Unit 3 - Making It Happen with Marketing
Learning Target 3: I can explain what marketing information management is
We now know that in marketing we must have the right product, at the right price, at the right place, right time and communicate it effectively. So how do we know what the right product, price, place time and communication methods are? Well we never really know exactly but marketing information management helps us get very close.
Marketing-information management are systems that continually monitor a company’s market, competition, customers, products, and marketing operations in order to determine if problems exist. Marketing research, deals with gathering, accessing, synthesizing, evaluating, and disseminating information for use in making business decisions.
There are different types of marketing research and these include the following but not limited to
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Market Research often provides marketers with information about the direction in which the people are moving, including trends & opportunities
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Causal Research is cause and effect research, sometimes called ‘What if’ scenarios. Experiments which involve manipulating one or more independent variables and then examining the outcome.
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"If we raise our prices on our chicken wings, what will happen to our sales of other menu items?"
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Exploratory Research is conducted for discovery purposes. You are not going into the research looking for an answer to a specific problem or situation, rather the research helps to define the marketing issue.
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What do customers feel about the general atmosphere when dining at Buffalo Wild Wings?
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Descriptive Research involves gathering specific information related to an identified issue, situation, or concern
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Why does Buffalo Wild Wings, store no. 67, have the highest customer service scores in the country?
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Watch the following video for the nature and scope of what market research is
The market research process is a very straight forward process. The steps are as follows.
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Define the problem
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Conduct preliminary investigation
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Develop a hypothesis
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Design the research study
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Analyze data
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Draw conclusions
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Make recommendations.
Failure to accurately define the problem is a major mistake that could cost the business a lot of money because you will render every other step in the market research process useless. In the preliminary investigation step a business needs to get some ideas as to what is causing the problem.
Once a business has these steps completed, they need to create a hypothesis or come up with a tentative explanation as to what is causing the problem. Finally, the business needs to create a comprehensive plan for testing this hypothesis. This plan will have two major components. The first component is planning the sample and the second component is collecting data. It is unrealistic for a business to assume they can survey everyone in their market instead they must survey a smaller part that represents the entire market or a sample of the market.
With marketing research, you will collect a lot of data. The type of data you collect can be consolidated to two major categories.
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Primary information is information collected for the purpose at hand; usually collected by surveys, focus groups, questionnaires and interviews
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Secondary data are facts, figures, and statistics that have been collected for projects other than the one at hand
Make The Connection: Using the steps in the market research process come up with a recommendation for new toy