Inside Information: Making Sense of Marketing Data - Hardcover

Smith, D. V. L.; Fletcher, J. H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471495433 ISBN 13: 9780471495437

Verlag: Wiley, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

The marketing information available to us doubles every five years. Increasingly, not only will marketing organizations have more access to data, but a lot of this information will be its own internal data, rather than information being supplied by an external market research agency.

In the future the successful marketing executives will be those who can quickly assimilate the plethora of incoming information about their markets and their customers, and from this information see the "big picture" and then take intelligent action. In the new Millennium, those who survive and flourish in marketing will be those who can quickly identify the 'messages' that are often hidden deep in their market and customer information. People who can see 'shapes and patterns' in data will be the ones who will successfully change and improve their organizations. The successful will be those who can quickly reject extraneous information and identify the overarching trends and themes that can be detected from different combinations of marketing evidence. Those who fail will be those who are overwhelmed with the minutia of information and are unable to get on top of what this growing mountain of marketing information is really telling them.

This book provides the way forward for all marketers faced with the above challenges. It highlights the basic principles about information, acknowledging the fact that we are entering a new era that is well away from the old fashioned model of a market research agency supplying survey type data. Increasingly, this process will be replaced with a much more instantaneous process where data from different sources - internal and external - are quickly fired at the marketer, with he/she being expected to make immediate sense of it. Inside Information is one of the first to respond to this new information era for understanding information. The book is a user friendly, very accessible book for the marketing manager who needs to process mountains of marketing information, but who will not have the time, or inclination to read detailed texts.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DR DAVID SMITH is Chairman of DVL Smith Ltd, a business research agency, part of the Incepta Group plc, and also a Visiting Professor at the University of Hertfordshire Business School. He is a Fellow and Vice President of the Market Research Society, and a former Chairman of the Society. He is a silver medal holder of the Market Research Society, and has received Best Paper Awards for papers presented at Market Research Society, ESOMAR and also Business and Industrial Group conferences. He is a graduate member of the British Psychological Society and a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Institute of Management Consultants. He holds a doctorate in organisational psychology from Birkbeck College, University of London.

JONATHAN FLETCHER is a Director of DVL Smith Ltd. He holds a research degree in philosophy from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining DVL Smith Ltd he worked in the Bank of England. He has given papers at various ESOMAR and Market Research Society conferences, in addition to contributing chapters on market research methodology to various books. With the Managing Director of DVL Smith Ltd, Andy Dexter, he won the Best Methodological Paper Award at the 1999 ESOMAR Congress.

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The twenty-first century has brought with it an inundation of information with which business has to grapple. For those who have to make sense of information on a day-to-day basis, a new set of information skills and competencies, a new set of habits are required to handle the new world of multi-source data.

In this book help is at hand. It is full of practical guidance on how to effectively process and action modern marketing and business information to maximum competitive advantage. The authors provide a step-by-step practical approach to the holistic analysis of information and data, complete with tools and checklists.

For 'knowledge workers' who have to make sense of new sources of business information for effective marketing decision-making, this book provides:
* the 'craft skills' to scan, gut and action information
* the tools to effectively apply qualitative and quantitative marketing information to the decision-making process
If you use market research data to make commercial decisions, this book will show you:
* how better to understand what qualitative research is telling you
* what questions to ask about surveys in order to get the most robust evidence
* what you need to know about commissioning new research

For market research practitioners who supply data, this book will also be invaluable. It defines, for the first time, the holistic data analysis process in a way that will generate debate within the industry on how to best advance these methods and approaches.

Aus dem Klappentext

This book, for the first time, brings together a wealth of insight and advice on the world of market research. It is the first book to define the holistic analysis process in a way that will allow industry to debate and advance these methods and approaches.

It plugs the gap between what newcomers to the market research industry can read about in a text book and what actually happens in practice in agencies and client organizations.

It seeks to help individuals working in the world of marketing to develop more confidence about using a range of hard and soft techniques in an holistic way, in order to better understand business information.

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Foreword

Everybody knows how to distrust statistical information - 'lies, damn lies, and statistics'. And a few people even know how misleading popular conceptions of probability are, to the extent that some can give the counter-intuitive, but correct, answer to the question 'what is the probability that two children in a class of 30 will share a birthday?' - a much higher probability than most people think.

But how many of the hundreds of thousands of people who use, survey data in their work or lives, let alone how many who read survey findings in the media, have had any serious training in their analysis or interpretation? It is precisely because there is much more to the understanding and use of survey research than statistical formulae, that this book is necessary.

A very public example in recent years has been the debate on the use of focus groups by political parties in the formulation and presentation of policy. This raises two kinds of issue, each addressed by Smith and Fletcher in this challenging book.

First, the issue addressed by Chapter three of how qualitative research is carried out, when it is appropriate (and when not), and what precautions should be taken in the interpretation of qualitative evidence. Historically, most qualitative research has been widely - even mainly used as part of the problem definition stage of a research project. Focus groups, or as they used to be called, discussion groups, were used to test how comprehensible ideas, language, or images, would be if used in a quantitative survey. Even motivation research, originally conducted by psychologists seeking to explore unexpressed motivation rather than conscious attitudes or behaviour, would commonly be reported as part of a study embracing both qualitative and quantitative data.

But the public image of focus groups, mainly triggered by political parties and their spin-doctors, has been as a short-cut to understanding of public opinion, not complementing but replacing the measurement of opinion and behaviour on political issues, among significant groups of the population, which can only be achieved by quantitative surveys. It is not just the media who over-simplify an issue of public concern: it is clear from their own accounts that those advising political parties in Britain have indeed misused focus groups, and neglected the proper use of survey research.

Dick Morris, President Clinton's spin-doctor, did not rely on focus groups to give his tactical advice to the presidential candidate in 1992, but commissioned 800 telephone interviews every night during the campaign. Not cheap, but effective. Spin-doctors to British political parties would do well to follow that example. Smith and Fletcher help to explain why.

Second, the issue of how research findings are to be used in making business decisions, which has dominated business texts on marketing research since Green and Tull. Again, the focus group controversy illuminates the issue. Too often, public reporting of research for political parties, often fed by leaks of internal documents, gives the impression that parties wish to use research, not to guide them in the presentation of policy, but as a replacement for political, social and economic analysis in the formulation of policy itself.

Perhaps they do: perhaps popularism without principle is gaining ground in our political life. But as a politician, I profoundly hope not; and as a survey researcher, both in business and in public policy, I deplore such distortion of our discipline. Survey research should assist, but never seek to usurp, the role of decision-making based on proper business or policy objectives, and in possession of all the relevant facts.

Again, this book provides practical illustrations of the dangers of misinterpretation of research findings - what the authors call the 'craft skills necessary to scan, gut, and action information'. Textbooks of market research already expound many of the rules of interpretation - caution when dealing with small sub-samples, re-percentaging when bases change (or better, avoiding changing bases), and so on: the authors rightly rehearse these rules. But in emphasising the importance of inductive reasoning, in what they call 'the seven pillars of information wisdom' they address issues which are well known to those experienced in the craft, but which have not before, to my knowledge, been sufficiently expounded in print.

It has always seemed to me that there are two difficult problems for those who find themselves required to commission research, or to make business or policy decisions using research findings.

The first is to remember that commissioning original research s a last resort. If effective ways can be found to use business or official statistics, or to re-examine or re-interpret existing research data, then that will be preferable to commissioning original research, which runs the twin risks of costing more than the benefit to be derived from it, or of being carried out on an inadequate budget, with the potential for untrustworthy results.

Second - and there are constant reminders of this in the book - survey research essentially provides the customer viewpoint, to counterbalance the producer bias which is inherent in business life. It does not mean that the customer is always right.

To give merely one example: for many years, economic and business researchers both in the UK and in the US devoted considerable resources and great skill to analysing the validity and reliability of anticipations data as a tool for forecasting consumer purchases. They took into account the obvious psychological truth that buying intentions will become less firm and actionable the further into the future they go; they allowed for the fact that large purchases, such as home or cars, are more likely to be anticipated than purchases of, for example, small electrical appliances; they even, eventually, caught up with the fact that anticipation of replacement purchases will follow a different pattern from first time buying.

But what they failed to do was to recognise that other factors, themselves capable of forecasting, but necessarily unknown to the consumer at the time of interview, would influence consumer buying intentions...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wiley
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0471495433
• ISBN 13: 9780471495437
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 276
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland