Capturing Marketing Insights

 Collecting Information and Forecasting Demand

Making marketing decisions in a fast-changing world is both an art and a science. To provide context, insight, and inspiration for marketing decision making, companies must possess comprehensive, up-to-date information about macro trends, as well as about micro effects particular to their business. Holistic marketers recognize that the marketing environment is constantly presenting new opportunities and threats, and they understand the importance of continuously monitoring, forecasting, and adapting to that environment

The severe credit crunch and economic slowdown of 2008–2009 brought profound changes in consumer behavior as shoppers cut and reallocated spending. Sales of discretionary purchases like toys, apparel, jewelry, and home furnishings dropped. Sales of luxury brands like Mercedes—driven for years by free-spending baby boomers—declined by a staggering one-third. Meanwhile, brands that offered simple, affordable solutions prospered. General Mills’s revenues from such favorites as Cheerios, Wheaties, Progresso soup, and Hamburger Helper rose. Consumers also changed how and where they shopped, and sales of low-priced private label brand soared. Virtually all marketers were asking themselves whether a new age of prudence and frugality had emerged and, if so, what would be the appropriate response.

Firms are adjusting the way 

They do business for more reasons than just the economy. Virtually every industry has been touched by dramatic shifts in the technological, demographic, social-cultural, natural, and political-legal environments. In this chapter, we consider how firms can develop processes to identify and track important macroenvironment trends. We also outline how marketers can develop good sales forecasts. Chapter 4 will review how they conduct more customized research on specific marketing problems

Components of a Modern Marketing Information System

The major responsibility for identifying significant marketplace changes falls to the company’s marketers.Marketers have two advantages for the task: disciplined methods for collecting information, and time spent interacting with customers and observing competitors and other outside groups. Some firms have marketing information systems that provide rich detail about buyer wants, preferences, and behavior

DuPont commissioned marketing studies to uncover personal pillow behavior for its Dacron Polyester unit, which supplies filling to pillow makers and sells its own Comforel brand. One challenge is that people don’t give up their old pillows : 37 percent of one sample described their relationship with their pillow as being like that of “an old married couple,” and an additional 13 percent said their pillow was like a “childhood friend.” Respondents fell into distinct groups in terms of pillow behavior: stackers (23 percent), plumpers (20 percent), rollers or folders (16 percent), cuddlers (16 percent), and smashers, who pound their pillows into a more comfy shape (10 percent).Women were more likely to plump, men to fold. The prevalence of stackers led the company to sell more pillows packaged as pairs, as well as to market different levels of softness or firmness

A well-researched and well-executed marketing campaign for the state of Michigan increased tourism and state tax revenue.

Companies with superior information can choose their markets better, develop better offerings, and execute better marketing planning. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) studied the demographic information of its visitors and those of competing Midwestern cities to create a new marketing message and tourism campaign. The information helped MEDC attract 3.8 million new trips to Michigan, $805 million in new visitor spending, and $56 million in incremental state tax revenue over the period 2004–2008

Every firm must organize and distribute a continuous flow of information to its marketing managers. A marketing information system (MIS) consists of people, equipment, and procedures to gather, sort, analyze, evaluate, and distribute needed, timely, and accurate information to marketing decision makers. It relies on internal company records, marketing intelligence activities, and marketing research.We’ll discuss the first two components here, and the third one in the next chapter

The company’s marketing information system should be a mixture of what managers think they need, what they really need, and what is economically feasible. An internal MIS committee can interview a cross-section of marketing managers to discover their information needs :

1.	What decisions do you regularly make?
2.	What information do you need to make these decisions?
3.	What information do you regularly get?
4.	What special studies do you periodically request?
5.	What information would you want that you are not getting now?
6.	What information would you want daily? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly?
7.	What online or offline newsletters, briefings, blogs, reports, or magazines would you like to see on a regular basis?
8.	What topics would you like to be kept informed of?
9.	What data analysis and reporting programs would you want?
10.	What are the four most helpful improvements that could be made in the present marketing information system?

Internal Records

To spot important opportunities and potential problems, marketing managers rely on internal reports of orders, sales, prices, costs, inventory levels, receivables, and payables.

The Order-to-Payment Cycle

The heart of the internal records system is the order-to-payment cycle. Sales representatives, dealers, and customers send orders to the firm. The sales department prepares invoices, transmits copies to various departments, and back-orders out-of-stock items. Shipped items generate shipping and billing documents that go to various departments. Because customers favor firms that can promise timely delivery, companies need to perform these steps quickly and accurately.Many use the Internet and extranets to improve the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of the order-to-payment cycle

Fossil Group Fossil Group Australia designs and distributes accessories and apparel globally. Its account executives lacked the latest information about pricing and inventory while taking wholesale orders. High demand items were often out of stock, creating problem for retailers. After the firm deployed a mobile sales solution that connected account executives with current inventory data, the number of sales tied up in back orders fell 80 percent. The company can now provide retailers with actual inventory levels and ship orders in hours instead of days

 

Sales Information Systems

Marketing managers need timely and accurate reports on current sales. Walmart operates a sales and inventory data warehouse that captures data on every item for every customer, every store, every day and refreshes it every hour. Consider the experience of Panasonic.

Panasonic makes digital cameras, plasma televisions, and other consumer electronics. After missing revenue goals, the company decided to adopt a vendor-managed inventory solution. Inventory distribution then came in line with consumption, and availability of products to customers jumped from 70 percent to 95 percent. The average weeks that product supply sat in Panasonic’s channels went from 25 weeks to just 5 weeks within a year, and unit sales of the targeted plasma television rose from 20,000 to approximately 100,000. Best Buy, the initial retailer covered by the vendor-managed inventory model, has since elevated Panasonic from a Tier 3 Supplier to a Tier 1 “Go-To” Brand for plasma televisions

Panasonic’s new vendor-managed inventory system met with marketplace success, including from retailers

Companies that make good use of “cookies,” records of Web site usage stored on personal browsers, are smart users of targeted marketing.Many consumers are happy to cooperate: A recent survey showed that 49 percent of individuals agreed cookies are important to them when using the Internet. Not only do they not delete cookies, but they also expect customized marketing appeals and deals once they accept them.

Companies must carefully interpret the sales data, however, so as not to draw the wrong conclusions. Michael Dell gave this illustration: “If you have three yellow Mustangs sitting on a dealer’s lot and a customer wants a red one, the salesman may be really good at figuring out how to sell the yellow Mustang. So the yellow Mustang gets sold, and a signal gets sent back to the factory that, hey, people want yellow Mustangs

Databases, Data Warehousing, and Data Mining 

Companies organize their information into customer, product, and salesperson databases—and then combine their data. The customer database will contain every customer’s name, address, past  transactions, and sometimes even demographics and psychographics (activities, interests, and opinions). Instead of sending a mass “carpet bombing” mailing of a new offer to every customer in its database, a company will rank its customers according to factors such as purchase recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM) and send the offer to only the highest-scoring customers. Besides saving on mailing expenses, such manipulation of data can often achieve a double-digit response rate.

Companies make these data easily accessible to their decision makers. Analysts can “mine” the data and garner fresh insights into neglected customer segments, recent customer trends, and other useful information. Managers can cross-tabulate customer information with product and salesperson information to yield still-deeper insights. Using in-house technology,Wells Fargo can track and analyze every bank transaction made by its 10 million retail customers—whether at ATMs, at bank branches, or online.When it combines transaction data with personal information provided by customers, Wells Fargo can come up with targeted offerings to coincide with a customer’s lifechanging event. As a result, compared with the industry average of 2.2 products per customer,Wells Fargo sells 4 products.7 Best Buy is also taking advantage of these new rich databases.

Best Buy has assembled a 15-plus terabyte database with seven years of data on 75 million households. It captures information about every interaction— from phone calls and mouse clicks to delivery and rebatecheck addresses—and then deploys sophisticated algorithms to classify over three-quarters of its customers, or more than 100 million individuals, into profiled categories such as “Buzz” (the young technology buff), “Jill” (the suburban soccer mom), “Barry” (the wealthy professional guy), and “Ray” (the family man). The firm also applies a customer lifetime value model that measures transaction-level profitability and factors in customer behaviors that increase or decrease the value of the relationship. Knowing so much about consumers allows Best Buy to employ precision marketing and customer-triggered incentive programs with positive response rates.

Best Buy uses a massive database to develop profiles with which to classify its customers

Marketing Intelligence

The Marketing Intelligence System

A marketing intelligence system is a set of procedures and sources that managers use to obtain everyday information about developments in the marketing environment. The internal records system supplies results data, but the marketing intelligence system supplies happenings data. Marketing managers collect marketing intelligence in a variety of different ways, such as by reading books, newspapers, and trade publications; talking to customers, suppliers, and distributors; monitoring social media on the Internet; and meeting with other company managers. Before the Internet, sometimes you just had to go out in the field, literally, and watch the competition. This is what oil and gas entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens did. Describing how he learned about a rival’s drilling activity, Pickens recalls, “We would have someone who would watch (the rival’s) drilling floor from a half mile away with field glasses. Our competitor didn’t like it but there wasn’t anything they could do about it. Our spotters would watch the joints and drill pipe. They would count them; each [drill] joint was 30 feet long. By adding up all the joints, you would be able to tally the depth of the well.” Pickens knew that the deeper the well, the more costly it would be for his rival to get the oil or gas up to the surface, and this information provided him with an immediate competitive advantage

Marketing intelligence gathering must be legal and ethical. In 2006, the private intelligence firm Diligence paid auditor KPMG $1.7 million for having illegally infiltrated it to acquire an audit of a Bermuda-based investment firm for a Russian conglomerate. Diligence’s cofounder posed as a British intelligence officer and convinced a member of the audit team to share confidential documents

A company can take eight possible actions to improve the quantity and quality of its marketing intelligence. After describing the first seven, we devote special attention to the eighth, collecting marketing intelligence on the Internet

-	Train and motivate the sales force to spot and report new developments. The company must “sell” its sales force on their importance as intelligence gatherers. Grace Performance Chemicals, a division ofW. R. Grace, supplies materials and chemicals to the construction and packaging industries. Its sales reps were instructed to observe the innovative ways customers used its products in order to suggest possible new products. Some were using Grace waterproofing materials to soundproof their cars and patch boots and tents. Seven new-product ideas emerged, worth millions in sales.
-	Motivate distributors, retailers, and other intermediaries to pass along important intelligence. Marketing intermediaries are often closer to the customer and competition and can offer helpful insights. ConAgra has initiated a study with some of its retailers such as Safeway, Kroger, and Walmart to study how and why people buy its foods. Finding that shoppers who bought their Orville Redenbacher and Act II brands of popcorn tended to also buy Coke, ConAgra worked with the retailers to develop in-store displays for both products. Combining retailers’ data with its own qualitative insights, ConAgra learned that many mothers switched to time-saving meals and snacks when school started. It launched its “Seasons of Mom” campaign to help grocers adjust to seasonal shifts in household needs
-	Hire external experts to collect intelligence. Many companies hire specialists to gather marketing intelligence.13 Service providers and retailers send mystery shoppers to their stores to assess cleanliness of facilities, product quality, and the way employees treat customers. Health care facilities’ use of mystery patients has led to improved estimates of wait times, better explanations of medical procedures, and less-stressful programming on the waiting room TV.
-	Network internally and externally. The firm can purchase competitors’ products, attend open houses and trade shows, read competitors’ published reports, attend stockholders’ meetings, talk to employees, collect competitors’ ads, consult with suppliers, and look up news stories about competitors
-	Set up a customer advisory panel. Members of advisory panels might include the company’s largest, most outspoken, most sophisticated, or most representative customers. For example, GlaxoSmithKline sponsors an online community devoted to weight loss and says it is learning far more than it could have gleamed from focus groups on topics from packaging its weightloss pill to where to place in-store marketing.
-	Take advantage of government-related data resources. The U.S. Census Bureau provides an in-depth look at the population swings, demographic groups, regional migrations, and changing family structure of the estimated 304,059,724 people in the United States (as of July 1, 2008). Census marketer Nielsen Claritas cross-references census figures with consumer surveys and its own grassroots research for clients such as The Weather Channel, BMW, and Sovereign Bank. Partnering with “list houses” that provide customer phone and address information, Nielsen Claritas can help firms select and purchase mailing lists with specific clusters.
-	Purchase information from outside research firms and vendors. Well-known data suppliers include firms such as the A.C. Nielsen Company and Information Resources Inc. They collect information about product sales in a variety of categories and consumer exposure to various media. They also gather consumer-panel data much more cheaply than marketers manage on their own. Biz 360 and its online content partners, for example, provide real-time coverage and analysis of news media and consumer opinion information from over 70,000 traditional and social media sources (print, broadcast,Web sites, blogs, and message boards.