Information About the Marketing Systems

When you run a business, be it online or offline , you need two levels of functioning.

One is the level at which you pay a lot of attention to details (micro-level) and the other is the level at which you try to look at the business as a whole (macro-level).

The micro-level is important, but it is disparate and time-consuming.

As an entrepreneur, you need to give higher priority to the macro-level because you do not want to miss the wood for the trees .

Why don't you focus on the woods and try to make it big? Allow us to pay attention to the minute details .

Marketing Information System (MKIS) is concerned with the collection, storage, and analysis of information and data for marketing decision making purposes. A marketing information system has traditionally been proposed to provide marketing managers a thorough process of intelligence gathering. MKIS is a set of procedures and methods for the regular, planned collection, analysis and presentation of information for use in marketing decisions.

MKIS are decision support systems targeted at marketing-specific decisions. One of the most widely disseminated MKIS models divides the marketing decision universe into four domains and links these domains to each other and to other marketing activities. Unfortunately, there is little guidance on the construction of specific MKIS targeted at problems in these domains or to the construction of integrated MKIS that span domains .

Information is of great strategic value to marketers, as well as contributing to tactical and more routine operational decision making. Knowing what kind of information to obtain and how to make effective use of it once you have got it, are the key skills of strategic marketing. All aspects of information including its collection, storage, processing, retrieval and use must be managed. The marketing firm needs some form of process to carry out this activity. What is needed is some form of system devoted to the management of the entire information needs of the organization. Such a system is called a Marketing Information System (MKIS). Marketing research is a component part of an integrated MKIS.

Management Supported by MKIS  

Information systems have to be designed to meet the way in which managers tend to work. Research suggests that a manager continually addresses a large variety of tasks and is able to spend relatively brief periods on each of these. Given the nature of the work, managers tend to rely on information that is timely and verbal (because this can be assimilated quickly), even if this is likely to be less accurate than more formal and complex information systems.

Marketing information systems are intended to support management decision making. Information for use in marketing information systems is gathered from customers, competitors and their products, and from the market itself.  Management has five distinct functions- planning, organizing, coordinating, decisions and controlling. Each of these functions requires support from an MKIS.

A marketing information system has four components:

The internal reporting system - Internal reports include orders received, inventory records and sales invoices.

The marketing research systems - Marketing research takes the form of purposeful studies either ad hoc or continuous.

The marketing intelligence system - Marketing intelligence is less specific in its purposes, is chiefly carried out in an informal manner and by managers themselves rather than by professional marketing researchers.

Cost-Benefit Aspects of MKIS

Ideally, a MKIS is carefully designed to produce information which is relevant, pertinent and useful to the users of the system in terms of assisting them in improving their marketing decision making. In fact the entire basis for a firm adopting a formally designed MKIS is that the system should help members of the marketing team make better decisions or enable them to make decisions faster. Management do not want to go to the time, expenses and trouble involved in designing and implementing an MKIS  just to make the firm look as if it is ‘up to date’ in adopting the latest marketing ideas . They want the system to generate a financial return.

Information, just like any other product has a marginal cost and a marginal value. Theoretically the marketing firm should continue to collect and store information up to the point where the marginal cost of information equals the marginal value.

Conclusion

A formal MKIS can be of a great benefit to any organization no matter what its size or the level of managerial sophistication is. It is true today that in many companies an MKIS is operated as part of a computer system. If no computing capability is available, the design and implementation of an MKIS is still possible if based entirely on a manual system of reference cards and files. Such a system will lack the ease of storage and retrieval of a computer system, but some form of manual system is better than having nothing and leaving the management of information to chance.

To manage a business well is to manage its future and this means the management of information (MIS) of which the MKIS is an integral part, which is a valuable resource to be carefully managed as any other resource e.g. human resources and financial resources. Hence, companies of all sizes are carrying out information reviews in an attempt to design management information systems that will meet their information needs and give them a competitive edge.