CHAP 4: MANAGING MARKETING INFORMATION

I. Marketing information and customer insights

- To create customer value, strong relationships  must gain insights into what customers
need and want  to develop competitive advantage
- Customer insights  hard to gain  must manage marketing information effectively from a
range of sources
1. Marketing information and today’s “big data”
- Marketing managers are often overwhelmed by data.
- Big data: huge and complex data sets generated by today’s sophisticated information
generation, collection, storage and analysis technologies
+ Opportunities: tapping big data effectively can gain rich, timely customer insights
Ex: Apple monitors online discussions about its brand in social media posts,… it might take
in a 6 million public conversations a day, more than 2 billion a year.
 Marketers don’t need “more” data, they need “better” data that lead to more useful
information and insights  need to make better use of them.
2. Developing customer insights (real value of marketing data)
- Customer insights (thấu hiểu khách hàng): deep understanding of customers’ stated and
unstated needs and wants that become the basic for creating enduring customer value,
engagement, and relationships.
Ex: Starbucks, Google, Unilever,… have restructured their marketing information and
research functions by creating “customer insight teams” tasked developing insights from
marketing data and working with marketing managers to apply those insights.
3. The marketing information ecosystem (MIE)
- MIE is people, processes, and assets dedicated to assessing managers’ information needs,
developing the needed information, helping managers apply that information to generate and
ensure customer and market insights.
  Explaination:
- MIE begins and ends with information users (Marketing managers and internal partners,
external partners,… who need marketing information and insights)
- 1st : MIE interacts with these information users to assess their needs
- 2nd: MIE interacts with marketing environment to develop needed information through
+ Internal archival data and company databases
+ Market intelligence gathering activities
+ Marketing research
- 3rd: MIE helps users analyze and use the information to develop customer and market insights
II. STEP 1 AND 2: Assessing information needs and developing data
1. Assessing marketing information needs
- MIE serves: Company’s marketing and other managers
External partners (suppliers, resellers, or marketing service agencies)
Ex: Walmart provides key suppliers with information on everything from store inventory
levels to how many items they’ve sold in which stores in the past 24 hours.
 A good MIE can balance the information that users want and what they REALLY need, and what
is feasible to offer.
+ Managers now tend to collect every information without carefully choosing  too much
information  harmful
+ Some don’t even know useful information has existed to collect
+ The cost of obtaining, analyzing, storing, and delivering information can increase quickly 
company must decide whether the insights from these information is worth the cost or not.
2. Developing marketing information
- Marketers can take the needed information from internal databases, market intelligence,
marketing research
- Internal databases: consumer and market information obtained from data sources within the
company network
+ Marketing department gives information on customer characteristics and preferences, store
and online transactions, web and social media sites
+ Customer service department gives information of customer satisfaction, inquires, and
service problems
+ Accounting department gives records of sales, costs, and cash flows
+ Operations reports on production, shipment, and inventories
+ Sale forces reports on reseller reactions, competitor activities, marketing channel partners
provide data on sale transactions.
 These information provides powerful customer and market insights
 Firms must build internal database structure carefully
 Benefits: quicker, cheaper than other information sources
 Shortcomings:
o internal information is often collected for other purposes  may
incomplete, wrong form for making marketing decisions
o requires sophisticated (phức tạp) equipments and techniques to mining the
mountain of information  HOWERVER: these advancements allow
well-structured internal databases  right kind of data that can power new
business models suited to the digital world.
- Competitive marketing intelligence: systematic monitoring, collection and analysis of
available information about competitors and developments in the marketing environment.
+ Goal: improve strategic decision making by: Understanding the consumer environment
Tracking and assessing competitors’ actions
Providing early warnings of opportunities,
threats
+ Process of marketing intelligence:
  Observing consumers (including competitors’ customers)
 Benchmarking competitors’ products (đánh giá sp)
 Analyzing competitors’ financial reports, conducting online research, and real-time
media monitoring
 Good marketing intelligence can:
 help marketers gain insights into how consumers talk about and engage with their
brands
 shed light on competitors’ sources of competitive advantage and their likely future
moves
+ Some firms have areas gathering competitive intelligence for their clients
Ex: Kroll’s competitive intelligence aims to provide clients with intelligence covering
competitors’ businesses strategies and capabilities, sales strategies, antitrust issues
+ Firms can gather many competitive intelligence on their own
 Useful intelligence can be collected from people inside the company (executives,
engineers, scientists, sales force, purchasing agent)
+ Firms can obtain important intelligence from suppliers, resellers, and customers
+ Intelligence seekers can find information of competitors through online databases
(including free)  marketers overwhelmed the amount of information of competitors
+ Firms can use competitive marketing intelligence to gain early insights into competitors’
strategies and to prepare quick respones
Ex: Amazon’s competitive intelligence routinely purchases merchandise from competing
sites to analyze their speed, service quality.
+ Firms set up state-of-the-art social media command centers that often monitor real-time
brand-related and competitor-related social and mobile media activity
 These centers can analyze relevant conversations in real time to gain marketing
insights, and response quickly, appropriately
 Every companies have to protect their own information  should conduct marketing intelligence
investgations of themselves, looking for damaging information leaks
 The higher use of marketing intelligence, the more in raising ethical issues
o Company should take advantage of public available information
o Company must careful not to cross the legal line
3. Marketing research:
- systematic design and execution of initiatives to collect, analyze, and report data,
information, and insights related to a specific marketing situation facing an organization
 Marketers often need formal purposed studies that provide customer and market insights
to inform specific marketing decisions
Ex: Starbucks wants to know how customers would react to a new breakfast item  need
marketing research
 Some large firms have their own research departments that work with marketing
managers on research projects
 Some firms purchase data collected by outside firms to help with their decision making
- Traditional marketing research in transition
+ Traditional research: surveys, focus groups  still powerful  shift into newers more
immediate, less costly digital data gathering methods through:
o Real-time social media
o Websites and online surveys
o Feedback monitoring to phone tracking
+ Just-in-time research: fast and agile (linh hoạt) marketing information research  for
fast decision making  speed is important
 Face trade-off between speed and precision (sự chính xác)
+ COVID-19, in-person research came to standstill (bế tắc)  must shift to digital data
collection
+ Traditional marketing research is still important and widely used
o Disadvantages: time-consuming, expensive
o Advantages: allow deeper in how and why of customer attitudes and behavior
 Fit in marketing decision that need rigor more than speed, low cost
+ Opportunities:
o Combine the traditional and new methods  enhance marketers’ ability to gather,
analyze, communicate, gain insights from data about customers and markets
o New digital approaches  provide immediate and affordable access to real-time
data on what, when, where, how of customer buying behaviors and their
responses
 Should complement and enhance instead of substituing
+ 4 steps of marketing research process:
1) Step 1: Defining problem and research objectives
Defining problem:
 Managers should understands the decisions for which information is
needed
 Managers may know sth is wrong without knowing causes  most
difficult step  incorrect defined  research effort will be wasted
 Market researchers should be well-directed and open-minded

Set the research objectives (3 types of objectives)

 For exploratory research (nghiên cứu khám phá): gather preliminary (sợ
bộ) information that will help further define the research problems and
suggest hypotheses
 For descriptive research: describe market and consumer characteristics
(potential market for a product, attitudes of customers)
 For casual research: test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships
(nhân quả)
2) Step 2: Developing the research plan
 Must detemine the needed data
 Research plan shows the management problems addressed and research
objectives
 Plan shows the proposed data sources, specific research approaches,
contact methods, sampling plans and the instruments that researchers will
use to gather data
 Research plan must be presented in written proposal (dạng văn bản) 
clarify the expectations of stockholders
 Research objectives must be translated into specific information needs 
calls for
 Secondary data: information that exist somewhere, have been
collected for other purposes
  Primary data: information collected for specific purposes at hand
a. Start by gathering secondary data
 Buy secondary data from outside suppliers
 Using commercial online databases  can conduct their own searches of
secondary data sources
 Using internet search engines for locating relevant secondary data
 Limitations: frustrating and inefficient
Ex: Wikipedia is not a perfect engine
 Well-structured online searches is a need for marketing
research project
 Advantages: speed, cheap than primary data, provide data a company cannot collect on its
own
 Disadvantages: cannot really obtain all the data researchers need from secondary sources
 information may be not useful  must evaluate if it relevant, accurate, current, and
impartial
b. Primary data collection (3 steps for designing a plan for primary data)
i. Research approaches
Observational research: gathering primary data by observing
relevant people, actions, and situations
Observe both what consumers do and say (through natural
feedback on social media, sites)
***Collection methods:
ii. Surveys and questionnaire: get information about customers’knowledge,
attitudes, preferences, buying behaviors
iii. Interviews
iv. Focus groups: carefully selected group of ppl, focus discussions on a
product, service, organization
v. Customer insight communities: creating a panel of customers (hosted
online)  provide insights on an ongoing basis
vi. Experimental research
vii. Digital text analysis: using AI to automatically analyze huge amount of
text data posted by consumers on digital platforms
 viii. Digital, mechanical, and biosensors: to monitor customer behaviors and
market development
ix. Online tracking and targeting

Ethnographic research (dân tộc): sending observers to watch

consumers in their natural environments as they go about their
daily lives  motives, attitudes cannot be observed
3) Step 3: Implemeting plan
 Involves collecting, processing, analyzing the information
 Can be carried by company’s marketing researchers or outside firms
 Must maintain discipline in processes, data quality, budget, timelines
 Need to check data for accruacy, code them for analysis, tabulate the
resutls, compute statistic measures, estimate empirical models
4) Step 4: Interpreting and reporting the findings
 Shouln’t left only to researchers
 Challenge: managers may be biased  only accept the findings that align
with their worldview
III. STEP 3: analyzing and using marketing information
1. Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Purpose: manage detailed information about individual customers and carefully manage
customer touch points to maximize customer loyalty
 Data must be organized around individual customers (including direct and indirect
information)  360-degree view of customer relationship  make decisions that create
value and reap value from customers
 Advantage: enhance customer service, deeper customer relationships, cross-sell products,
customize offerings and target high-value customers more effectively
2. Big data, marketing analytics, and AI
- Marketing analytics: analysis tools, technologies, and processes by which marketers dig out
meaningful patterns in big data to gain customer insights, gauge marketing performance,
improve customer experience
+ Apply to large and complex sets of data from web, social media tracking, customer
transactions and engagements
 Ex: Netflix, while members are busy watching it, Netflix is busy watching them  use
big data insights to give what they exactly want
- Often employ AI
 Analyze at lightning speed to gain deep insights  the smarter, the more accurate it gets
 Help customers manage their lives, their buying in return  AI recommendations for
deciding what to buy
 Help marketing managers shape marketing strategies and tatics
 Limitations: managers may miss the big picture, try to let machines make decisions
3. Distributing and using marketing information
- Providing managers with regular performance reports, result of the research studies
- Managers need to access nonroutine information for special situations
- Many firms use company intranets and internal CRM systems to facilitate this process
 Provide access to internal data, intelligence and marketing research information
- Many firms allow key customers to access account, product, and other data on demand
through extranets
- Suppliers, customers, resellers may access a company’s extranet to update their accounts,
arrange purchases, check order against inventories to improve customer service
IV. Other marketing information considerations
1. Marketing research in small businesses and nonprofit organizations
- Problems: not enough for budget to invest in large-scale research studies and sophisticated
digital analytics
 They can obtain much useful market and customer insight without spending a lot of
money
 They can obtain good marketing insights through observation, secondary data, or
informal survey using small convinenence samples
 Many associations, social media, government provide special help to small organizations
 They can collect a considerable amount of information at very low cost online  check
out online product and service review sites, do searches on specific companies and issues
2. International marketing research
- Problems: must deal with diverse markets in many countries
May have tough time finding good secondary data  must collect their own
primary data  not easy
 Cultural differences  obstacle of languages  add research costs, risk of error
and misinterpretation
Consumers vary in attitudes toward marketing research
3. Public policy and ethics in marketing research
- Instrusion into consumer privacy
- Consumer data security and protection
+ Damaged the company  costly
+ Harm the hard-won customer-brand relationships
- Misuse of research findings