Why it Matters
Overview
Teacher resources for Unit 6 can be found on the next page.
Why It Matters: Marketing Information and Research
Resources for Unit 6: Marketing Information and Research
Slide Deck - Module 6: Marketing Information and Research
Pacing
The Principles of Marketing textbook contains sixteen units—roughly one unit per week for a 16-week semester. If you need to modify the pace and cover the material more quickly, the following units work well together:
- Unit 1: What Is Marketing? and Unit 2: Marketing Function. Both are lighter, introductory units.
- Unit 15: Global Marketing and Unit 16: Marketing Plan. Unit 16 has more course review and synthesis information than new material per se.
- Unit 5: Ethics can be combined with any unit. You can also move it around without losing anything.
- Unit 8: Positioning and Unit 9: Branding. Companion modules that can be covered in a single week.
- Unit 6: Marketing Information & Research and Unit 7: Consumer Behavior. Companion units that can be covered in a single week.
We recommend NOT doubling up the following units, because they are long and especially challenging. Students will need more time for mastery and completion of assignments.
- Unit 4: Marketing Strategy
- Unit 10: Product Marketing
- Unit 13: Promotion: Integrated Marketing Communication
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Why use marketing information and research to develop marketing strategies for organizations?
Learning Outcomes
- Explain the role of marketing information in helping firms understand and reach consumers
- Describe the key types of marketing information including internal data, competitive intelligence and marketing research
- Outline a standard process for using marketing research to address an organization’s strategic questions
- Recognize alternative methods for conducting marketing research, including primary and secondary research methods
- Identify major sources of available market data
- Explain how Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems can help organizations manage and gain customer insights from marketing information
- Use marketing information to inform the marketing strategy
Your uncle Dan owns an independent bookstore called Bookends in Seattle, Washington. You drop in to see him whenever you’re in the neighborhood to catch up and borrow some graphic novels. (That’s you in the picture.)
When you visit this time, Dan sits you down in a corner and tells you he needs help. “Sales are down,” he says, “and rent’s going up. It’s killing me. I’d say I’ve got six months to turn things around or I’m done. The end of Bookends. You still learning about marketing?—your mom said you’re taking a class. Got any bright ideas? Maybe some whiz-bang advertising?”—he grins and punches you lightly on the shoulder.
You start to tell him that marketing isn’t just advertising . . . but instead you say, “I don’t know, Dan. I’ll have to think about it.”
So, you do think about it. You don’t know everything about marketing yet, but you’ve learned this: Your uncle needs to understand his customers—that’s where marketing starts and ends. Who are Dan’s customers, and what’s up with them? Why aren’t they buying as much as they used to? How can you find out more about what they want?
These are big, important questions. For now, they all have one answer: marketing information and research.
Read on if you want to save your uncle’s bookstore . . .
Marketing information and marketing research are tools that organizations use to understand what’s happening in the markets they serve.
Why do marketing information and research matter? Because no one has all the answers all the time. Because people and attitudes and behaviors change. Because customers, competitors, the economy, and other factors can all affect your success. Marketing is an increasingly data-rich field, and these days, doing it well means using all the information you can to gain insights into what your customers want and how you can give them value. Without that information, you’re trying to shoot a target in the dark.
Licenses and Attributions
CC licensed content, Original
- Why It Matters: Marketing Research. Provided by: Lumen Learning. License: CC BY: Attribution
CC licensed content, Shared previously
- bookstore. Authored by: darwin.wins. Located at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/darwinwins/930136784/. License: CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives