Advantages and Disadvantages of Primary Data

Compared with secondary data, primary data have the advantage of being more specific to the problem being studied. The main disadvantages are that primary data are usually far more costly and time consuming to collect than secondary data.

Using Information Technology to Trigger Marketing Actions

Today’s marketing managers can be drowned in such an ocean of data that they need to adopt strategies for dealing with complex, changing views of the competition, the market, and the consumer. The Internet and the PC power of today provide a gateway to exhaustive data sources that vary from well organized and correct to disorganized and incorrect.

The Marketing Manager’s View of Sales Drivers

Figure 8 shows a marketing manager’s view of the product or brand “drivers,” the factors that influence buying decisions of a household or organization and, hence, sales.

These drivers include both the controllable marketing mix factors like product and distribution as well as uncontrollable factors like competition and the changing tastes of households or organizational buyers.

FIGURE 8

Product and brand drivers: factors that influence sales

Understanding these drivers involves managing this ocean of data. Sometimes hundreds of thousands of bits of data are created each week. Sources feeding this database ocean range from internal data about sales and customers to external data from syndication services and TV ratings. The marketer’s task is to convert this data ocean into useful information on which to base informed decisions. In practice, some market researchers distinguish data - the facts and figures - from information - the distilled facts and figures whose interpretation leads to marketing actions.

Current information about products, competitors, and customers is almost always accessed and analyzed by computer. So today, these activities fall under the broader term of information technology, which involves a computer and communication system to satisfy an organization’s needs for data stor­age, processing, and access.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1252