Identify the reason for doing marketing research, and describe the five-step marketing research approach leading to marketing actions.
To be successful, products and marketing programs must meet the wants and needs of potential customers. So marketing research provides the vital information to help marketing managers understand those wants and needs and translate them into actions in their marketing activities. This information reduces the risk and uncertainty marketing managers face and helps them make better decisions. The first step of the five-step marketing research approach involves defining the problem, which requires setting the research objectives and identifying possible marketing actions. The second step, developing the research plan, requires specifying the constraints in solving the problem, identifying data needed, and determining how to collect the data. The third step involves collecting the relevant information, which includes considering pertinent secondary and primary data. Analyzing the data and presenting findings based on the data is the fourth step. The fifth step in the marketing research sequence involves identifying and implementing marketing action recommendations and evaluating the results—how the decisions turned out.
Describe how secondary and primary data are used in marketing, including the uses of questionnaires, observations, experiments, and panels. Secondary data have been recorded prior to the project.
Internal secondary data come from within the organization, such as sales reports and customer comments. The most widely used external secondary data are reports from the U.S. Bureau of the Census on characteristics of the country's population, manufacturers, and retailers. Primary data are collected specifically for the project and are obtained by either observing or questioning people. Observing people in marketing is done in various ways, including electronically with Nielsen people meters to measure TV viewing habits or personally, say, with mystery shoppers. Questionnaires involve asking people questions—in person, by telephone or fax, in a printed survey, or by Internet. Panels involve a sample of consumers or stores that are measured repeatedly through time to see if behavior changes. Experiments, such as test markets, involve measuring the effect of marketing variables like price or advertising on sales.
Explain how information technology and data mining link massive amounts of marketing information to meaningful marketing actions.
Today's marketing managers are often overloaded with data—from internal data to those provided by services on, say, TV-viewing habits or grocery purchases from the scanner data at checkout counters. This can involve millions of bits of new information in a week or month. So information technology enables massive amounts of marketing data to be stored, processed, and accessed. Using this information technology, databases can be queried using data mining to find statistical relationships useful for marketing decisions and actions.
