Inside Information: Making Sense of Marketing Data

The marketing information available to us doubles every five years. Increasingly, not only will marketing organizations have more access to data, but a lot of this information will be its own internal data, rather than information being supplied by an external market research agency.

In the future the successful marketing executives will be those who can quickly assimilate the plethora of incoming information about their markets and their customers, and from this information see the "big picture" and then take intelligent action. In the new Millennium, those who survive and flourish in marketing will be those who can quickly identify the 'messages' that are often hidden deep in their market and customer information. People who can see 'shapes and patterns' in data will be the ones who will successfully change and improve their organizations. The successful will be those who can quickly reject extraneous information and identify the overarching trends and themes that can be detected from different combinations of marketing evidence. Those who fail will be those who are overwhelmed with the minutia of information and are unable to get on top of what this growing mountain of marketing information is really telling them.

This book provides the way forward for all marketers faced with the above challenges. It highlights the basic principles about information, acknowledging the fact that we are entering a new era that is well away from the old fashioned model of a market research agency supplying survey type data. Increasingly, this process will be replaced with a much more instantaneous process where data from different sources - internal and external - are quickly fired at the marketer, with he/she being expected to make immediate sense of it. Inside Information is one of the first to respond to this new information era for understanding information. The book is a user friendly, very accessible book for the marketing manager who needs to process mountains of marketing information, but who will not have the time, or inclination to read detailed texts.

DR DAVID SMITH is Chairman of DVL Smith Ltd, a business research agency, part of the Incepta Group plc, and also a Visiting Professor at the University of Hertfordshire Business School. He is a Fellow and Vice President of the Market Research Society, and a former Chairman of the Society. He is a silver medal holder of the Market Research Society, and has received Best Paper Awards for papers presented at Market Research Society, ESOMAR and also Business and Industrial Group conferences. He is a graduate member of the British Psychological Society and a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Institute of Management Consultants. He holds a doctorate in organisational psychology from Birkbeck College, University of London.

JONATHAN FLETCHER is a Director of DVL Smith Ltd. He holds a research degree in philosophy from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining DVL Smith Ltd he worked in the Bank of England. He has given papers at various ESOMAR and Market Research Society conferences, in addition to contributing chapters on market research methodology to various books. With the Managing Director of DVL Smith Ltd, Andy Dexter, he won the Best Methodological Paper Award at the 1999 ESOMAR Congress.