster analysis using the K-means clustering analysis technique.

K-means clustering works great with large data sets, such as those commonly called "Big Data" with millions of observations (think rows on an Excel spreadsheet). This analysis can help you find structures or patterns within the data without them being tied to a specific outcome, so you can "understand our customers better" as the Chief Marketing Officer wants. K-means is one of the most widely used analytical techniques for creating clusters, aka subgroups, aka segments, so there is a strong chance you will need to know this analytical technique at your next job.

Here is what you need to do for this assignment:

1. Watch the video below that shows step-by-step how to perform a K-means cluster analysis. It also helps you understand this assignment better if you have chapter the chapter and lecture slides already (see materials).
2. Open the Excel data file K_Means Analysis Assignment (Student).xlsx
3. Perform a K-means analysis. Use K=2 when you begin your analysis (this will make more sense after you watch the video).
4. Show all your work in the spreadsheet. Don't delete your previous iterations of the analysis.
5. When your K-means analysis is finished, make a small table with 2 columns, with the first column labeled Cluster 1 and the second column labled Cluster 2. Then assign each person to either cluster 1 or 2 by putting their name in the appropriate column. Highlight this table so I can find it easily in your spreadsheet.
6. Finally, submit your work in the Excel spreadsheet here.