4. Managing Marketing Information to Gain Customer Insights

Customer insights

Fresh understandings of customers & the marketplace derived from marketing information that becomes the basis for creating customer value & relationships.

Marketing information system (MIS)

People & procedures dedicated to assessing information needs, developing the needed information, & helping decicion makers to use the info to generate & validate actionable customer & market insights.

Internal databases

Electronic collections of consumer & market information obtained from data sources within the company network.

Competitive marketing intelligence

The systematic collection & analysis of publicly available information about consumers, competitors & developments in the marketing environment.

Marketing research

The systematic design, collection, analysis, & reporting of data relevant to a specific marketing situation facing an organization.

Exploratory research

Marketing research to gather preliminary information that will help define problems & suggest hypotheses.

Descriptive research

Marketing research to better describe marketing problems, situations, or markets, such as the market potential for a product or the demographics & attitudes of consumers.

Casual research

Marketing research to test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships.

Secondary data

Information that already exists somewhere, having been collected for another purpose.

Primary data

Information collected for the specific purpose at hand. (Research approaches, contact methods, sampling plan, research instruments)

Observational research

Gathering primary data by observing relevant people, actions & situations.

Ethnographic research

A form of observational research that involves sending trained observers to watch & interact w/ consumers in their “natural environments.”

Survey research

Gathering primary data by asking people questions about their knowledge, attitudes, preferences & buying behavior.

Experimemtal research

Gathering primary data by selecting matched groups of subjects, giving them different treatments, controlling related factors & checking for differences in group responses.

Contact methods

Mail, telephone, personal & online (interviewing)

Focus group interviewing

Personal interviewing that involves inviting 6 to 10 people to gather for a few hours w/ a trained interviewer to talk about a product, service or organization. The interviewer “focuses” the group discussion on important issues.

Online marketing research

Collecting primary data online through Internet surveys, online focus groups, Web-based experiments or tracking consumers’ online behavior.

Online focus groups

Gathering a small group of people online w/ a trained moderator to chat abt a product, service or organization & gain qualitative insights abt consumer attitudes & behavior.

Sample

A segment of the population selected for marketing research to represent the population as a whole.

Research instruments

Questionnaires & mechanical devices

Customer relationship management (CRM)

Managing detailed information about individual customers & carefully managing customer touch points to maximize customer loyalty.