Have you ever gotten a receipt from a store and at the bottom it tells you that you can get some kind of reward by filling out an online survey? But why do companies care about your opinion in the first place? What do they do with the answers that you provide them in the questionnaire?
This is the first video in Unit 18, Marketing Information Management. Take a look at this breakdown, which shows you how often this unit comes up on district, state, and international exams for each of the different clusters. Hello and welcome.
This is Lesson 18.1, Intro to Marketing Information Management. Now let's get to work team. In this video, there are a few main topics that we will be covering.
First we will define marketing information management. Then we will talk about research data, which includes a comparison between primary and secondary data, five types of primary data, and six types of secondary data. We introduced this briefly in the last lesson, but marketing information management is synonymous with marketing research.
In general, it involves collecting information about customers, competitors, market opportunities, etc. to help businesses make informed decisions. Beyond this, marketing research is critical for market planning. which is another one of the seven functions of marketing.
But there's still one big question that every business needs to answer. Who are the customers and what exactly do they want? That question is answered with marketing research.
As you can see in this table, marketing research helps businesses define primary customers, learn about the competition, and identify growth opportunities, all of which are important to increasing profit. Now that we've given a brief definition of marketing information management, We need to talk about research data. If you don't already know, data are pieces of information gathered through research and are then stored in a database. Most businesses have a customer database, which contains contact information for their customers and sometimes their buying behavior. Another type of database is a marketing research database.
database, which is where you keep the results of market research. Now, there are two types of market research, primary and secondary data. What's the difference? Well, you've probably heard of primary and secondary data in your history classes. Essentially, primary data are pieces of information collected by you or your organization for a specific purpose.
This might be a customer survey that helps inform what kind of colors your customer wants out of your clothing brand. Primary data can come from customers, customer service reps, or salespeople. But in order for primary data to be collected properly, the right people need to be asked the right questions. Companies use smaller representative groups. groups of people to conduct market research.
But there still needs to be enough people in the research group for the results to be valid. This number of people is called the sample size. Within an organization, marketers can either collect their own primary data or they can hire a marketing research firm to do it for them. Businesses usually hire a firm if they don't have their own marketing research team or if the project is large.
Some firms include AC Nielsen, Arbitron, and J.D. Power. Now let's move on to secondary data, which is data that already exists and can be found in government databases, academic sources, and even in the internet. trade associations, the internet, and business records. Someone collected this data for a specific purpose, and marketers can use that data for their own market research.
Because they can use that data that is already collected, marketers do not need to go through the time and expense of collecting their own data. As a result, many marketers look for secondary data first. However, in order for secondary data to be useful, it has to be relevant.
In general, data older than five years is not useful. Quick caveat before moving on. Not all information collected by you or your organization is primary data necessarily. Primary data is first-hand research that's uniquely connected for a specific purpose.
So if you have a research project and you collect information for that project, that's primary data. But if you use old research that you or your organization may have conducted years ago, now it's secondary data. Data is either qualitative or quantitative.
Qualitative data is more than just a yes or no. It requires judgment from the subject. Quantitative data are facts and figures.
Take a look at this table which includes both qualitative and quantitative data about a graduating senior class at a particular high school. As you can see, they provide different information, and there are cases in which one of the two is preferable to the other. Now that we have differentiated between primary and secondary data, we need to go in depth on the types of each.
There are five types of primary data. Observation, interview, survey, diary, and experiment. Observation is when the researcher watches how people behave in certain situations and records the facts.
For example, let's say you want to know how effective your window display is. Some observation data is how many people walked by, how many people looked at the window, and how many people purchased items. Another form of observation is called a secret shopper.
It's basically a person who pretends to shop to test the employees and observe the quality of customer service. The results will be more authentic if the people don't know that they're being observed. The second type is an interview, which is a formal meeting between two or more people to obtain information.
When interviews are with a group of people, it's called a focus group. A focus group is paid for their time and run by one person who asks questions and keeps the group on track. The group may be watched by others behind a one-way mirror.
Focus groups are used to figure out how people in a group interact with one another. You may have been asked to complete a survey regarding your experiences with something. A survey is an organized study where different people are asked the same questions.
This can be given in person, by telephone, by mail, or by email. The questions have to be random and cannot be biased in any way. Biased questions are called leading questions, and they aren't a good idea because they interject the answer that you want to hear within the question.
That makes it uncomfortable for customers to express differing opinions. An example of a leading question is, You saw the sign above the window display when you walked in, right? Another type of primary data is a diary, which is a written record of thoughts, activities, or plans of the writer during a given period of time. Marketing diaries are given to people to learn about their activities. This allows researchers to find out how people spend their time and money, and they can be in two different formats, open format and forced choice format.
An open format allows people to write whatever they want about their experiences. This gives researchers more information, but it takes longer to analyze. Meanwhile, forced choice format is kind of like a multiple choice test. There are options, and you have to pick one instead of free writing. It provides much less info, but it's easier to analyze.
Take a look at this table which covers both disadvantages and advantages of using a diary as a source of primary data. The last source of primary data is experiments. This is very similar to a scientific experiment you may run in a science lab.
Basically, the researcher sets up two situations that only differ in one variable and then compare the results. A variable is something that has changed. For example, the researcher may count how many people who are passing by the store that actually enter inside.
Then the researcher could change the window display and test the same thing. When comparing results, the researcher can determine whether changing the window display made a difference in the number of individuals who decided to enter the store. Another common product experiment is taste tests, which allows food manufacturers to understand how customers feel about their food or drink.
Now, let's talk about the six different types of secondary data. These are business records, government sources, market research sources, academic sources, trade associations, and the internet. Let's start with business records.
All businesses collect data in many forms, such as sales records, customer databases, financial statements, and marketing records. Business records are often a great starting point. Now, many students falsely believe that secondary data means data collected outside of the business. But one of the types of secondary data is business records, so this is clearly not true. If you have a marketing research project where you try to find your customer's favorite clothing styles, you would probably start by looking at sales records.
This is previously collected data, so it's secondary. However, if you set up an interview with a few selected customers, then you are freshly collecting data. So, it's primary data that you obtain for the purpose of this particular marketing research project.
Let's move on to government sources. Federal, state, and local governments collect a lot of data that can be useful for businesses. For example, information about the economy, various industries, and population demographics are all publicly available via government sources.
The U.S. Census Bureau is a good starting point for free, recent information. Now, let's discuss marketing research sources. Many businesses actually collect data that they allow others to use for marketing research purposes. Sometimes this is available at no or low cost. Two good places to start are looking at state and local chambers of commerce.
A Chamber of Commerce is a group of businesses whose main goal is to encourage local business development, so they often have current information on other businesses in the local economy. Most of the time, however, you need to pay for marketing data, and it can be costly. Research firms such as Dunn and Bradstreet collect data for the purpose of selling it to other businesses.
Another great source of secondary data is academic sources, such as universities, community colleges, and local libraries. Colleges and their libraries can assist marketers by directing them to research done at their own schools. Universities may also have on-campus business organizations that provide secondary data. Local public libraries also have books, business directories, magazines, journals, newsletters, newspapers, and other free resources that businesses can utilize for research purposes. The next source is trade associations, which is a group of people in a specific business or industry.
The members of a trade association often work together to help each other succeed. The information collected by a trade association may either be free to everyone or free only to the members. Some trade associations, such as the National Grocers Association, post survey results on their websites.
Others may have industry publications, known as trade journals, which are just magazines or newsletters that focus on a particular industry. An example of a trade journal is the Storrs magazine. The last source of secondary information is the Internet. Information about many topics can be found online.
Businesses use the Internet frequently for competitor information. For example, they can find general information on their competition, look into their marketing mixes, and study their promotions by taking a look at their respective websites. However, it's important to remember that anyone can post on the internet, and not everything is verified. Sites ending in.com and.net may not always have accurate information.
Generally speaking, sites ending in.gov and.edu have more trustworthy information, although this is definitely not a hard and fast rule. We covered several types of primary and secondary data. Take a look at this graphic organizer, which summarizes all the ones that we've talked about under their respective categories.
Feel free to screenshot this for future references. Now that we've gone over all the content, it's time to test your knowledge with a real ticket question. Pause the video and try to answer. The answer is C, leading question. As we talked about earlier, survey questions shouldn't hint or suggest at an answer.
If they do, then they are leading questions, and you shouldn't use them in a survey. Questions that begin with phrases like, do you agree with that, are generally leading questions and should be avoided in neutral customer surveys. And here are the sources we used for this video.
Feel free to check them out if you still have any questions. Alright, that pretty much sums up Lesson 18.1, Intro to Marketing Information Management. Great work, team, and we'll see you in the next video.