Perreault−McCarthy: Basic
Marketing: A
Global−Managerial
Approach, 14/e- Improving Decisions
with Marketing
Information
Text © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2002236 Chapter 8
questions about the effectiveness of their discount coupons. Did the coupons draw
new customers, or did current customers simply use them to stock up? If consumers
switched from another brand, did they go back to their old brand the next time?
The answers to such questions are important in planning marketing strategies—and
scanners can help marketing managers get the answers.
Some members of the consumer panel are also tied into a special TV cable sys-
tem. With this system, a company can direct advertisements to some houses and
not others. Then researchers can evaluate the effect of the ads by comparing the
purchases of consumers who saw the ads with those who didn’t.
The use of scanners to “observe” what customers actually do is changing con-
sumer research methods. Companies can turn to firms like Information Resources
as a single sourceof complete information about customers’ attitudes, shopping
behavior, and media habits.
Data captured by electronic scanners is equally important to e-commerce in
business-to-business markets. Increasingly, firms mark their shipping cartons and
packages with computer-readable bar codes that make it fast and easy to track inven-
tory, shipments, orders, and the like. As information about product sales or
shipments becomes available, it is instantly included in the MIS and accessible over
the Internet. That way, a manager can access any detailed piece of information or
do an analysis to summarize trends and patterns. Here, as with scanner data on con-
sumers, the information available is so detailed that the possibilities are limited more
by imagination—and money—than by technology.^16A marketing manager can get a different kind of information—with either ques-
tioning or observing—using the experimental method. With the experimental
method,researchers compare the responses of two (or more) groups that are simi-
lar except on the characteristic being tested. Researchers want to learn if the specific
characteristic—which varies among groups—causesdifferences in some response
among the groups. For example, a researcher might be interested in comparing
responses of consumers who had seen an ad for a new product with consumers
who had not seen the ad. The “response” might be an observed behavior—like theSimmons’ ad agency used an
experiment to improve a new
print ad for the Beautyrest
mattress. Groups of consumers
saw two different ads. The ads
were the same, except that one
featured a father holding a baby
and the other featured a mother.
The ad with the father earned
higher recall scores.Experimental method
controls conditions