Unit F.03 – Importance of Marketing Information – Marketing

What you’ll learn to do: explain the role of marketing information in helping organizations understand and reach customers

Marketers are fortunate to work in an information-rich environment. They don’t have to make decisions based on gut feeling or blind luck. These days, many valuable sources of marketing information are available to guide marketers’ thinking, choices, and actions. While it’s true that this information may be more readily accessible in some organizations than others, it’s important for marketers to know what to look for and how to find it in order to make wise decisions about marketing strategy and execution.

The specific things you’ll learn in this section include:

Define marketing information
Explain why organizations use marketing information to provide customer insights

Fresh Customer Insights

Effective marketing starts with a strong knowledge of your customers: the kind of knowledge that gives you unique insights into what they want and how to satisfy them better than the competition. The most reliable source of fresh customer insights is good marketing information. Useful marketing information may come from a variety of sources both inside and outside your organization. Marketing information is generated by a variety of different activities, including marketing research.

Marketing research is a systematic process for identifying marketing opportunities and solving marketing problems, using customer insights that come out of collecting and analyzing marketing information. The mechanics of marketing research must be controlled so that marketers uncover the relevant facts to answer the problem at hand. Control over this fact-finding process is the responsibility of the marketing research director, who must correctly design the research and carefully supervise its execution, to ensure it yields the customer insights the organization needs.

A marketing information system is a combination of people, technologies, and processes for managing marketing information, overseeing market research activities, and using customer insights to guide marketing decisions and broader management and strategy decisions.

Knowledge Is Power Against the Competition

The business environment is increasingly competitive. With something as simple as a Google search, customers have unprecedented opportunities to explore alternatives to what any single company offers. Likewise, companies have ample opportunity to identify, track, and lure customers away from their less-vigilant competitors. A regular infusion of fresh customer insights can make all the difference between keeping customers and losing them. Marketing information and research are essential tools for marketers and the management team as they align strategy with customer wants and needs.

Consider the following examples:

Before introducing OnStar, the first-ever embedded wireless service in cars, GM used marketing research to understand what types of applications would make consumers most interested in subscribing to the service and how much they would pay for it. Of all the benefits OnStar could offer, the research helped GM prioritize how the initial service would provide value, focusing on driver assistance and security. Research also helped determine OnStar pricing to help the company build a large subscriber base quickly.^[1]
Enterprise systems provider PeopleSoft recruited a diverse set of universities as early-adopter “Beta” partners to provide input as it designed a new student information system for higher education. This marketing research helped PeopleSoft create a versatile system that could support the needs of a variety of colleges and universities, ultimately leading to strong receptivity and market share when the new system became widely available.^[2]

What Should Marketers Investigate Using Marketing Information?

An easy—and truthful—answer to this question is “everything.” There is no aspect of marketing to which information and research do not apply. Every marketing concept and every element involved in the marketing management process can be subjected to a great deal of careful marketing research and inquiry. Some important questions include:

Who is the customer?
What problems is the customer trying to solve with a given purchase?
What does s/he desire in the way of satisfaction?
How does the customer get information about available choices?
Where does s/he choose to purchase?
Why does s/he buy, or not buy?
When does s/he purchase?
How does s/he go about seeking satisfaction in the market?

Seeking answers to these questions yields insights into the customer’s needs, perceptions, and behaviors. Another area in which research is critical is profitability. Organizations need to forecast sales and related costs in order to understand how their operations will be profitable. They also need to plan competitive marketing programs that will produce the desired level of sales at an appropriate cost. The analysis of past sales and interpretation of cost information are important in evaluating performance and providing useful facts for future planning. All these activities rely on marketing information and a rigorous marketing research process to produce insights managers can trust and act on.

When to Use Marketing Information and Research

Many marketing decisions are made without consulting marketing information or the use of formal marketing research. For example, a decision maker may feel she already knows enough to make a good decision. The time required to investigate a question or conduct formal marketing research may not be available. In other cases, the cost of obtaining the data is prohibitive, or the desired data cannot be obtained in reliable form. In a few instances, there may be no choice among alternatives and therefore no decision to make because there is little value in spending time and money to study a problem if there is only one possible solution. But in most business situations, marketers and managers must choose among two or more courses of action. This is where fact-finding, marketing information, and research enter to help make the choice.

Marketing information and research address the need for quicker, yet more accurate, decision making by the marketer. These tools put marketers close to their customers to help them understand who they customers are, what they want, and what competitors are doing. When different stakeholders have very different views about a particular marketing-related decision, objective information and research can inform everyone about the issues in question and help the organization come to agreement about the path forward. Good research should help align marketing with the other areas of the business.

Marketers should always be tapping into regular sources of marketing information about their organization and industry in order to monitor what’s happening generally. For example, at any given time marketers should understand how they are doing relative to sales goals and monitor developments in their industry or competitive set.

Beyond this general level of “tuning in,” additional market research projects may also be justified. As a rule, if the research results can save the company more time, money, and/or risk than it costs to conduct the research, it is wise to proceed. If the cost of conducting the research is more than it will contribute to improving a decision, the research should not be carried out. In practice, applying this cost-test principle can be somewhat complex, but it provides useful guidance about when marketing research is worthwhile. Ultimately, successful marketing executives make decisions on the basis of a blend of facts and intuition.

Fact: Top Performers Research Customer Preferences

In 2010, the management consultancy McKinsey published research about the difference between organizations that produced top-performing products and those that produced under-performing products. The use of marketing research was a striking differentiator:

More than 80 percent of the top performers said they periodically tested and validated customer preferences during the development process, compared with just 43 percent of bottom performers. They were also twice as likely as the laggards to research what, exactly, customers wanted.^[3]

The study also identified other differences between top and bottom performers, but an underlying theme was the emphasis successful projects and companies placed on understanding their customers and adjusting course when necessary to better address customers’ needs. This research provides more than anecdotal evidence that marketing research and well-applied marketing information can make a substantial contribution to an organization’s success.

CASE STUDY: JUICY FRUIT GUM

Discovering Why They Chew

Photo of one package of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum

Back in the nineties, Juicy Fruit Gum, the oldest brand of the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, was not chewing up the teen market, gum’s top demographic. In 1997, the company found itself under pressure from competitors. Sales and market share were down. How could Wrigley get more kids to go for their famous gum?

Wrigley went to the source to find out. Marketing researchers approached teens who chewed five or more sticks of Juicy Fruit each week and gave them a homework assignment: Find pictures that remind you of Juicy Fruit gum and write a short story about it. When the kids shared their stories, Wrigley learned that they chew Juicy Fruit because it’s sweet. They said it refreshed and energized them.

Wrigley’s ad agency, BBDO, confirmed what the teens were saying. Conducting survey research, BBDO asked more than four hundred heavy gum chewers to rate various brands by attributes that best represented them. For Juicy Fruit, respondents picked phrases such as “has the right amount of sweetness” and “is made with natural sweetness.”

Another of BBDO’s studies investigated why teens in particular chew gum. Was it to cope with stress? Or because they forgot to brush their teeth before going to school? Nearly three out of four teens reported popping a stick of gum into their mouth when they craved something sweet. And Juicy Fruit was the top brand they picked to fulfill that need. (Rival chewing-gum brand Big Red was a distant second.)

Chewing on the Results

Teenage girl in foreground wearing sunglasses, blowing a gum bubble. Boy in background.

Although the marketing research conducted by the Wrigley Co. was fairly simple, it provided a new direction for the company’s marketing strategy to capture more of the essential teen market. BBDO developed four TV commercials with the “Gotta Have Sweet” theme. Roughly 70 percent of respondents voluntarily recalled the Juicy Fruit name after watching the commercial (the average recall for a brand of sugar gum is 57 percent). Sales of 100-stick boxes of Juicy Fruit rose 5 percent after the start of the ad campaign, reversing a 2 percent decline prior to it. Juicy Fruit’s market share also increased from 4.9 percent to 5.3 percent—the biggest gain of any established chewing-gum brand during the year following the campaign.

In this case, marketing research paid off with better customer insights that marketers translated into improved product positioning, messaging, advertising and ultimately market share.

Vincent P. Barabba, Surviving Transformation: Lessons from GM’s Surprising Turnaround, pp 46–50, https://books.google.com/books?id=VvbDYad7cLoC&pg ↵
Proquest, “First We Built, Now We Buy: A Sociological Case Study for Enterprise Systems in Higher Education,” pp 292–203, https://books.google.com/books?id=rgIAaigKQBIC&pg ↵
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/operations/the_path_to_successful_new_products ↵

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