Basic Marketing: A Global Managerial Approach

Perreault−McCarthy: Basic
Marketing: A
Global−Managerial
Approach, 14/e

8. Improving Decisions
   with Marketing
   Information

Text © The McGraw−Hill

Companies, 2002

Improving Decisions with Marketing Information 227

then click on the hyperlink of interest. Then the browser shows the relevant page

for that hyperlink on screen. If you want, you can go back to the list and check out

another hyperlink.

One of the most popular and useful

search engines is at the website for Yahoo

(www.yahoo.com). It is especially good at

searching for web pages. Another very

useful search engine is at the AltaVista

website (www.altavista.digital.com); it does a good job of classifying online docu-

ments that include the search string. A search engine that is particularly useful for

locating specific people or businesses is at http://www.hotbot.lycos.com. The Northern

Light search engine (www.northernlight.com) is very good at identifying published

articles on the search topic. Keep in mind, however, that these are just a few of the

popular search engines. In fact, if you want to get an idea of how many are avail-

able—and how they are different—go to http://www.yahoo.com and do a search on the

term search engine.^9

Most computerized database and index services are now available over the Inter-

net. Some of these are provided by libraries and private firms. For instance, for a

fee a user can use Dow Jones’ interactive news retrieval system (www.djnr.com) to

search the full text of hundreds of publications, including newspapers from around

the world. ProQuest Direct, at http://www.proquest.com, is another valuable research tool.

It provides access to one of the world’s largest collections of information, including

summaries of articles from over 5,000 publications. Many articles are available in

full text, full image format.

Exhibit 8-3 Sources of Secondary and Primary Data

Company files, intranet, reports,

marketing information system, people,

sales, cost data

Internet, libraries, governments,

trade associations, universities,

private research organizations

Mechanical approaches

Personal approaches

Inside

company

Outside

company

Observation

Secondary

data sources

Primary data

sources

All data

sources

In-depth and focus group interviews

Online, mail, phone, personal surveys

Panels

Questioning

Internet

Internet Exercise Assume that your boss has asked you to do a customer

satisfaction survey. As part of a situation analysis, you want to get ideas about

what others have done in this area. Go to the website for the Yahoo search

engine (www.yahoo.com). In the dialogue box type ‘customer satisfaction

survey’ (include the single quote marks) and click on search. Look at some of

the websites identified. How helpful is this? How could it be improved?