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Week 3: Capture Marketing Insights

Solid marketing research is critical for international marketing decisions. Skipping research can prove costly. Good information facilitates strong decisions and competitive advantages. Firms now dedicate staff and departments to capturing marketing insights and spending on research is increasingly important. Superior marketing insights provide significant benefits in competitive markets.

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55 views3 pages

Week 3: Capture Marketing Insights

Solid marketing research is critical for international marketing decisions. Skipping research can prove costly. Good information facilitates strong decisions and competitive advantages. Firms now dedicate staff and departments to capturing marketing insights and spending on research is increasingly important. Superior marketing insights provide significant benefits in competitive markets.

Uploaded by

Nm
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Week 3: Capture Marketing Insights

 Week 3: Capture Marketing Insights

Given the changing global markets and their complexities, solid marketing research is
critical for a host of global marketing decisions.  Skipping the research phase in the
international marketing decision process can often prove to be a costly mistake.  It is
clear that good information will facilitate solid decision making and will aid in
gaining a competitive advantage over competition.  Doing research (whether in the
domestic or international market place) is still a question of benefit versus cost.

To make cross-country comparisons meaningful, companies need to adequately


manage and coordinate their market research projects with a global scope.  Locals
(including the markets themselves) are very important to this process.  For any
meaningful decisions to be reached, the locals must not only be a part of but support
the conclusions of the research effort.  The local support goes a long way to making
overstandardized research instruments and techniques more customized and culturally
sensitive.

Introduction

There is now a very developed industry and activity areas based around ensuring that
firms have access to accurate, actionable and robust market intelligence.

Firms now have dedicated staff and departments based around this activity and
spending on marketing intelligence/research is becoming more important. There are
many views as to the “optimum” percentage of sales revenue that should be allocated
to market intelligence and research.  These benchmarks range widely but there is a
view that firms could be spending up to 10% of sales revenue.

Irrespective of the amount spent on this activity, it is very important and in an


increasingly competitive market, the benefits of superior marketing insights cannot be
overstated.

Internal Records

A marketing information system (MIS) consists of people, equipment, and procedures


to gather, sort, analyze, evaluate, and distribute needed, timely, and accurate
information to marketing decision makers. It relies on internal company records,
marketing intelligence activities, and marketing research.

Marketing intelligence

Marketing Intelligence: Systematic collection and analysis of publicly available


information about competitors and developments in the marketing environment.
Macroenvironment--Trends
A fad is “unpredictable, short-lived, and without social, economic, and political
significance.” A direction or sequence of events with momentum and durability, a
trend is more predictable and durable than a fad; trends reveal the shape of the future
and can provide strategic direction. A megatrend is a “large social, economic,
political, and technological change [that] is slow to form, and once in place, influences
us for some time—between seven and ten years, or longer.”

Analysing the Macro-environment--part one

Any marketing strategy and activity must be developed and actioned against a very
clear understanding of the macro environment.

A well-used framework is:

P             Political, the impact of Government

E              Economic, how economic factors shape the macro environment

S              Social, including key demographic/culture/attitudes/lifestyle etc.

T              Technology, how it is changing and how it impacts at many levels

E              Environment, more about the physical and natural environment

L              Legal, how regulation and the legal system is 

Introduction to marketing research

Marketing research is the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the
marketer through information—information used to identify and define marketing
opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor
marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process.
The marketing research process--part 1

The market research process is a systematic methodology for informing business


decisions.

Perhaps the most important step in the market research process is defining the goals of
the project.  At the core of this is understanding the root question that needs to be
informed by market research.  There is typically a key business problem (or
opportunity) that needs to be acted upon, but there is a lack of information to make
that decision comfortably; the job of a market researcher is to inform that decision
with solid data.  Examples of  “business problems” might be “How should we price
this new widget?” or “Which features should we prioritize?”
By understanding the business problem clearly, you’ll be able to keep your research
focused and effective.  At this point in the process, well before any research has been
conducted, I like to imagine what a “perfect” final research report would look like to
help answer the business question(s).  You might even go as far as to mock up a fake
report, with hypothetical data, and ask your audience: “If I produce a report that looks
something like this, will you have the information you need to make an informed
choice?”  If the answer is yes, now you just need to get the real data.  If the answer is
no, keep working with your client/audience until the objective is clear, and be happy
about the disappointment you’ve prevented and the time you’ve saved.

The marketing research process--part2

In market research, sampling means getting opinions from a number of people, chosen
from a specific group, in order to find out about the whole group. Let's look at
sampling in more detail and discuss the most popular types of sampling used in
market research.

It would be expensive and time-consuming to collect data from the whole population
of a market. Therefore, market researchers make extensive of sampling from which,
through careful design and analysis, marketers can draw information about their
chosen market.

Although much of the content for this week has been based on the first two stages of
the marketing research process model, the final steps of the model are equally as
important (particularly reporting the findings).

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