Describe how secondary and primary data are used in marketing, including the uses of questionnaires, observations, experiments, and panels.

Secondary data have been recorded prior to the project. Inter­nal secondary data come from within the organization, such as sales reports and customer comments. The most widely used external secondary data are reports from the U.S. Bureau of the Census on characteristics of the country’s population, manufacturers, and retailers. Primary data are collected specifically for the project and are obtained by either observ­ing or questioning people. Observing people in marketing is done in various ways, including electronically with Nielsen people meters to measure TV viewing habits or personally, say, with mystery shoppers. Questionnaires involve asking people questions - in person, by telephone or fax, in a printed survey, or by Internet. Panels involve a sample of consumers or stores that are measured repeatedly through time to see if behavior changes. Experiments, such as test markets, involve measuring the effect of marketing variables like price or adver­tising on sales.

3. Explain how information technology and data mining link massive amounts of marketing information to meaningful mar­keting actions.

Today’s marketing managers are often overloaded with data - from internal data to those provided by services on, say, TV- viewing habits or grocery purchases from the scanner data at checkout counters. This can involve millions of bits of new information in a week or month. So information technology enables massive amounts of marketing data to be stored, processed, and accessed. Using this information technology, databases can be queried using data mining to find statistical relationships useful for marketing decisions and actions.

FOCUSING ON KEY TERMS

Constraints In a decision, the restrictions placed on potential solutions to a problem.

Data The facts and figures related to the problem, divided into two main parts: secondary data and primary data.

Data mining The extraction of hidden predictive information from large databases.

Decision A conscious choice from among two or more alternatives.

Information technology Involves a computer and communication system to satisfy an organization’s needs for data storage, processing, and access.

Marketing research The process of defining a marketing problem and opportunity, systematically collecting and analyzing information, and recommendation.

Measures of success Criteria or standards used in evaluating proposed solutions to a problem.

Nonprobability sampling Using arbitrary judgments to select the sample so that the chance of selecting a particular element may be unknown or zero.

Observational data Facts and figures obtained by watching, either mechanically or in person, how people actually behave.

Primary data Facts and figures that are newly collected for the project.

Probability sampling Using precise rules to select the sample such that each element of the population has a specific known chance of being selected.

Questionnaire data Facts and figures obtained by asking people about their attitudes, awareness, intentions, and behaviors.

Sampling Selecting representative elements from a population.

Secondary data Facts and figures that have already been recorded before the project at hand.

Statistical inference Drawing conclusions about a population from a sample taken from that population.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 752