MARKETING 2201 CH 4

Big data: huge and complex data sets generated by today’s sophisticated information generation, collection, storage, and analysis technologies.

• marketers don’t need more information; they need better information. And they need to make better use of the information they already have.

Customer insights: marketing info understandings of customers and the marketplace that become the basis for creating customer value, engagement, and relationships

Marketing Information System: people and procedures dedicated to assessing information needs, developing the needed information, and helping decision-makers use the information to generate and validate actionable customer and market insights.

1. MIS begins with info users, marketing managers, and others who need marketing information and insights to assess info needs

2. Interacts with the marketing environment to develop needed info through internal company databases, marketing intelligence activities, and marketing research

3. Helps users analyze and use info to develop customer insights and make marketing decisions

Internal databases: Collections of consumer and market information obtained from data sources within the company’s network.

• Marketing department: Furnishes information on customer characteristics and preferences

• Marketing channel: provide data on sales transactions

• Customer service department: Keeps records of customer satisfaction, inquiries, or service problems

• Accounting department: provides detailed records of sales, costs, and cash flows

• Operations: reports on production, shipments, and inventories

• Salesforce: reports on reseller reactions and competitor activities

Competitive marketing intelligence: Systematic monitoring, collection, and analysis of publicly available information about consumers, competitors, and developments in the marketplace

• Goal is to improve strategic decision-making by understanding the consumer environment, assessing and tracking competitors’ actions, and providing early warnings of opportunities and threats

• Companies actively monitor competitors’ activities through web and social media sites.

Marketing research: Systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data relevant to a specific marketing situation facing an organization. 

• gives marketers insights into customer motivations, purchase behavior, and satisfaction.

MARKETING RESEARCH PROCESS:

DEFINE PROBLEM AND RESEARCH OBJECTIVES:

1. After the problem has been defined carefully, they must set the research objectives. A marketing research project might have one of three types of objectives:

• Exploratory research: Gather preliminary information that will help define the problem and suggest hypotheses

• Descriptive research: Describe things, such as the market potential for a product or the demographics and attitudes of consumers who buy the product

• Casual research: Test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships

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2. The research plan outlines existing data sources and spells out the specific research approaches researchers will use to gather new data. The research plan can call for gathering secondary data, primary data, or both.

• Secondary data: Information that already exists somewhere, having been collected for another purpose

  • Researchers can rarely obtain all the data they need from secondary sources.

  • Cheaper and quicker to get than primary data

• Primary data: Information collected for the specific purpose at hand.

PLANNING PRIMARY DATA COLLECTION:

RESEARCH APPROACHES:

Observational research: gathering primary data by observing relevant people, actions, and situations.

• Ethnographic research: sending observers to watch and interact with consumers in their “natural environments.”

Survey Research: Gathering primary data by asking people questions about their knowledge, attitudes, preferences, and buying behavior 

• Very flexible and can get info in many situations in person, by phone, mail, or online

• Some people are unable tor unwilling to answer

Experimental research: Selecting matched groups of participants, giving them different treatments, controlling unrelated factors, and checking for differences in group responses

CONTACT METHODS:

Mail: 

• Good: Large response at low cost, unbiased, honest

• Bad: Not flexible and takes lomg to complete with low response rates

Telephone:

• Good: Gather info quickly, flexible, can get into more details

• Bad: high cost, unwilling to respond, bias

Personal Interview:

• Individual: talking with people in their homes or offices, on the street, or in shopping malls. 

  • Good: Flexible

  • Bad: High cost

• (Online) Focus Group: Invite small groups of people to meet with a trained moderator to talk about a product, service, or organization (normally paid) 

  • Good: Researcher can not only hear but observe facial expressions, body movements, group interactions, and conversational flows

  • Bad: Small sample so hard to generalize , can be dishonest

Online: internet and mobile surveys

• Good: Suited for quantitative research, fast and cheap, high response rates

• Bad: Hard to control whos in the sample

SAMPLING PLAN:

Sample: segment of the population selected for marketing research to represent the population as a whole. Designing the sample requires three decisions:

• Who is to be studied (sampling unit)

• How many people should be included (sample size)

• How should the people in the sample be chosen (sampling procedure)

RESEARCH INSTRUMENTS:

Questionnaires: The most common tool for collecting data, whether in person, by phone, email, or online. Very Flexible

• Closed-ended questions: Respondents choose from provided options, such as multiple-choice or scale questions. These are easier to interpret and analyze.

• Open-ended questions: Respondents answer in their own words, providing deeper insights. These are especially useful in exploratory research to understand opinions without limiting responses.

Mechanical instruments examples:

• People meters (track program viewership on TVs)

• Retailers use checkout scanners to record purchases.

• GPS technologies: track consumer movements near stores

3. Implement the research plan by collecting, processing, and analyzing the information.

4. Market researchers must analyze findings, draw conclusions, and present them to management in a clear and actionable way.

Marketing analytics: Analysis tools, technologies, and processes by which marketers dig out meaningful patterns in big data to gain customer insights and gauge marketing performance

Marketing information system must make information readily available to managers:

• Regular performance reports, intelligence updates, and reports on the results of research studies.

• Intranet: Internal network accessible only by employees of the organization.

• Extranet: Extended internal network accessible by authorized external users (partners, suppliers, customers).

• CRM system tool that helps businesses manage customer relationships, improve sales and marketing efforts, and enhance customer service.