3.3 Decision making to improve marketing performance

Question 1

What is a marketing objective?

Answer 1

A specific goal or target relating to the marketing activities & performance of a business

Question 2

What are the main types of marketing objectives?

Answer 2

• Sales Volume
• Revenue
• Sales growth
• Market share
• Brand loyalty/awareness

Question 3

What are the benefits & drawbacks of using marketing objectives

Answer 3

Benefits
-Aligned with company objecitves
- Provide a focus for helping to identify marketing priorities and allocating resources
- A way of measuring marketing performance

Drawbacks
- Fast changing external enviroment
- Potential conflict between marketing objectives
- Easy to be too ambitious with marketing objectives

Question 4

What are some internal influences on Market objectives?

Answer 4

Internal influences
- Corporate objectives
- Finance ( i.e. its profitability, cash flow, liquidity so it can invest etc…)
- Human resouce (particularly in service based businesses)
- Operational issues (Its productivity…)
- Organisation culture ( Whether it has a more marketing-orentatied culture or a production-oriented culture)

Question 5

What are some external influences on Marketing objectives?

Answer 5

External influences
- Economic enviroment
- Competitor actions
- Market size, growth & segmentation ( i.e. Depends on your industry)
- Technological change
- Social/political change (i.e. legislation changes)

Question 6

What is primary data?

Answer 6

Data that has been obtained first hand for a specific research purpose

Question 7

What are some examples of primary research?

Answer 7

Examples of primary research
- Focus groups
- Interviews
- Surveys
- Product testing

Question 8

What are advantages & disadvantages of primary research?

Answer 8

Advantages
- Directly focused to research puropose (i.e. fit to purpose)
- Tends to be up to date
- More detailed insights

Disadvantages
- Time consuming
- Costly
- Risk of survey bias

Question 9

What is secondary data?

Answer 9

Data that already exsists & which has been collected for a different purpose

Question 10

What are some examples of secondary data?

Answer 10

Examples of secondary data
- Market reports
- Trade & Industry associations
- Sales transactions

Question 11

What are some advantages and disadvantages of secondary data?

Answer 11

Advantages
- Often free & easy to obtain
- Good source of market insights

Disadvantages
- Can be out of date/ older research
- Not always tailored to a specific need
- Specialised reports can be expensive