Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Chapter 5 Capabilities For Learning About Customers and Markets
Chapter 5 Capabilities For Learning About Customers and Markets
Prepared by:
Learning Organizations
Guided by a shared vision that focuses the energies of organizational members on creating superior value for customers. Continuously acquire, process, and disseminate throughout the organization knowledge about markets, products, technologies and business processes. Do not hesitate to question long held assumptions and beliefs regarding their business. Knowledge is based on experience, experimentation, and information from customers, suppliers, competitors and other sources. Reach a shared interpretation of the information, which enables them to act swiftly and decisively to exploit opportunities and defuse problems. Exceptional in their ability to anticipate and act on opportunities in turbulent and fragmenting markets.
Scanning Processes
Making existing functional groups responsible for scanningwill focus only with the familiar, not the periphery. Create ad hoc issue groupsidentify important questions to address and assign them to task forces. A high-level lookouta team scanning specific topics at the periphery of the organization and sharing insights with top management. New initiativesencourages managers to envision and test new opportunities beyond the core business. Investing in start-upsmodest investments which may build a clear view of emerging technologies and markets. Outsourceuse consultants for fresh perspectives on the business to be incorporated in strategic decision making.
Scanning Processes
Probability of the Event Occurring
High Medium Low
Danger
Future Risks
Exhibit 1. A Grid for Market Sensing
systematic gathering, recording, of marketing data which, when marketing executive to uncover in decision making.
Research Questions
Identify the specific pieces of information required and the questions that need to be asked to obtain that information.
Research Objectives
Set specific goals for the study why is it being undertaken?
Planned Outcomes
When completed, how should the results be presented for management use?
It is developed from internal company records, marketing intelligence activities, and marketing research.
Inward-oriented firms emphasize enhanced operating efficiency and reduced costs through automating information processing.
The market-oriented firm looks for ways in which information systems can make the firm more effective in the marketplace.
An MDSS integrates data that are not easily found, assimilated, formatted, or readily manipulated with software and hardware into a decision making process that provides the marketing decision maker with assistance when needed. The MDSS allows the user flexibility in applications and in format.
An MDSS can be used for various levels of decision making ranging from determining reorder points for inventory to launching a new product. May operate autonomously or instead require interaction with the decision maker during the process.
Marketing Intelligence
Many companies have invested in in-company intelligence units to coordinate and disseminate soft or qualitative data and improve shared corporate knowledge. May come from published materials in trade and scientific journals, salesperson visit reports, programs of customer visits by executives, social contacts, feedback from trade exhibitions and personal contacts, or even rumor in the marketplace. Formal marketing intelligence gathering activities may be an important element of the scanning processes.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge about customers should be managed as a strategic asset, because competitive advantage can be created by not merely possessing current market information but by knowing how to use it. Market knowledge is obviously linked to organizational learning and market orientation in the market-driven company.