Chapter 4: Managing Marketing Information to Gain Customer Insights

Question 1

To create value for customers and build meaningful relationships with them, marketers must first

Answer 1

gain fresh, deep insights into what customers need and want.

Question 2

Big data

Answer 2

refers to the huge and complex data sets generated by today’s sophisticated information generation, collection, storage, and analysis technologies.

Question 3

Big data analogy

Answer 3

“When it rains, you can’t just drink the water. It must be collected, purified, bottled, and delivered for consumption,” observes a data expert. “Big data works the same way. It’s a raw resource that is a few important steps away from being useful

Question 4

Customer insights

Answer 4

Fresh marketing information based understandings of customers and the marketplace that became the basis for creating customer value, engagement, and relationships

Question 5

customer insights teams

Answer 5

whose job it is to develop actionable insights from marketing information and work strategically with marketing decision makers to apply those insights

Question 6

marketing information system (MIS)

Answer 6

consists of people and procedures dedicated to assessing information needs, developing the needed information, and helping decision makers use the information to generate and validate actionable customer and market insights.

Question 7

The marketing information system primarily serves

Answer 7

the company’s marketing and other managers. However, it may also provide information to external partners, such as suppliers, resellers, or marketing services agencies

Question 8

Marketers can obtain the needed information from

Answer 8

internal data, marketing intelligence, and marketing research.

Question 9

Internal databases

Answer 9

collections of consumer and market information obtained from data sources within the company’s network

Question 10

Competitive marketing intelligence

Answer 10

the systematic monitoring, collection, and analysis of publicly available information about consumers, competitors, and developments in the marketplace

Question 11

The goal of competitive marketing intelligence

Answer 11

to improve strategic decision making by understanding the consumer environment, assessing and tracking competitors’ actions, and providing early warnings of opportunities and threats

Question 12

Marketing intelligence techniques

Answer 12

range from observing consumers firsthand to quizzing the company’s own employees, benchmarking competitors’ products, online research, and real-time monitoring of social and mobile media.

Question 13

Firms use competitive marketing intelligence

Answer 13

to gain early insights into competitor moves and strategies and to prepare quick responses.

Question 14

The growing use of marketing intelligence also raises ethical issues.

Answer 14

Clearly, companies should take advantage of publicly available information. However, they should not stoop to snoop. With all the legitimate intelligence sources now available, a company does not need to break the law or accepted codes of ethics to get good intelligence.

Question 15

Marketing research

Answer 15

the systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data relevant to a specific marketing situation facing an organization.

Question 16

Companies use marketing research in a wide variety of situations.

Answer 16

For example, marketing research gives marketers insights into customer motivations, purchase behaviour, and satisfaction. It can help them to assess market potential and market share or measure the effectiveness of pricing, product, distribution, and promotion activities.

Question 17

In recent years, as a host of new digital data-gathering technologies have burst onto the scene,

Answer 17

traditional marketing research has undergone a major transformation

Question 18

Traditional mainstays such as research surveys and focus groups, although still prevalent and powerful,

Answer 18

are now giving way to newer, more agile, more immediate, and less costly digital data-gathering methods.

Question 19

just-in-time research

Answer 19

Today’s fast and agile decision making often calls for fast and agile marketing information and research

Question 20

Is marketing research still important?

Answer 20

marketing research is still widely used and very important.

Question 21

The traditional research approaches, although often more time-consuming and expensive,

Answer 21

can allow for deeper, more focused probing, especially into the whys and wherefores of consumer attitudes and behaviour.

Question 22

The key for marketers is to blend the traditional and new approaches into a unified marketing information system that yields agile but deep and complete marketing information and insights.

Answer 22

New digital approaches can provide immediate and affordable access to real-time data on the wants, whens, wheres, and hows of consumer buying activities and responses.

Question 23

The marketing research process has four steps

Answer 23

1) defining the problem and research objectives,
2) developing the research plan,
3) implementing the research plan,
4) and interpreting and reporting the findings.

Question 24

Hardest part of researching process

Answer 24

Defining the problem and research objectives is often the hardest step in the research process.

Question 25

A marketing research project might have one of three types of objectives

Answer 25

1) exploratory research
2) descriptive research
3) causal research

Question 26

1) exploratory research

Answer 26

Objective: gather preliminary information that will help define the problem and suggest hypotheses.

Question 27

2) descriptive research

Answer 27

Objective: is to describe things, such as the market potential for a product or the demographics and attitudes of consumers who buy the product.

Question 28

3) causal research

Answer 28

Objective: to test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships. For example, would a 10 percent decrease in tuition at a private college result in an enrolment increase sufficient to offset the reduced tuition?

Question 29

Managers often start with _____ research and later follow with _______ or _______ research.

Answer 29

exploratory

causal or descriptive

Question 30

The research plan outlines

Answer 30

sources of existing data and spells out the specific research approaches, contact methods, sampling plans, and instruments that researchers will use to gather new data.

Question 31

The research plan should be presented in a written proposal

Answer 31

A written proposal is especially important when the research project is large and complex or when an outside firm carries it out.

Question 32

Secondary data

Answer 32

consist of information that already exists somewhere, having been collected for another purpose

Question 33

Primary data

Answer 33

consist of information collected for the specific purpose at hand.

Question 34

Researchers usually start by gathering _____ data

Answer 34

secondary

The company’s internal database provides a good starting point.

Question 35

Secondary data sources

Answer 35

1) commercial online databases
2) Internet search engines
3)

Question 36

Benefits of secondary data

Answer 36

• can usually be obtained more quickly and at a lower cost than primary data
• secondary sources can sometimes provide data an individual company cannot collect on its own—information that either is not directly available or would be too expensive to collect

Question 37

Secondary data problems

Answer 37

• Researchers can rarely obtain all the data they need from secondary sources
• The researcher must evaluate secondary information carefully to make certain it is relevant (fits the research project’s needs), accurate (reliably collected and reported), current (up to date enough for current decisions), and impartial (objectively collected and reported).

Question 38

designing a plan for primary data collection calls for decisions on

Answer 38

1) research approaches,
2) contact methods,
3) the sampling plan,
4) research instruments

Question 39

Research approaches for gathering primary data include

Answer 39

1) observation,
2) surveys,
3) experiments

Question 40

1) observational research

Answer 40

involves gathering primary data by observing relevant people, actions, and situations

For example, Petro-Canada might evaluate possible new gas station locations by checking traffic patterns, neighborhood conditions

Question 41

ethnographic research

Answer 41

involves sending observers to watch and interact with consumers in their “natural environments.” The observers might be trained anthropologists and psychologists or company researchers and managers

Question 42

2) survey research

Answer 42

• most widely used method for primary data collection
• best suited for gathering descriptive information
• conducted by phone or mail, online, or in person.

Question 43

3) Experimental Research

Answer 43

Experiments involve selecting matched groups of subjects, giving them different treatments, controlling unrelated factors, and checking for differences in group responses.

best suited for gathering causal information.

Cause-and-effect relationships.

Question 44

Contact Methods

Answer 44

Information can be collected by mail, by telephone, by personal interview, or online. Each contact method has its own particular strengths and weaknesses.

Question 45

Mail questionnaires

Answer 45

• can be used to collect large amounts of information at a low cost per respondent
• Respondents may give more honest answers on a mail questionnaire than to an unknown interviewer in person or over the phone
• no interviewer is involved to bias respondents’ answers
• not very flexible; all respondents answer the same questions in a fixed order

Question 46

Telephone interviewing

Answer 46

• can be used by gather information quickly, and it provides greater flexibility than mail questionnaires
• Interviewers can explain difficult questions and, depending on the answers they receive, skip some questions or probe on others.
• Response rates tend to be higher than with mail questionnaires, and interviewers can ask to speak to respondents with the desired characteristics or even by name.
• the cost per respondent is higher than with mail, online, or mobile questionnaires.
• people may not want to discuss personal questions with an interviewer

declined in recent years

Question 47

Personal interviewing takes two forms

Answer 47

1) individual interviewing

2) group interviewing

Question 48

1) individual interviewing

Answer 48

• involves talking with people in their homes or offices, on the street, or in shopping malls.
• interviewing is flexible
• Trained interviewers can guide interviews, explain difficult questions, and explore issues as the situation requires
• individual personal interviews may cost three to four times as much as telephone interviews.

Question 49

Focus Group Interviewing

Answer 49

• consists of inviting small groups of people to meet with a trained moderator to talk about a product, service, or organization.
• Participants normally are paid a small sum for attending
• A moderator encourages free and easy discussion, hoping that group interactions will bring out deeper feelings and thoughts
• one of the major qualitative marketing research tools for gaining fresh insights into consumer thoughts and feelings
• consumers in focus groups are not always open and honest about their real feelings, behavior’s, and intentions in front of other people.

Question 50

online marketing research

Answer 50

internet and mobile surveys, online focus groups, consumer tracking, experiments, and online panels and brand communities.

Question 51

online focus groups

Answer 51

Focus group but online

Question 52

behavioural targeting

Answer 52

marketers use the online data to target ads and offers to specific consumers. Even further, they use social targeting, mining individual online social networking activity for the purpose of target ads and marketing efforts.

Question 53

sample

Answer 53

a segment of the population selected for marketing research to represent the population as a whole

Question 54

Designing the sample requires three decisions

Answer 54

1) Who (is to be studied)
2) How many (people should be included)
3) How (should people be chosen)

Question 55

probability samples,

Answer 55

each population member has a known chance of being included in the sample, and researchers can calculate confidence limits for sampling error

Question 56

Nonprobability Sample

Answer 56

Convenience sample

Judgment sample

Quota sample

Question 57

Probability Sample

Answer 57

Simple random sample
Stratified random sample
Cluster (area) sample

Question 58

In collecting primary data, marketing researchers have a choice of two main research instruments:

Answer 58

questionnaires and mechanical devices

Question 59

Questionnaires

Answer 59

-most common instrument,
-very flexible
-Closed-ended questions include all the possible answers, and subjects make choices among them(MC)
-Open-ended questions allow respondents to answer in their own words
-should use simple, direct, and unbiased wording
-

Question 60

Mechanical Instruments

Answer 60

-mechanical instruments to monitor consumer behavior
-neuromarketing (EEG and MRI)
-biometric measures
-
-
-

Question 61

Information gathered from internal databases, competitive marketing intelligence, and marketing research usually

Answer 61

requires additional analysis

Question 62

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Answer 62

Building and maintaining profitable customer relationships by delivering superior customer value and satisfaction

CRM integrates everything that a company’s sales, service, and marketing teams know about individual customers, providing a 360-degree view of the customer relationship

Question 63

smart companies capture information at every possible customer touch point.

Answer 63

These touch points include customer purchases, sales force contacts, service and support calls, web and social media site visits, satisfaction surveys, credit and payment interactions, market research studies—every contact between a customer and a company.

Question 64

Marketing analytics

Answer 64

consists of the analysis tools, technologies, and processes by which marketers dig out meaningful patterns in big data to gain customer insights and gauge marketing performance.

Question 65

artificial intelligence (AI)

Answer 65

technology by which machines think and learn in a way that looks and feels human but with a lot more analytical capacity.

Question 66

Marketing Research in Small Businesses and Nonprofit Organizations

Answer 66

They too need market information and the customer insights that it can provide

Small businesses can obtain much useful market and customer insight without spending a lot of money

can obtain good marketing insights through observation, secondary data searches, or informal surveys using small convenience samples

many associations, local media, and government agencies provide special help to small organizations

Question 67

International Marketing Research

Answer 67

follow the same steps as domestic researchers, from defining the research problem and developing a research plan to interpreting and reporting the results

international researchers deal with diverse markets in many different countries

In many foreign markets, the international researcher may have a tough time finding good secondary data

Must conduct primary data, but such information is largely lacking in many countries.

Questionnaires must be prepared in one language and then translated into the languages of each country researched

Question 68

Public Policy and Ethics in Marketing Research

Answer 68

the misuse of marketing research can also harm or annoy consumers

Question 69

Two major public-policy and ethics issues in marketing research are

Answer 69

1) intrusions on consumer privacy

2) the misuse of research findings.

Question 70

Misuse of Research Findings

Answer 70

Recognizing that marketing research can be abused, several associations—including the Canadian Marketing Association, the American Marketing Association, the Marketing Research Association, and the Council of American Survey Research Organizations (CASRO)—have developed codes of research ethics and standards of conduct