Abstract:

Processing the right customer information is fundamental for category managers to become more market oriented. Information supply has to respect individual knowledge to support effective information processing and to avoid information overload. This presentation investigates mental maps from category managers in order to show how they think in terms of customers. The maps show the relevance and sophistication of customer knowledge on an individual basis. The results indicate that capacity for customer information processing is limited and customer-oriented goals play an important role. Market research could improve market orientation of category managers by highlighting very few customer-oriented concepts.