Collecting Information and Forecasting Demand

Good Marketers need insights to help them analyze the market and customers' needs, interpret past
performance and trands, and plan future activities. 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. This system draws from data based on internal company records, marketing intelligence, and
marketing research.

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 Research

Marketing research is the systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data and findings
relevant to a specific marketing situation facing the company. It consist of six steps. They are

Step 1: Define the Problem, Decision Alternatives, and Research Objectives

            Marketing managers must be careful not to define the problem too broadly or too narrowly for
the marketing researcher. Not all research projects can be specific. Some research is exploratory, to
shed light on the nature of the problem and suggest possible solutions or new ideas. Some research
is descriptive, to quantify demand and some research is casual, to test a cause-and-effect relationship.

Step 2: Develop the Research Plan

            Managers develop a plan for gathering the needed information. This involves decisions about
data sources, research approaches, research instruments, sampling plan, and contact methods.

Step 3: Collect the Information

            The data collection phase of marketing research is generally the most expensive and the most
prone to error. Four major problems arise in surveys: (1) some respondents will be away from home or
otherwise inaccessible and must be contacted again or replaced; (2) some respondents will not
cooperate; (3) some respondents will give biased or dishonest answers; and (4) some interviewers will
be biased or dishonest.

Step 4: Analyze the Information

            Extract the findings by tabulating the data and developing summary measures. The researchers
now compute averages and measures of dispersion for the major variables and apply statistical
techniques and decision models in the hope of discovering additional findings. They may test different
hypotheses and theories, applying sensitivity analysis to test assumptions and the strength of the
conclusions.

Step 5: Present the Findings

            As the last step, the researcher presents findings relevant to the major marketing decisions facing
management. Researchers increasingly are being asked to play a more proactive, consulting role in
translating data and information into insights and recommendations. They're also considering ways to
present research findings in ways that are understandable and compelling.

Step 6: Make the Decision

            The decision to launch the research into motion or not is manager's responsibilities, but the
research has provided them with insight into the problem.

Figure. The Marketing Research Process

Forecasting and Market Demand

             Forecasting is the art of anticipating what buyers are likely to do under a given set of conditions.
The next step is to estimate total market demand. Market demand for a product is the total volume that
would be bought by a defined customer group in a defined geographical area in a defined time period in
a defined marketing environment under a defined marketing program. Market demand is not a fixed
number, but rather a function of the stated conditions, which is why it is called the market demand
function.

Good Marketers need insights to help them analyze the market and customers' needs, interpret past
performance and trands, and plan future activities. 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. This system draws from data based on internal company records, marketing intelligence, and
marketing research.

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 Research

Marketing research is the systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data and findings
relevant to a specific marketing situation facing the company. It consist of six steps. They are

Step 1: Define the Problem, Decision Alternatives, and Research Objectives

            Marketing managers must be careful not to define the problem too broadly or too narrowly for
the marketing researcher. Not all research projects can be specific. Some research is exploratory, to
shed light on the nature of the problem and suggest possible solutions or new ideas. Some research
is descriptive, to quantify demand and some research is casual, to test a cause-and-effect relationship.

Step 2: Develop the Research Plan

            Managers develop a plan for gathering the needed information. This involves decisions about
data sources, research approaches, research instruments, sampling plan, and contact methods.

Step 3: Collect the Information

            The data collection phase of marketing research is generally the most expensive and the most
prone to error. Four major problems arise in surveys: (1) some respondents will be away from home or
otherwise inaccessible and must be contacted again or replaced; (2) some respondents will not
cooperate; (3) some respondents will give biased or dishonest answers; and (4) some interviewers will
be biased or dishonest.

Step 4: Analyze the Information

            Extract the findings by tabulating the data and developing summary measures. The researchers
now compute averages and measures of dispersion for the major variables and apply statistical
techniques and decision models in the hope of discovering additional findings. They may test different
hypotheses and theories, applying sensitivity analysis to test assumptions and the strength of the
conclusions.

Step 5: Present the Findings

            As the last step, the researcher presents findings relevant to the major marketing decisions facing
management. Researchers increasingly are being asked to play a more proactive, consulting role in
translating data and information into insights and recommendations. They're also considering ways to
present research findings in ways that are understandable and compelling.

Step 6: Make the Decision

            The decision to launch the research into motion or not is manager's responsibilities, but the
research has provided them with insight into the problem.
Figure. The Marketing Research Process

Identifying the Major Forces

       
Firms must monitor six major forces in the broad environment: demographic, economic, sociocultural,
natural, technological, and political-legal in addition to the steep decline of the stock market, which
affected savings, investment, and retirement funds; increasing unemployment; corporate scandals;
stronger indications of global warming and other signs of deterioration in the national environment; and
of course, the rise of terrorism. These dramatic events were accompanied by the continuation of many
trends that have already profoundly influenced the global landscape.

merican inventor Henry Ford famously said that history is “more or less

bunk.” Others have characterized history differently: as the essence of
innumerable biographies, as a picture of human crimes and misfortunes, as
nothing but an agreed upon fable, as something that is bound to repeat
itself.

It’s hard to define such a monumental thing without grappling with the
tensions between what is fact and what is fiction, as well as what was
included and what was left out. So it’s only fitting that those tensions are
wrapped up in the history of the word itself.
The short version is that the term history has evolved from an ancient Greek
verb that means “to know,” says the Oxford English Dictionary’s Philip
Durkin. The Greek word historia originally meant inquiry, the act of seeking
knowledge, as well as the knowledge that results from inquiry. And from
there it’s a short jump to the accounts of events that a person might put
together from making inquiries — what we might call stories.

The words story and history share much of their lineage, and in previous

eras, the overlap between them was much messier than it is today. “That
working out of distinction,” says Durkin, “has taken centuries and
centuries.” Today, we might think of the dividing line as the one between
fact and fiction. Stories are fanciful tales woven at bedtime, the plots of
melodramatic soap operas. That word can even be used to describe an
outright lie. Histories, on the other hand, are records of events. That word
refers to all time preceding this very moment and everything that really
happened up to now.

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The distinction is still messier than that, of course. Plenty of stories — like
the story of a person’s life or a “true story” on which a less-true film is based
— are supposed to be factual. And plenty of stories defy easy categorization
one way or the other. Take the notion of someone telling their side of a
story. To them, that account might be as correct as any note about
a president’s birthplace. To someone else, that account might be as incorrect
as the notion that storks deliver babies. Yet the word stands up just fine to
that stress because the term story  has come to describe such varying
amounts of truth and fiction.

As the linguistic divide has evolved since the Middle Ages, we have come to
expect more from history  — that it be free from the flaws of viewpoint and
selective memory that stories so often contain. Yet it isn’t, humans being the
imperfect and hierarchical creatures that they are and history being
something that is made rather than handed down from some omniscient
scribe.

That is why feminists, for example, rejected the word history and

championed the notion of herstory during the 1970s,
says Dictionary.com’s Jane Solomon, “to point out the fact that history has
mostly come from a male perspective.” The “his” in history has nothing,
linguistically, to do with the pronoun referring to a male person. And some
critics pointed that out back in the 1970s, saying that the invention
of herstory showed ignorance about where the word comes from. But
sociolinguist Ben Zimmer says there’s evidence that the feminists knew as
much at the time. And more importantly, the fact that it sounds
plausible that there would be a link can still tell us something.

Take the fact that similar plays on the word have been made by people in
other marginalized groups too: When jazz musician Sun Ra quipped that
“history is only his story. You haven’t heard my story yet,” that statement
might have nothing to do with etymology but it can suggest a lot about race
and whether an African-American viewpoint is included in the tales passed
down in textbooks. That’s why, even if the origins of the word “history” are
clear, the question of who gets to decide which version of the past is the
right one remains a contentious debate centuries after the term came to be.
“The narrative element has always been there,” Zimmer says. In some ways,
the apocryphal tale about how history came to describe accounts of the past
“plays on what has been hiding in that word all along.”

Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly described the

origins of the words “history” and “inquiry.” They do not share the same
root.

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