BNAD 303 Exam 1

The process of developing and maintaining a strategic fit between the organization’s goals and capabilities and its changing marketing opportunities.

Steps in Strategic Planning: 1. Defining the company’s mission (corp. level) 2. Setting the company objectives and goals (corp. level) 3. Designing the business portfolio (corp. level) 4. Planning marketing and other functional strategies (business unit, product, and market level)

Consists of people and procedures for assessing information needs, developing the needed information, and helping decision makers to use the information to generate and validate actionable customer and market insights

The systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data relevant to a specific marketing situation facing an organization
Made up of: exploratory, descriptive, and causal research

Marketing research to gather preliminary information that will help define problems and to suggest hypotheses

Marketing research to better describe marketing problems, situation, or markets, such as the market potential for a product or the demographics and attitudes of consumers

Marketing research to test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships

· gathering primary data by observing relevant people, actions, and situations o Observing such naturally occurring feedback can provide inputs that simply can’t be gained through more structure and formal research approaches o Feelings, attitudes, and motives can’t be observed o Observations can be hard to interpret

· observation in the “natural habitat” o Yield the details that don’t emerge from traditional research questionnaires or focus groups

· gathering primary data by asking people questions about their knowledge, attitudes, preferences, and buying behavior o Best for gathering descriptive information o Flexible o People are unwilling to respond; don’t know how to respond

· gathering primary data by selecting matched groups of subjects, giving them different treatments, controlling related factors, and checking for differences in group responses. o Best for gathering causal information

· personal interviewing that involves inviting 6-10 people to gather for a few hours with a trained interviewer to talk about a product, service, or organization. o May be hard to generalize results o Customers not always open to express feelings

Information that already exists somewhere which has been collected for another purpose --Commercial Database Services: offer wealth of information to firms --Weaknesses: May be inaccurate, needed information may not exist, relevancy --Strengths: Lower cost and quicker than primary data; can provide information a company cannot collect on its own

Consists of information collected for the specific purpose at hand --Must be relevant, accurate, current, and unbiased

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