Abstract:

In the field of information one can observe two simultaneous phenomena which, of course, are somewhat related: 1. Everything is going faster and faster : the life of a product gets shorter and shorter, new materials are available, more competitors try to be present on worldwide markets, that is to say on somebody else's domestic market, new technologies can suddenly make obsolete a well-known technology, etc... The problems to be taken into account while designing, manufacturing and selling products become more and more important: one has to take into account what happens in the world; international, political problems interfere more and more in the selling process (the ecologist movement, the present tunnoil in the Eastern countries, etc...). For all these reasons more and more information is required. 2. At the same time it is becoming easier to get information at a reasonable price and speed. Furthermore the quantity of information easily enough available increases very much. Both the offer's and the demand sides' important increases influence each other, and one is entitled to think that this will be a long-term phenomenon. For several years the online information business has been 25 % up per year and its productivity has grown much better. This has two consequences: - In the information business new actors are appearing, inventing new products and trying not to make too many mistakes. - It is an innovation business with all the problems that occur in an innovative process, as far as the users are concerned, which interests us more closely, the consequences are of two kinds: 1. They have to acquire a new culture about these tools, the minimum being to know roughly that they exist, what kind of information is available and how to reach it directly or indirectly. We shall try in this paper to give some dements of this culture. 2. Working with much more information than before has strong consequences on the methodology field. Marketing people have to change some elements of the methodologies they are used to work with because it is impossible to work in the same way than before if you handle or have the ability to handle 10, 100 or 1000 times as much information as before. In the frame of this paper we shall only provide a few example.