Nielsen is able to spot screen and track down relevant trends to the marketing research business as soon as they emerge in a specific country and if that small creek has the momentum to be turned into a mighty river, Nielsen is in the position of telling it first. This is the experience I would like to share with you today. The next slides summarise such major trends from the Consumers Retailers and Brands perspective.
This paper will deal with the role of the marketing researcher in corporate projects rather than traditional product/market-oriented research. The strategic nature of many corporate projects requires the researcher to have a broad level of business knowledge and an understanding of the political environment. He or she must function as a team player to provide technical assistance in a demanding context. An example of a strategic study conducted by the Du Pont Company at the corporate level shows the interactive role of marketing research and the practical resolution of certain technical and political problems.
Marketing is a misleading concept. It is derived from "market", but marketing is not dealing with the "market", it is dealing with really existing people. Marketing needs above all information on potential clients and on what makes them move. This information has to be concrete instead of abstract, specific instead of general. Most frequently there is a considerable disequilibrium in the contribution that marketing research offers to meet these requirements: The marketing researchers present hard figures to show problems, but they only present weak recommendations to solve the problems. This gap frequently excludes marketing researchers from final decision making. Experimental detailing is an opportunity to bring the marketing researcher much closer to the front of face-to- face contacts with clients.
The authors propose to identify reasons for the apparent lack of Marketing Research applications. Examples of areas where AI and ES could contribute to increase considerably the efficiency of Marketing Research will then be developed. Finally, the requirements for successful implementation will be examined from the potential user's point of view.
In this paper we will examine some of the readily available software that enables "knowledge workers", which Marketeers and Researchers certainly are, to improve their personal effectiveness and creativity. Only commercially available software will be discussed as it is extremely rare that a custom developed program will be cost-effective. Development time of good software is to be counted in person-years. This takes it out of reach of all but the largest organisations. For most organisations commercial software is sufficient and can be the basis for highly effective and efficient systems.
This paper discusses the development of scanning, particularly in Europe, and the uses of consumer sales data captured at the point-of-sale in marketing research.
The purpose of this communication is to expose the basic principles of causal modelling, and to examine its conditions of application to marketing research. It will be showed that these models are part of a "second generation" of multivariate analysis. The switch from an exploratory approach to a confirmatory one contributes to fill the gap, and reinforce the links, between data analysis and model building.