Chapter 5 – managing marketing information to gain customer insights
Marketing information and customer insights
Other marketing information considerations
- Customer & market insight helps build customer value and relationships
- Customer insights: fresh understandings of customers and the marketplace derived from
marketing information that become the basis for creating customer value and relationship
o Don’t become customer controlled -> where you basically give everything customers
want
- Marketing information system (MIS): ppl and procedures for assessing information needs,
developing the needed information, and helping decision makers to use the information to
generate and validate actionable customer and market insights
o Assess information needs
o Develop needed info
Assessing marketing information needs
- Consider the need of all users when designing an IS
- Good MIS balances info users would like to have against what they really need and what is
feasible to offer
Developing marketing information
Internal data
- Internal databases: electronic collections of consumer and market information obtained from
data sources within the company’s network
o Assessed cheaply and quickly
o Can be incomplete/ wrong form for making marketing decisions
o Data ages quickly
Marketing intelligence
- Marketing intelligence: the systematic collection and analysis of publicly available information
about consumers, competitors, and development in the marketing environment
o To improve strategic decision making by
Understanding the consumer environment
Assessing and tracking competitors’ actions
Providing early warnings of opportunities
o Competitive intelligence = get early warnings or competitor moves and strategies, new-
product launches, etc
Strategic thinking
o Ethical issues
Marketing research
- Marketing research: the systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data relevant to
a specific marketing situation facing and org
o Provides insight into customer motivations, purchase behaviours, satisfaction
o Can assess market potential & market share
o Measures the effectiveness of pricing product, distribution, promotion
o FOUR steps
Defining the problem and research objectives
Developing the research plan for collecting info
Implementing the research plan – collecting and analyzing the data
Interpreting and reporting the findings
Defining the problem and research objectives
- Exploratory research: marketing research to gather preliminary information that will help define
problems and 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 and attitudes of
consumers
- Casual research: marketing research to test hypothesis abt cause-and-effect relationships
Developing the research plan
- Research plan in the form of a written proposal
- Secondary data: information that already exists somewhere, having been collected for another
purpose
- Primary data: information collected for the specific purpose at hand
Gathering secondary data
- Researches start with this
- Can buy secondary data from outside suppliers
- Commercial online databases: computerized collections of information available from online
commercial sources or via the internet
- Obtained more quickly and at a lower cost
- Can provide info that is either not directly available or would be too expensive to collect
- Sometimes needed information is non-existent
- Evaluate secondary info to be
o Relevant
o Accurate
o Current
o Impartial
Primary data collection
- Primary data must be
o Relevant
o Accurate
o Current
o Unbiased
Research approaches
- Observational research: gathering primary data by observing relevant ppl, actions, and
situations
o Sometimes the only way to get needed info
o Ethnographic research: a form of observational research that involves sending trained
observers to watch and interact w/ consumers in their “natural habitat”
o Fresh customer and market insights
- Survey research: gathering primary data by asking ppl questions abt their knowledge, attitudes,
preferences, and buying behaviour
o *descriptive information*
o Flexible
- Experimental research: gathering primary data by selecting matched groups of subjects, giving
them different treatments, controlling other factors and checking for differences in group
responses
o For causal information
o Tries to explain cause-and-effect relationships
Contact methods
- Mail, telephone, and personal interviewing
o Mail questionnaires -> collects large amnts of info at LOW cost
Not flexible
o Telephone interviewing = greater flexibility
Interview bias
o Personal interviewing
Individual interviewing
Flexible
Group interviewing(6-10 ppl)
Focus group interviewing: personal interviewing that involves inviting 6-
10 ppl to gather for a few hrs with a trained interviewer to talk abt a
product, service, or org. The interviewer “focuses” the group discussion
on important issues
o A qualitative marketing research tool for gaining new insight
into consumer thoughts and feelings