Information can be obtained from: – Internal databases: collection of consumer and market information obtained from data sources within the company network. – Competitive marketing intelligence: collection, analysis of information (About consumers, competitors) Offer insights about consumer opinions, Helps firms to protect their own information – Marketing research: collection, analysis of data Process: 1, Exploratory research: Used to gather preliminary information Helps to define problems and suggest hypotheses 2, Descriptive research: Used to better describe the market potential for a product 2, Causal research: Used to test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships Big data refers to the huge and complex data sets generated by today’s sophisticated information generation, collection, storage, and analysis technologies. Data can be collected through: Internet surveys Online focus groups Web-based experiments Secondary Data: Information that already exists Collected for another purpose Sources: – Company’s internal database – Purchased from outside suppliers – Commercial online databases – Internet search engines Advantages: low cost, obtained quickly Disadvantages: inaccurate, irrelevant, dated Primary data: Observational research: Gathering primary data by observing relevant people, actions, and situations Ethnographic research: Sending trained observers to watch and interact with consumers in their natural environments Survey research: Asking people questions about their knowledge, attitudes, preferences, and buying behavior Experimental research: Selecting matched groups of subjects, giving them different treatments, controlling related factors, and checking for differences in group responses Research Plan: Outlines sources of existing data Should be presented in a written proposal Topics in a research plan: – Information to be obtained – Type of data required – How results will help decision making Fogalmak: A sample is a segment of the population selected to represent the population as a whole. Decisions required for sampling design: – Sampling unit - People to be studied – Sample size - Number of people to be studied – Sampling procedure - Method of choosing the people to be studied Marketing Information System (MIS): Consists of people and procedures to – Assess information needs – Develop the needed information – Help decision makers use the information to generate Online listening: Provides valuable insights into what consumers are saying or feeling about a brand Behavioral targeting: Uses online consumer tracking data to target advertisements and marketing offers to specific consumers Social targeting: Mines individual online social connections and conversations from social networking sites Marketing analytics consists of the analysis tools, technologies, and processes by which marketers dig out meaningful patterns in big data to gain customer insights and gauge marketing performance.