Customers

Understand how consumer needs, preferences, and purchasing behaviors drive marketing strategies.

Competitors

Analyze how businesses monitor competitors to differentiate their offerings and maintain a competitive edge

Big data

refers to the huge and complex data sets generated by today’s sophisticated information generation, collection, storage, and analysis technologies

Marketing Information System

Consists of people and procedures to – Assess information needs – Develop the needed information – Help decision makers use the information to generate and validate actionable customer and market insights

Developing Marketing Information

Information needed can be obtained from – Internal databases – Competitive marketing intelligence – Marketing research

Assessing Marketing Information Needs

A good MIS balances the information users would like to have against – What they really need – What is feasible to offer • Obtaining, analyzing, storing, and delivering information is costly. – Firms must decide whether the value of the insight is worth the cost.

Internal databases

are collections of consumer and market information obtained from data sources within the company network.

Competitive Marketing Intelligence

• Offers insights about consumer opinions and their association with the brand • Provides early warnings of competitor strategies and potential competitive strengths and weaknesses • Helps firms to protect their own information • Raises ethical issues

Marketing Research

• Systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data relevant to a specific marketing situation facing an organization • Approaches followed by firms: – Use own research departments – Hire outside research specialists – Purchase data collected by outside firms

Exploratory research

• Used to gather preliminary information • Helps to define problems and suggest hypotheses

Descriptive research

Used to better describe the market potential for a product or the demographics and attitudes of consumers

Causal research

Used to test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships

Secondary Data (1 of 2)

• Information that already exists • Collected for another purpose • Sources: – Company’s internal database – Purchased from outside suppliers – Commercial online databases – Internet search engines

Secondary Data (2 of 2)

• Advantages – Low cost – Obtained quickly – Cannot collect otherwise • Disadvantages – Potentially Irrelevant – Inaccurate – Dated – Biased

Observational research

Gathering primary data by observing relevant people, actions, and situations

Ethnographic research

Sending trained observers to watch and interact with consumers in their natural environment

Survey research

Asking people questions about their knowledge, attitudes, preferences, and buying behavior

Experimental research

Selecting matched groups of subjects, giving them different treatments, controlling related factors, and checking for differences in group responses

Mail questionnaires

are used to collect large amounts of information at a low cost per respondent.

Telephone interviewing

gathers information quickly, while providing flexibility.

Personal interviewing methods include

– Individual interviewing – Group interviewing

Online Marketing Research • Data is collected through

– Internet surveys – Online focus groups – Web-based experiments – Tracking consumers’ online behavior

Online listening

Provides valuable insights into what consumers are saying or feeling about a brand

Behavioral targeting

Uses online consumer tracking data to target advertisements and marketing offers to specific consumer

Social targeting

Mines individual online social connections and conversations from social networking sites

sample

is a segment of the population selected to represent the population as a whole

Decisions required for sampling design

– Sampling unit - People to be studied – Sample size - Number of people to be studied – Sampling procedure - Method of choosing the people to be studied

Implementing the Research Plan

Data collection • Researchers should guard against various problems. – Techniques and technologies – Data quality – Timeliness Processing the data • Check for accuracy • Code for analysis Analyzing the data • Tabulate results • Compute statistical measures

Interpreting and Reporting Findings

• Responsibilities of the market researcher: – Interpret the findings – Draw conclusions – Report findings to management • Responsibilities of managers and researchers: – Work together closely when interpreting research results – Share responsibility for the research process and resulting decisions

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) (1 of 2)

• Managing detailed information about individual customers • Carefully managing customer touch points to maximize customer loyalty • Consists of software and analysis tools that – Integrate customer information from all sources – Analyze data in depth – Apply the results

Marketing analytics

consists of the analysis tools, technologies, and processes by which marketers dig out meaningful patterns in big data to gain customer insights and gauge marketing performance

Distributing and Using Marketing Information

• MIS must make information readily available for decision making. – Routine information for decision making – Non-routine information for special situations • Intranets and extranets facilitate the information-sharing process.

Marketing Research in Small Businesses and Nonprofit Organizations

Obtaining good marketing insights • Secondary data collection • Observation • Surveys • Experiments Responsibility of managers • Think carefully about the research objectives • Formulate questions in advance • Recognize the biases introduced by smaller samples and less skilled researchers • Conduct the research systematically

International Marketing Research

• The problems faced include – Dealing with diverse markets – Finding good secondary data in foreign markets – Developing good samples – Reaching respondents – Handling differences in culture, language, and attitudes toward marketing research • The cost of research is high, but the cost of not doing it is higher.

Intrusions on Consumer Privacy (1 of 2)

• Failure to address privacy issues results in – Angry, less cooperative consumers – Increased government intervention • Best approaches for researchers: – Asking only for the information needed – Using the information responsibly to provide customer value – Avoiding sharing the information without the customer’s permission

Misuse of Research Findings

• Few advertisers rig their research designs or deliberately misrepresent the findings. • Solutions: – Development of codes of research ethics and standards of conduct – Companies must accept responsibility to protect consumers’ best interests and their own