Marketing Chapter 4: Customer Insights and MIS

Chapter 4: Managing Marketing Information to Gain Customer Insights

• Marketing information is crucial for creating value and building strong customer relationships. Customer insights are essential for better decisions.
• Customer insights are fresh understandings of customers and the market, forming the basis of customer value, engagement, and relationships.
• Obtaining customer insights can be challenging.
• Marketers use customer insights to create better decisions to maximize customer value.

Marketing Information System (MIS)

• A marketing information system (MIS) provides information to marketing and other managers and external partners (suppliers, resellers, and marketing service agencies).
• A good MIS balances the information users want with what they need and what is feasible to offer.
• Information is important; it is vital for companies to use the right information, in the correct form, at the appropriate time to create customer value and stronger relationships.

Developing Marketing Information

• Marketers gain information using three key methods:
  • Internal Databases: These are collections of consumer and market information from company sources. These databases are often collected for other purposes and may be incomplete or in the wrong format. Internal data can be accessed quickly and cheaply.
  • Marketing Intelligence: This involves systematic collection and analysis of publicly available information about consumers, competitors, and developments in the market environment. The goal is to improve strategic decision-making by understanding the consumer environment, assessing competitors' actions, and identifying opportunities and threats. This can include observing consumers, monitoring competitors' activities, or researching the internet.
  • Marketing Research: The process involves systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data relevant to a specific marketing situation an organization faces. Marketing research helps marketers understand customer motivations, purchasing behaviours, market potential, and effectiveness of pricing, product, distribution, and promotion activities.

The Marketing Research Process

• Defining the problem/research objectives: The most important and often difficult step. The management team and the researchers ensure they are on the same page with problems and objectives to avoid misleading or incorrect results. Exploratory, descriptive, and causal research help define objectives.
• Developing the research plan: This plan includes methods for collecting data, research design, and sampling approach. A detailed written proposal is often recommended. This step covers the methods to use to collect data and answer research questions, and includes decisions about research design, data collection methods, and sampling approach.
• Collecting Information: Gathering primary or secondary data.
• Analyzing Information: Processing gathered data to identify key findings.
• Interpreting and Reporting: Interpreting findings and presenting the findings to management.

Additional Considerations

• Mechanical Research Instruments: These include devices like people meters, checkout scanners, biometric measures, to record specific consumer actions.
• Public Policy and Ethics: Marketing researchers need to consider ethical issues, government regulations, and customer privacy to ensure research methods are fair and transparent.
• There are many different approaches to conducting marketing research. Different considerations are present depending on the size of the company and industry.