Marketing Management

By
Shailesh G. Jadhav
Objectives of Today Learning

 Explain the importance of information to get the insight

of customers and marketplaces.
 Define market information system and discuss its parts.
 Understanding Market Research process.
 How companies analyze and use the marketing
information.
 Other issue faced by market researchers.
Customer insights
Fresh understandings of customers and the
marketplace derived from marketing
information that become the basis for
creating customer value and relationships.
Marketing Information System (MIS)
People 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.
Assessing Marketing Information Needs
• A good MIS balances the information users
would like to have against:
• What they really need
• What is feasible to offer
• Obtaining, analyzing, storing, and delivering
information using an MIS is expensive.
• Firms must decide whether the value of the
insights gained from more information is
worth the cost.
Developing Marketing Information’s

Electroniccollections of consumer and market

information within a company’s network
Advantage: Information can be accessed
quickly and economically.
Disadvantages:
◦ Data ages rapidly and may be incomplete.
◦ Maintenance and storage of data is expensive.
 Observing consumers
Quizzing the company’s own
employees
Benchmarking competitors’
products
Researching on the Internet
Monitoring social media
buzz

Advantages:
◦ Gain insights about consumer opinions and their association
with the brand
◦ Gain early warnings of competitor strategies, new product
launches or changing markets, and potential competitive
strengths and weaknesses
◦ Help firms to protect their own information
Disadvantage:
◦ May involve ethical issues
Systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of
data
◦ Relevant to a specific marketing situation facing an
organization

Approaches followed by firms:

◦ Use own research departments
◦ Hire outside research specialists
◦ Purchase data collected by outside firms
Market Research

 Meaning
 Growth of Marketing Research
 When Marketing Research is
Unnecessary
 Scope of Marketing Research
 Limitation of Marketing Research
The American Marketing Association (AMA) has
defined marketing research as follows:

 Marketing Research is the function which 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.

 Marketing research specifies the information required to

address these issues; designs the” method for collecting
information; manages and implements the data collection
process; analyses the results; and communicates the
findings and their implications.
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.

Causal research
Marketing research to test hypotheses about cause-and-effect
relationships
Developing the
Research Plan

Outlines sources of existing data

Spells out:
◦ Specific research approaches
◦ Contact methods
◦ Sampling plans
◦ Instruments that researchers will use to gather
new data
Research Plan contd.
Should be presented in a written proposal
Topics covered in a research plan:
◦ Management problems and research objectives
◦ Information to be obtained
◦ How the results will help management’s
decision making
◦ Estimated research costs
◦ Type of data required
Secondary Data

Information that already exists

◦ Collected for another purpose
Sources:
◦ Company’s internal database
◦ Purchased from outside suppliers
◦ Commercial online databases
◦ Internet search engines
Secondary Data

Advantages Disadvantages

●
Can be obtained quickly ●
Researchers may not get
and at a low cost
all the data they need
●
Can provide data that an
individual company cannot
●
Information might not be
collect on its own very usable
Primary Data
Information collected for the specific
purpose at hand
Table 4.1 - Planning Primary
Data Collection
 Research Approaches

Observational research

●
Gathering primary data by observing relevant people, actions, and situations
●
Ethnographic research: Sending trained observers to watch and interact with consumers in their natural environments

Survey research

●
Asking people questions about their knowledge, attitudes, preferences, and
buying behavior

Experimental research

●
Selecting matched groups of subjects, giving them different treatments,
controlling related factors, and checking for differences in group responses
Mail, Telephone, and
Personal Interviewing
Mail questionnaires are used to collect
large amounts of information at a low cost
per respondent.
Telephone interviewing gathers
information quickly, while providing
flexibility.
Personal interviewing methods:
◦ Individual interviewing
◦ Group interviewing
Table 4.2 - Strengths and Weaknesses of
Contact Methods
Online Marketing Research
Data is collected through:
◦ Internet surveys
◦ Online focus groups: Focus group
interviewing conducted online
◦ Web-based experiments
◦ Tracking consumers’ online behavior
 Online Behavioral & Social Tracking
and Targeting

Online listening

●
Provides the passion and spontaneity of unsolicited consumer opinions

Behavioral targeting
●
Uses online consumer tracking data to target advertisements and marketing offers to
specific consumers

Social targeting

●
Mines individual online social connections and conversations from social networking sites
Sampling Plan
Sample: Segment of the population
selected to represent the population as a
whole
Decisions required for sampling design:
◦ Sampling unit - People to be studied
◦ Sample size - Number of people to be studied
◦ Sampling procedure - Method of choosing the
people to be studied
Types of Samples
Research Instruments
Questionnaires can be administered in
person, by phone, by e-mail, or online.
◦ Closed-end questions – Multiple choice
◦ Open-end questions – respondent answer in
their own way
Mechanical instruments include:
◦ People meters
◦ Checkout scanners
◦ Neuromarketing
 Implementing the Research Plan

Data collection
●
Researchers should guard against various problems.
●
Interacting with respondents
●
Quality of participants’ responses
●
Interviewers who make mistakes or take shortcuts

Processing the data

●
Check for accuracy
●
Code it for analysis

Analyzing the data

●
Tabulate results
●
Compute statistical measures
Interpreting and Reporting Findings
Responsibilities of the market researcher:
◦ Interpret the findings
◦ Draw conclusions
◦ Report findings to management
Responsibilities of managers and
researchers:
◦ Work together closely when interpreting
research results
◦ Share responsibility for the research process and
resulting decisions
Customer Relationship
Management (CRM)
Managing detailed information about
individual customers
Carefully managing customer touch points
to maximize customer loyalty
Consists of software and analytical tools
that:
◦ Integrate customer information from all sources
◦ Analyze data in depth
◦ Apply the results
Distributing and Using
Marketing Information
MIS must make information readily
available for decision-making.
◦ Routine information for decision making
◦ Non-routine information for special situations
Intranetsand extranets facilitate the
information sharing process.
 Marketing Research in Small Businesses
and Nonprofit Organizations

Obtaining good marketing insights

●
Secondary data collection
●
Observation
●
Surveys
●
Experiments

Responsibility of managers

●
Think carefully about the research objectives
●
Formulate questions in advance
●
Recognize the biases introduced by smaller samples and less skilled researchers
●
Conduct the research systematically
International Marketing Research
The problems faced include:
◦ Dealing with diverse markets
◦ Finding good secondary data in foreign markets
◦ Developing good samples
◦ Reaching respondents
◦ Handling differences in culture, language, and
attitudes toward marketing research
The cost of research is high but the cost of
not doing it is higher.
Intrusions on Consumer Privacy
Failure to address privacy issues results in:
◦ Angry, less cooperative consumers
◦ Increased government intervention
Best approach for researchers:
◦ Asking only for the information they need
◦ Using the information responsibly to provide
customer value
◦ Avoiding sharing the information without the
customer’s permission
Misuse of Research Findings
Few advertisers rig their research designs
or deliberately misrepresent the findings.
Solutions:
◦ Development of codes of research ethics and
standards of conduct
◦ Companies must accept responsibility to
protect consumers’ best interests and their
own.
Marketing Myopia