The shift from primary and manufacturing industries to the service sector continues in the industrialized nations of the West. Within the service industries, the emphasis is now on the production and distribution of organised information. The age of knowledge and know-how is here; the "fuel" of modern economies is information, on a commodity or specialty basis. It is imperative for market researchers to consider this trend. The changes taking place in the business environment can be perceived by looking at non-traditional indicators. Two types are identified here, complete with examples, "entities" and "transactions." Both are useful in pinpointing fast-growing segments and genuine opportunities. The changes in the technical environment include the fast rise of microcomputers on the one hand and on-line, electronic data bases on the other. More and more, they will be used in a complementary fashion. The information content of industries, functions, and occupations must be analyzed as well as the speed with which information is delivered to users. Spatial maps are drawn up to identify the characteristics of both information content and information delivery.
At this moment centralised international data collection via telephone is the most dominant form. Since it first started hesitantly in Europe about five years ago, enough experience has now been gathered to evaluate its benefits, its complications, and also its disadvantages. I will limit this part about international telephone research to Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing, or CATI. These interviewing procedures are in line with the standardisation and capital-intensive situation.
This paper reviews, briefly, the new technologies relevant to information handling and attempts to place them in the economic context of Europe to-day. The role and potential of these technologies and their possible application in Market and Opinion Research and in Marketing management are then discussed. Finally the EEC role in these developments is analysed.
The availability of large scale databases of particular interest in Market Research has grown recently. There is now detailed information on most companies in Europe and databases are also available on completed market research projects and business opportunities in Europe. The increased numbers of intelligent terminals on market researchers' desks will lead to a rapidly expanding European use of such data.
The paper argues the case for international market intelligence systems and identifies the key factors that need to be taken into account in developing such a system. The industry is becaming increasingly competitive, more international and managers need to be aware of their business environment to ensure the long term success, of the company. Sophisticated computer systems are essential if market research departments are to provide a comprehensive market intelligence service to the whole company. The factors that need to be taken into account are data requirements, report generating facilities, analysis capabilities and personnel. The MIDAS system developed at IMS is an example of such a system, where a variety of IMS data for a number of countries has been assembled on a carman databank for clients to access using a 'friendly' user language.
The purpose of this lecture is to give an impression of the possibilities which are open to the magazine publisher through the use of computer-models. They are pieces of electronic equipment which give the publisher a chance of seeing how his magazine will react under various circumstances as regards economy, circulation and the market. The aim of the lecture is not to give a technical explanation of the functioning of a computer, it is only the aim to give the listener an impression of the fact that the computer can be a valuable tool for the publisher in a decade in which the rapidly changing influences from within and without require ever new decisions and new reactions. These must be based on a first-class comprehensive view of the operation. This view can be secured by the computer-model, and the lecturer mentions a concrete example of a magazine which it was only possible to launch because a computer was used.
QUANTUM is a sophisticated package designed to maximise the benefits of computer technology for the Survey Practitioner. It is used extensively in Europe and USA for both ad-hoc surveys and larger more complex studies in the commercial and public sectors of industry. QUANTUM combines in one package the facilities available in most survey analysis packages, namely data editing, reformatting, generation of new variables, weighting, tabular and statistical analysis. It operates on PRIME and IBM computers in batch or interactive mode. This paper discusses briefly some technical aspects of its current features and then outlines the total system approach used in the design of the package.
Only comparatively recently has informatics been accepted as a science in its own right and its content and boundaries are still unsettled. In effect, the definition of the term informatics is still being argued between experts both at national and international levels. Without going into a lengthy discussion on the semantic and other distinctions it should be made clear that in this paper, the term is understood as the electronic processing of data within information systems. And, in fact, this paper is concerned with those information systems which form the operative instrument for the organization, processing and retrieval of information itself.
The users of management information systems and the designers and programmers of such systems live in different worlds; they have different backgrounds, skills and motivations. As a result communication between the two groups can be difficult. Communication can be improved by formulating explicit formal models of the data of interest. Implicit data models are in any case pervasive and unavoidable. A fixed length sequential file with a certain record layout is already a crude and very restrictive model of the underlying data. More flexible and sophisticated models imply a more abstract view of data. In its simplest form this merely requires separation between physical and logical data structure. In its most advanced form this leads to the concept of a relational data-base. Other forms of data-bases are somewhere between these two extremes. It is argued that the traditional communication path "user to analyst to programmer" impedes communication. More modern organizational structures, such as the chief-programmer-team can be more effective. Fictitious and real examples are used to illustrate the concepts described above.
The thesis of this paper is that a new technology exists and that within the next generation, it will drastically alter the jobs of market researchers and the methods by which decisions are made. First, we will look at decision making, its past, its present, and its future new requirements. Secondly, we will discuss nine new technologies. Finally, we will put decision making and these new technologies together to see what the combination suggests for the future.