SCANNING THE MARKETING

ENVIRONMENT & MARKETING

RESEARCH
LECTURE 4
 HOW DO YOU SCAN THE ENVIRONMENT
AND GATHER CUSTOMER INSIGHTS?

• Marketers have a major responsibility of identifying significant

marketplace changes and gathering customer insights.
• They do this primarily through two ways: 1) disciplined methods for
collecting information; 2) time spent interacting with customers and
observing competitors and other outside groups.
• Both of these ways can be executed by developing a strong Marketing
Information System (MIS).
 MARKETING INFORMATION
SYSTEM (MIS)
• 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.

• MIS relies on: a) an internal records system; b) a marketing intelligence

system; c) a marketing research system.
MIS: INTERNAL RECORDS
IR: Order-to-Payment Cycle
 IR: Sales
Information
Systems
• Walmart operates a sales
and inventory data
warehouse that captures
data on every item for
every customer, every
store, every day and
refreshes it every hour.
 IR: Databases
• Companies organize their information into customer, product and salesperson
databases-and then combine their data.
• The customer database will contain every customer’s name, address, past
transactions, and sometimes even demographics and psychographics (activities,
interests, and opinions).
• Instead of sending mass mails of a new offer to every customer in its database,
a company will rank its customers according to factors such as purchase
recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM) and send the offer to only the
highest-scoring customers.
 IR: Data
Warehousing
• A data warehouse is a central
repository of information that can be
analyzed to make more informed
decisions.
• Data flows into a data warehouse
from transactional systems, relational
databases, and other sources,
typically on a regular cadence.
• Business analysts, data engineers,
data scientists, and decision makers
access the data through business
intelligence (BI) tools, SQL clients,
and other analytics applications.
IR: Data Mining
• Data mining is the process
of sorting through large data
sets to identify patterns and
relationships that can help
solve business problems
through data analysis.
• Data mining techniques and
tools enable enterprises to
predict future trends and
make more-informed
business decisions.
 MIS: MARKETING INTELLIGENCE
SYSTEM
• A Marketing Intelligence System is a set of procedures and sources that managers use to obtain everyday
information about developments in the marketing environment.

• The Internal Records (IR) system supplies results data, but the Marketing Intelligence System supplies happenings
data.

• Marketing managers collect marketing intelligence in a variety of different ways, such as by reading books,
newspapers, and trade publications; talking to customers, suppliers, and distributors; monitoring social media on the
Internet; and meeting with other company managers.

• 4 components of Marketing Intelligence: Competitor analysis, Product evaluation, Market analysis, Customer
understanding.
MIS: MARKETING
RESEARCH

• Marketing Research is
defined as the
systematic design,
collection, analysis and
reporting of data and
findings relevant to a
specific marketing
situation facing the
company.
 STEP 1: DEFINE THE PROBLEM
• The first step is to define the problem and the research objectives.

• Clarity on the following helps define the problem appropriately:

• What is to be researched (the content, the scope)?
• Why is to be researched (the decisions that are to be made)?
 STEP 2: DEVELOP THE RESEARCH
PLAN
• The second stage requires developing the most efficient plan for gathering
the required information.

• This involves decisions on data sources, research approaches, research

instruments, sampling plan, and contact methods.
 DRP: Data Sources
• Researchers can gather secondary data, primary data, or both.
• Secondary data are data that were collected for another purpose, and
already exist somewhere.
• Primary data are freshly gathered data for a specific purpose or for a
specific research project.
• Researchers usually start with secondary data to see whether the problem can
be partly or wholly solved.
• When the required data do not exist or are dated, inaccurate, incomplete, or
unreliable, the researcher will have to collect primary data.
 DRP: Research Approaches
• Primary data can be collected in 5 ways:
• Through observations (e.g., Ethnographic research)
• Focus groups
• Surveys
• Behavioral data
• Experiments
 DRP: Research Instruments
• Marketing researchers have a choice of 3 main instruments in collecting
primary data:
• Questionnaires

• Qualitative measures (e.g., word associations, projective techniques, laddering, etc.)

• Technological devices (e.g., galvanometers, tachistoscope, audiometers, etc.)

 DRP: Sampling Plan
• After deciding on the research approach and instruments, the marketing
researcher must design a sampling plan. This calls for three decisions:
• Sampling unit: Whom should we survey?
• Sample size: How many people should we survey?
• Sampling procedure: How should we choose the respondents?
 STEP 3: COLLECT THE
INFORMATION
• The data collection phase of marketing research is generally the most expensive and
the most prone to error.
• Internationally, one of the biggest obstacles to collecting information is the need to
achieve consistency.
• There are primarily four ways to collect information:
• By mail
• By telephone
• In person
• Online
 STEP 4: ANALYZE THE
INFORMATION
• The next step in the process is to extract findings by tabulating the data
and developing summary measures.
• The researchers now compute averages and measures of dispersion for the
major variables and apply some advanced statistical techniques and
decision models in the hope of discovering additional findings.
• They may test different hypotheses and theories, applying sensitivity
analysis to test assumptions and the strength of the conclusions.
 STEP 5: PRESENT THE FINDINGS
• In this step, the researchers presents the findings relevant to the major
marketing decisions facing management.
• Researchers increasingly are being asked to play a more proactive,
consulting role in translating data and information into insights and
recommendations.
• Researchers also need to ensure that research findings are presented in an
understandable and compelling fashion.
 STEP 5: MAKE THE DECISION
• Research findings only provide additional information and insight to
managers.

• Depending on their confidence in the findings, managers decide to use it,

discard it, or carry out more research.
THANK YOU…