4 (b) Industrial (B2B) Marketing.

Marketing Information Systems .

1
2
 Internal Accounting System.
• The earliest and the most basic Information System used by the Marketing
Executive is the Internal Accounting System.
• The heart of the Accounting System is the Order Shipping( Dispatching)-
Billing Cycle.
• This System generates Reports mostly on a monthly basis giving the
following information:
• 1) Orders Booked. 2) Billed Sales. 3) Pending Orders. 4) Inventory -Levels.
5) Receivables 6) Payables. 7) Comparison of Actual Performance Vs
Budgeted Performance. 8) Gross Profit, Direct and Indirect Expenses, and
Net Profit. 9) Branch wise, Salesman wise, Region wise Performance 10)
Customer wise Performance- Sales, Outstanding, Age wise Outstanding.
11) Collection, Payments made. 12) Product wise Performance.
• In some Companies, a Marketing Information-Planning Committee is
appointed to provide only as much information as required to make
Marketing Decisions on time.

3
 Marketing Intelligence System.
• Internal Accounts System supplies Marketing Executives with Results Data.
• Marketing Intelligence System supplies Executives with Happening Data.
• Marketing Intelligence System can be defined as the way in which Company
Executives are kept current and informed about changing conditions in the
Macro- Environment and Task Environment.
• All Executives engage at different times in four models of scanning the
Environment:
1) Undirected Viewing: General exposure to information, where the viewer has no
specific purpose in mind.
2) Conditioned Viewing: Directed exposure not involving active search, to a more
or less clearly identified area or type of information.
3) Information Search: A relatively limited and unstructured effort to obtain
specific information or information for a specific purpose.
4) Formal Search: A deliberate effort-usually following a pre-established plan,
procedure or methodology – to secure specific information relating to a specific
issue.

4
 Marketing Intelligence System( Cont’d).
• Marketing Executives carry on Marketing Intelligence mostly on their
own, through reading News Papers, Trade Publications, Business
Magazines, through sub ordinates, Competitors, Customers etc.
• A Company can take 3 steps to improve Executive’s Intelligence System:
1) Train the Sales Persons to be better at Intelligence Gathering and
Reporting on time.
2) Utilize additional Intelligence Resources.
3) Buy Information from specialized Market Research Services.
• Sales Representatives are Company’s Eyes and Ears Of Market Place:
They meet Buyers, Dealers, and Competitors regularly and can pick up
significant information and feed to Company. They should be well
trained for this job and their job should be facilitated by designing call
reports that are easy to fill in.
• The Intelligence Performance of Sales Reps should be considered while
deciding increments.

5
 Marketing Intelligence System.
•
(Cont’d)
Other Means of Gathering Competitive Intelligence:
• Sometimes it is desirable to hire one or two full time specialists in Marketing
Intelligence Gathering.
• They can learn about competitor’s activities through activities like:
• a) Purchasing Competitor’s Products and knowing their Prices.
• b) Attending “Open Houses” and trade shows.
• c) Reading Competitor’s Published Reports and attending Shareholder meetings.
• d)Talking to Competitor’s former employees and present employees, dealers,
distributors, suppliers, freight agents etc.
• Purchase of Special Marketing Intelligence Services:
• Certain Market Research Organizations sell weekly, Bimonthly Reports on
movement of Brands, Prices, Deals etc, which give useful information.
• Improving Intelligence Processing Activity: A centralized Marketing Intelligence
Centre can offer several services to improve the processing and dissemination of
intelligence through trained analysts.

6
 Improving Intelligence
Processing Activity(Cont’d).
• The usefulness of gathered Intelligence depends on its accuracy, retrievability,
and speed in moving to higher management levels where it can be used.
• The first service a centralized Marketing Intelligence Center can offer is
Intelligence evaluation. An Analyst trained in Data Evaluation would be
available to examine any Information and renders a technical opinion as to how
much confidence can be placed in it.
• A Second important service is Intelligence Abstraction. Trained Abstracters can
condense and edit incoming information to make it more useful for Executives.
• Dissemination involves getting Information to the right people in the right form
in the shortest feasible time. Among the devices used are news letters, telephone
calls, cassettes teletype services, and interconnected company computers.
• The Fourth service is Storage and Retrieval. Each company should develop a
master indexing system and organize all existing Information into easily
accessible files.
• The Fifth service is Purging, where old Information that is no longer useful is
removed, to keep the amount of Information within limits.

7
 Marketing Research System.
• Besides Internal Accounting Information and Marketing Intelligence, Marketing
Executives need specific studies of problem and opportunity areas.
• They may need a Market Survey, A Product-Preference Test, A Sales Forecast by
region, or an Advertising-Effectiveness Study.
• These Studies require talents of skilled researchers, who can apply principles of Sample
Size, Sample Design, and Questionnaire Construction to the task. These researchers
usually make up the Marketing Research Department of the company.
Organizational Characteristics Of Marketing Research: Most large companies have formal
Marketing Research Departments headed by a Marketing Research Manager who
normally reports to the Marketing Vice President and in some cases to top management
or other officers.
• The Marketing Research Manager is considered a major member of the Marketing
Team and performs such roles as Study Director, administrator, internal company
consultant, and advocate.
• In smaller companies the Department consists of a few professional researchers and in
larger companies may comprise one to two dozen full time employees. They may be
specialized by skill( survey expert, statistician, behavioral scientist,by industry or by
type of project.

8
Categories Of Marketing Research
Firms.
• Marketing Research Firms fall into three major categories:
1) Full Line Marketing Research Firms. These Firms offer General
Marketing Research Services. Their clients range from companies
that are too small to support their own Marketing Research
Department to large firms who subcontract a portion of their work
to relieve backlog or to obtain an independent point of view.
2) Specialty-Line Marketing Research Firms: These Firms
specialize in particular Marketing Research Services, such as
Market Analysis and Forecasting, Survey Research Work,
Packaging Research, Product Research, or Brand Name Testing.
They may also specialize in either Consumer or Industrial Goods.
3) Syndicated Information-Selling Firms: These Firms specialize in
gathering continuous Trade or Consumer Data, which they sell to
clients on a fee-subscription basis.

9
 The Scope Of Marketing
Research.
• Marketing Research Departments have been steadily expanding their activities
and techniques.
• The Ten Most Common Activities are Determination of Market Characteristics,
Measurement of Market Potentials, Market Share Analysis, Sales Analysis, Studies
of Business Trends, Competitive-Product Studies, Short Range Forecasting, New
Product Acceptance and Potential, Long Range Forecasting, and Pricing Studies.
• These Studies have benefited over years from increasingly Sophisticated
Techniques.
• Many of them-such as Questionnaire Construction and Area Sampling-came along
early and were quickly and widely accepted in the corpus of Marketing Research
Practice.
• Others-such as Motivation Research and Mathematical Methods-came in uneasily,
with prolonged and heated debates among practitioners over practical usefulness.
But they too settled in the corpus of Marketing Research Methodology.

10
 Management’s Use Of
Marketing Research.
• In Spite of rapid growth of Marketing Research, there are many companies that
are still without it or that use it poorly. Several other factors stand in the way of
its greater utilization:
1) A Narrow Conception Of Marketing research: Many Executives see
Marketing Research as only a fact-finding operation. The Marketing Researcher
is supposed to design a Questionnaire, choose a Sample, carry out Interviews,
and report results, often without being given a careful definition of the problem
or of the decision alternatives before Management. As a result, some of the fact
finding fails to be useful. This reinforces Management’s idea of the limited good
that can come from Marketing Research.
2) Uneven Caliber Of Marketing Researchers.
3) Late Results.
4) Intellectual Differences. Intellectual divergences between the mental styles of
Line Managers and Researchers often get in the way of productive relationships.
All too often the Marketing Researcher’s Report is Abstruse, complicated and
tentative, whereas the manager wants concreteness, simplicity, and certainty.

11
 Marketing Management-Science
System( Operations Research).
• An increasing number of Organizations have been adding
a Fourth Information Service to help their Marketing
Executives-Management Science
( Operations Research).
• A Management Scientist applies Scientific Methodology to
Organizational Problems in the search for improved
understanding, prediction, and control. They will study
various alternative solutions available for Problems and
recommend the one best suitable for the Organization.
• Management Scientists are often called “Model Builders”,
and quite appropriately, because “Model” is one of the
central defining concepts in their field.
12