Session 4-1 - Scanning The Marketing Environment, Forecasting Demand, and Conducting Marketing Research

Phillip Kevin Lane
Kotler • Keller
Marketing Management • 14e
Scanning the Marketing Environment,

Forecasting Demand, and Conducting
Marketing Research
Components of modern marketing system
• Marketers have the major responsibility for identifying significant

marketplace changes. They have 2 advantages for their task: disciplined
methods for collecting information and time spend interacting with
customers and observing competitors and others outside groups.
• Some firms have marketing information systems that provide rich detail
about buyers wants, preferences and behavior
• Every firm must organize and distribute a continues flow of information
to its marketing managers
“MIS consists of people, equipment and procedure 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: (a) an internal record system, (b) a business intelligence
system,(c ) a marketing research system
Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall Slide 2 of 25

1. Internal Records
To spot important opportunities and potential problems, marketing managers

rely on internal reports of orders, sales, prices, cost, inventory levels,
receivables and payables.
a. The order-to-payment cycle
Sales representatives, dealers, and customers send orders to the firm. The
sales department prepares invoices, transmits copies to the 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
b. Sales Information System
Marketing manager need timely and accurate reports on current sales
Example: Wal-Mart 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

1. Internal Records
c. 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 customer’s name, address, past transactions
and sometimes even demographics and psychographics (activities, interest
and opinions)

2. Marketing Intelligence
The marketing intelligence system
“it is a set of procedures and sources that managers use to obtain everyday
information about developments in the marketing environment.”
• 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
• Marketing intelligence gathering must be legal and ethical. A company can
take 8 possible actions to improve the quantity and quality of its marketing
intelligence:
 Train and motivate the sales force to spot and report new developments
 Motivate distributors, retailers, and other intermediaries to pass along
important intelligence
 Hire external experts to collect intelligence: service providers and retailers
send shoppers to their stores to assess cleanliness of facilities, product
quality and the way employees treat customers
 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: includes the company’s largest , most
outspoken, most sophisticated or most representative customers
 Take advantage of government data resources: government agencies in
South Asia provide detailed data pertaining to population trends,
demographic characteristics, agricultural production, and a host of useful
data. Population census conducted by government is an important data
source
 Purchase information from outside suppliers: companies can also make
use of data that is purchased from other agencies

Collecting marketing intelligence on the internet

There are 5 main ways marketers can research competitors’ product strengths
and weaknesses online
 Independent customer goods and services review forums: independent
forums include Websites such as Epinions.com, ConsumerReview.com,
Bizrate.com collects millions of consumer reviews of stores and products
each year from 2 sources: 1.3 million volunteer members and feedback
from stores that allow Bizrate.com to collect it directly from their
customers as they make purchases
 Distributors or sales agent feedback sites: Example, Amazon.com offers an
interactive feedback opportunity through which buyers, readers, editors
and others can review all products on the site, especially books
 Combo sites offering customer services and expert opinions: Example,
ZDNet.com an online advisor on technology products, offers customer
comments and evaluations based on ease of use, features and stability
along with expert reviews. The advantage is that a product supplier can
compare experts’ opinions with those of consumers
 Customer compliant sites: PlanetFeedback.com allows customers to voice

unfavorable experiences with specific companies.
 Public blogs: offers personal opinions, reviews, ratings, and
recommendations on virtually any topic – and their numbers continue to
grow
Communicating and acting on marketing intelligence
The competitive intelligence function works best when it works closely
coordinated with the decision making process. Given the speed of the
internet, it is important to act quickly on information online. Here is a
company who benefited from a proactive approach to online information
“When coke’s monitoring software spotted a Twitter post that went to 10,000
followers from an upset consumer who couldn’t redeem a prize from a My
Coke rewards program, Coke quickly posted an apology on his Twitter profile
and offered to help resolve the situation. After the consumer got the prize, he
changed his Twitter avatar to a photo of himself holding a coke bottle”

Analyzing the macro environment
1. Needs and Trends

• Fads: “unpredictable, short lived, and without social, economic, and
political significance”. A trend is more predictable and durable than fad
whereas megatrend is a “large social, economic, political, and
technological change that is slow to form and once in place influences us
for some time – between seven and ten years or longer

2. Identifying the major forces

Firms must monitor 6 major forces in the broad environment: demographics,
economic, social – cultural, natural, technological, and political – legal.
• The interaction between them leads to new opportunities and threats
Example: explosive population growth (demographic), leads to more resource
depletion and pollution (natural), which leads to consumers to call for more
law (political- legal), which stimulates new technological solutions and
products (technological) that, if they are affordable (economic)may actually
change attitudes and behaviors (social – cultural)
 Demographic environment
Includes study of human population, including size, age, gender, race etc.
Worldwide population growth
A growing population does not mean growing markets unless there is
sufficient purchasing power. Marketers have to analyze the various markets to
find opportunities

Population age mix
Marketers normally divide the population into 6 age groups: preschool
children, school age children, teens, young adults age 20 to 40, middle aged
adults 40 to 65, and older adults 65 and older
Ethnic and other markets
India has a diverse population in terms of religion – about 80.5 percent of
Indians were Hindus, 13.4 Muslims, 2.31 Christians, 1.9 Sikhs etc.
Educational groups
The population in any society falls into 5 educational groups: illiterates, high
school dropouts, high school diplomas or secondary school certificates, college
degrees and professional degree
The educational level of a society has implications for marketers of books,
magazines, education and travel services and many other products and
services
Household patterns
Joint family system is not preferred. The decision making roles have now
shifted to the younger family heads
 Economic environment
The purchasing power in an economy depends on current income, prices,
savings, debts, and credit availability
Consumer psychology
Consumer spending depends on the disposable income, socio economic
profile, expectations from the future. In the inflationary environment,
consumers become choosy, bargain for better deals, buy bulk or economy
packs. In recessionary environment, hunt for bargains, however, the very poor
and the very rich are not significantly impacted by changes in the economy
Income distribution
There are 5 income distributions:
Very low income (small market)
mostly low incomes (small market)
very low, very high incomes (large market)
Low, medium, high income
Mostly medium incomes
Income levels and consumption patterns:
a. Deprived households – These households have an annual disposable
income of less than Rs. 90,000. They are the poorest economic class in
the economy. They are mostly unskilled workers working on daily wage
basis
b. Aspirers-This category has an annual disposable incomes in the range of
Rs.90,000 to Rs.200,000. They spend almost half of their incomes on
basic necessities. Includes small time retailers, small farmers, and low
skilled industrial workers
c. Seekers- This category has an annual disposable income between Rs.
200,000 and Rs. 500,000. Includes white collar employees, mid-level
government officials, newly employed young post graduates etc
d. Strivers- They have an income ranging from Rs. 500,000 to Rs. 1,000,000
per annum. Includes established professionals like lawyers, MBAs, senior
government officials, medium scale industrialists etc. people in this
category are considered as well established & successful in the Indian
society
Global Indians- this category has an annual disposable income in excess of Rs.
1,000,000. Includes senior corporate executives, large business owners, top
most professionals, politicians, film actors, and big farmers.

 Socio cultural environment

From our socio cultural environment we absorb a world view that defines
our relationships to ourselves, others, organizations, society, nature and the
universe
Peoples views of themselves
1. People vary in their emphasis of serving themselves versus serving
others
2. Some people seek personal pleasure, wanting fun, change & escape
3. Some seek self realization through religion, recreation, career & other
life goals.
4. People use product, brand & services as a mean of self expression &
they buy product and services that match their views of themselves
5. Marketers can target their product & services based on such self views.
Example,MasterCards target adventurers who might want to use their
credit cards to quickly set up experience of a lifetime

Peoples views of others
1. In the past decades observer have noted several shifts in people’s
attitude towards others
2. Some trend trackers have seen a new wave in which people are going out
less with others & staying home more to enjoy creature comforts of home
& hearth
3. This trend suggests a great demand for home improvement &
entertainment products
People’s views of organizations
1. People vary in their attitude toward corporations, government agencies,
trade unions, universities & other organizations
2. People are now willing to work for major organizations and expect them,
in turn, to carry out society’s work
3. Many people don’t see work as a source of satisfaction but as a source to
earn money to enjoy their nonwork hours
4. This trend suggests that organizations need to find new ways to win
consumer & employee confidence
People’s views of society
1. People vary in their attitude towards the society
2. People’s orientation to their society influences their consumption
patterns & attitudes toward the marketplace
People’s views of nature
1. People vary in their attitude towards the natural world
2. The renewed love of things natural has created a 63-million-person
“lifestyles of health and sustainability” market, consumers who seek out
everything from natural, organic & nutritional products to fuel efficient
cars & alternative medicine

People’s views of the universe
1. People vary in their beliefs about the origin of the universe & their place
in it.
2. People have been moving away from materialism to seek more
permanent values – Family, community, earth, faith
3. American are on spiritual journey, concerned with the meaning of life and
issues of the soul & spirit. People say they are increasingly looking to
religion. This new spiritualism affects consumers in everything from the TV
show they watch & the books they read to the products and services they
buy

 Core cultural values & beliefs
• Core and secondary beliefs
 Existence of sub cultures
Each society contains subcultures, groups with shared values, beliefs,
preferences and behaviors emerging from their life experiences
 Natural environment
Involves the natural resources that are needed as inputs by marketers or that
are affected by marketing activities
Marketers should be aware of several trends in the natural environment:
1. Shortages of raw materials
2. Increased pollution
3. Increased government intervention

Shortages of raw materials:
1. Air & water may seem to be infinite resources, but some groups see long
run danger. Air pollution & water shortage are already a big problem in most
parts of the world.
2. Renewable resources, such as forests & food, also have to be used wisely
3. Non-renewable resources such as oil, coal & various minerals, pose a
serious problem
4. Firms making products that require these non-renewable resources face
large cost increase, even if the material do remain available
Increased pollution
1. Industry will almost always damage the quality of the natural environment
2. Consider the disposal of chemical & nuclear wastes, quantity of chemical
pollutants in the soil & food supply & the littering of the environment with
bottles, plastics & other packaging materials

Increased Government Intervention in Nature Resource Management
1. The government of different countries vary in their concern & efforts to
promote a clean environment.
2. Poor nations, do little about pollution, because they lack the needed funds
& political accord needed to mount a worldwide environmental effort.
3. Now companies are developing environmentally sustainable strategies &
practices in an effort to create a world economy that the planet can support
indefinitely. They are responding to customer demands with more
environmentally responsible products.

 Technological environment
Marketers should monitor the following technological trends:
• Accelerating pace of change
Think for future
• Unlimited opportunities for innovation
• R & D budgets
• Increased regulation of technological change
Government has expended its agencies powers to investigate and ban
potentially unsafe products
Example: health products or drugs to be sold

 Political legal environment
• Increase in business legislation
To avoid unfair competition, protect consumers from unfair business
practices, protect society etc.
• Growth of special interest groups
“A person who is dedicated to protecting and promoting the welfare and
rights of consumers”
Many companies have established public affairs departments to deal with
special groups and issues.
The consumerist movement organized citizens and government to strengthen
the rights and powers of buyers in relationship to sellers.
They have the right to know the real cost of loan, true cost per standard unit
of competing brands (unit pricing), benefits of the products

Marketing research
“systematic design, collection, analysis and reporting of data relevant to
a specific marketing situation facing an organization”
There are 4 steps in the research process
1.Defining the problem and research objectives

2. Developing the research plan – for collecting information
3. Implementing the research plan – collecting and analyzing the data
4. Interpreting and reporting the findings
24
1. Defining the problem and research objectives
• Marketing managers and researchers must work closely together to

define the problem and agree on research objectives.
• Defining the problem and research objective is often the hardest
step in the research process. The manager may know that
sometime is wrong without knowing the specific causes
• Once the problem has been defined, the researcher must set the
research objectives
• A marketing research project might have one of three types of
objectives: exploratory, descriptive and causal research
25
a. Exploratory research – totally new
Gather information that will help define problems and suggest
hypotheses
b. Descriptive research – find conclusion
To describe marketing problems, situations, or markets such as market
potential for a product
c. Causal research – correlation effect
To test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships
Example: effect of ufone TV advertisement on customer purchase
decision
26
2. Developing the research plan
• Now researchers must determine the exact information needed,

develop a plan for gathering it efficiently, and present the plan to
management
• Example: Tapal tea in Pakistan decides to conduct research on how
consumers , especially those in Punjab, would react to a proposed
hard pack version of their very popular Tapal danedar brand,
currently available in soft packs
• Research and feedback from its sales force suggest that people in
Punjab seem to prefer competitive tea brands sold in hard packs.
To obtain high market share, it might want to launch a hard pack
version of tapal danedar
27
The proposed research might call for the following specific
information:
• The demographic, economic, and lifestyle characteristics and
attitude of current tapal danedar softpack users, especially in
Punjab: who are they? Etc
Tapal’s brand manager will need these and many more other types of
information to decide whether to and how to introduce the new tapal
danedar hard pack
DATA SOURCES: To meet the manager’s information needs, the
research plan can call for gathering secondary data, primary data, or
both
• Secondary data – consist of information that already exists
somewhere, having been collected for another purpose
• Primary data – consist of information collected for the specific
purpose at hand 28
Gathering secondary data
• Companies can buy secondary data reports from outside suppliers
• Using commercial online data bases, marketers can conduct their
own searches of secondary data sources
• Web search engines is also a very good source
Advantages of secondary data collection

• Secondary data can be collected more quickly and at a lower cost
than primary data
• Secondary sources can sometimes provide data an individual
company cannot collect on it own
29
Gathering primary data
1. Research approaches
Includes: observation, surveys, and experiments
a. Observation
• By observing relevant people. Example: fisher price, has set up an
observation lab in which it can observe the reactions of little kids to new
toys
• Observational research can obtain information that people are unwilling or
unable to provide.
• A wide range of companies now use ethnographic research.– sending
trained observers to watch and interact with consumers in their natural
habitat
b. Survey
• Most appropriate for gathering descriptive information
• A company that wants to know about people’s knowledge, attitudes,
preferences, or buying behavior can often find out by asking 30 them directly.
Example: questionnaire
c. Experimental research
• “Gathering primary data by selecting matched groups of subjects,
giving them different treatments, controlling related factors, and
checking for differences in group responses”
Example: before adding a new sandwich to its menu, McDonalds might
use experiments to test the effects on sales of two different prices it
might charge. It could introduce the new sandwich at one price in one city
and at another price in another city. If the cities are similar, and if all other
marketing efforts for the sandwich are the same, then differences in the
sales in the two cities could be related to the price charged.
2. Contact methods
a. Mail, telephone, personal interviewing
31
• Mail questionnaire can be used to collect large amount of information
at a low cost per respondent. However mail questionnaire are not very
flexible – all respondents answer the same questions in a fixed order.
• Mail survey take longer to complete and the response rate is slow
• Marketer has little control over it
• Telephone interviewing is one of the best methods for gathering

information quickly, and provide flexibility.
• Cost per respondent is higher than mail questionnaire
• Personal interviewing takes two forms: individual and group

interviewing
32
• Individual interviewing involves talking with individual in their homes
or offices, on the street, on in shopping malls. Such interviewing is
flexible.
• Group interviewing involves inviting six to ten people to meet with a
trained moderator to talk about a product, service or organization.
Participants normally are paid a small sum for attending. Example:
focus groups
Online marketing research

“Collecting primary data online through internet surveys, online focus
groups, web based experiments or tracking consumers’ online behavior”
• Company can introduce questionnaire on their website and offer
incentives for completing them
• Internet is well suited for quantitative research – collecting data
• Lowest cost research method
33
• Engages the consumers alot
Online marketing research
ADVANTAGES:
• Online research is inexpensive
• It is fast
• People are open to opinions when they can respond privately
• It is versatile (changeable or inconstant), more fun and entertaining
than paper work
DISADVANTAGES:
• Online panels and communities can suffer from excessive turnover
• They can suffer from technological problems and inconsistencies
(product might look different on screen than in real)
34
Online focus groups
• Such groups offer many advantages over traditional focus groups
• Participants can log from anywhere - all they need is a laptop and a
web connection
• Low cost
• They can take place in several formats:
 Online chat room discussions in which participants and a moderator
sit around a virtual table exchanging comments
Disadvantage is that it can lack the real world dynamics of more
personal approaches. (having no eye contact, body language, and
direct personal interaction)
35
Sampling plan
“ a segment of the population selected for marketing research to represent
the population as a whole”
Designing a sample requires three decisions:
1. Who is to be surveyed? (what sampling unit)?
For example, to study a decision making process of a family automobile
purchases, should the research interview the husband, wife and other family
members or all of them?
2. How many people should be surveyed (what sample size)?
large samples give more reliable result than small samples. However large
samples cost more
3. How should the people in the sample be chosen (what sample procedure)?
• Probability sampling – every member of the population has the known and
equal chance of selection
• Non probability sampling – researcher selects the easiest population
members from which to obtain information 36
Research instruments
1. Questionnaire
• The most flexible way – there are many ways to ask questions
Close ended questions – choose the best answer, MCQs
Open ended questions – to know about people suggestions
Qualitative approaches
• Word association – what comes to the mind when you hear about the
brand name?
• Projective techniques – interesting activities / exercises
• Visualization – create a collage from magazine photos or drawing
• Brand personification – what kind of person they think of when the brand is
mentioned
• Laddering – to study consumer mind (ask why they prefer the product?)
2. Mechanical instruments
• It is used to monitor consumer behavior. Example, advertisers use cameras
to study viewers’ eye movements while watching ads – at what point their
eyes focus first etc. 37
3. Collect the information
4. Analyzing and Implementing the research plan
• Putting the marketing research plan into action
• Make sure the plan is implemented correctly
5. Interpreting and reporting the finding

• Draw conclusion and report them to the management
• Researcher should present important findings and insights that are
useful in the major decisions faced by management
6. Make a decision
Some organizations use marketing decision support systems to help
their marketing managers make better decisions.
“software company use to gather and interpret relevant information
from business and environment and turns it into a basis for marketing
action” 38

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Phillip Kevin Lane

Scanning the Marketing Environment,

• Marketers have the major responsibility for identifying significant

“MIS consists of people, equipment and procedure to gather sort, analyze,

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall Slide 2 of 25

To spot important opportunities and potential problems, marketing managers

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall Slide 3 of 25

c. Databases, Data Warehousing, and Data Mining

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall Slide 4 of 25

• Marketing managers collect marketing intelligence in a variety of different

 Network internally and externally: the firm can purchase competitors’

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall Slide 6 of 25

Collecting marketing intelligence on the internet

 Customer compliant sites: PlanetFeedback.com allows customers to voice

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall Slide 8 of 25

1. Needs and Trends

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall Slide 9 of 25

2. Identifying the major forces

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall Slide 10 of 25

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall Slide 14 of 25

 Socio cultural environment

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Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall Slide 17 of 25

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall Slide 18 of 25

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall Slide 19 of 25

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Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall Slide 23 of 25

There are 4 steps in the research process

1.Defining the problem and research objectives

• Marketing managers and researchers must work closely together to

• Now researchers must determine the exact information needed,

Advantages of secondary data collection

a. Mail, telephone, personal interviewing

• Telephone interviewing is one of the best methods for gathering

• Personal interviewing takes two forms: individual and group

Online marketing research

5. Interpreting and reporting the finding

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