We live in a time of extraordinary and accelerating change. New knowledge, tools, and ways of doing and communicating continue to emerge and evolve. Calculators, too expensive for common use in the early eighties, now are not only commonplace and inexpensive but vastly more powerful. Quantitative information available to limited numbers of people a few years ago is now widely disseminated through popular media outlets. In this changing world, those who understand and analyze will have significantly enhanced opportunities and options for shaping their futures. Analytical competence opens doors to productive futures and this importance for analytics is felt more so in predicting consumer behaviour.
BUSINESS APPLICATION
MARKETING ANALYTICS
"For most people, especially smaller businesses, marketing isn't a science, and most run their marketing plan with more "gut feel" than anything else. The problem with that is that it ends up with more "We tried it and it didn't work" comments than us marketers would like to hear."
Alan Reading
Marketing analytics is the process of identifying potential consumers of a product or service, the size of the group, and the percentage of the market that could be captured, considering costs and competition. In terms of e-commerce, it can be defined as a process through which one identifies online market value, competition and marketing strategies among other things.
MARKET ANALYSIS
In the study of evaluating and investigating the market and how the market moves, a market analysis must be conducted by the company. This analysis helps an organization make planning decisions especially in the inventory, purchasing decisions, work force, promotional programs, branch expansion, and other aspects of the business. The essence of conducting a marketing analysis is to aid a company in getting ready to enter a new market, launch or promote a new product or service, and help get a business started.
DIMENSIONS OF MARKET ANALYSIS
The science of marketing analysis is classified into various elements: market size, market growth rate, market profitability, industry cost structure, distribution channels, market trends, and key success factors.
In assessing the market size, both the present or current sales and future or potential sales are to be considered. In identifying the market size, the company can derive data from sources like government, trade associations, customer surveys, and financial data from the industry’s key players. Evaluating market growth rate may be conducted by basing it on demographic information and growth of sales in similar products. As for market profitability, certain factors are useful for the analysis and these are the consumer’s buying power, supplier power, threat of replacement products, competition among businesses, and hindrances in penetrating the market.
The market trend must be closely analyzed since the business world is dynamic. A company must be able to adjust to the changes going on in the market.
COMPLETE MARKET ANALYSIS PROCESS
A marketing analysis is properly conducted when marketers follow a certain process. Just as in every study, marketing analysis starts out by defining the problem or issues that need to be scrutinized. Once these problems are determined, an analysis of the situation is the next step especially when the marketers are not familiar with the said situation.
Next, a formal and primary marketing research is conducted in order to gather primary data. Qualitative or quantitative form of research may be used. After a thorough research, the collected data is prepared for analysis and interpretation. Once research results are generated, the findings are used to determine the marketing strategies that will serve to be useful. Managers play important roles in this part because their decisions are highly considered.
EXAMPLE FROM THE INDUSTRY
In the late 90's, the entire Information Technology (IT) industry was undergoing rapid change, and new products and applications were transitioning a company's IT investments from back-office necessities into front-office competitive advantages. As IT became more strategic, so did the IT profession, which resulted in the creation of Chief Information Officer (CIO), VP and Director level roles. These folks were charged with helping management leverage technology and utilizing their professional skills in innovative ways to streamline business practices, improve products and marketing, and to be better competitors.
The same trend has been happening in the marketing intelligence industry. Access to quality primary, secondary and competitive research gets better every day. As a result, marketing intelligence professionals are achieving much higher and more influential positions within companies, often reporting directly to executive management. It is for this reason, that a number of major nationwide publications have chosen the marketing research profession as one of the best professions for the future.
SAS CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE
DRIVING PROFITABLE GROWTH
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The transition to a customer-focused business strategy continues to gain momentum, as it provides more opportunity than ever to drive profitable revenue growth. To make the transition successfully, companies need a solid customer intelligence or integrated marketing management framework, which takes a holistic approach to solving critical challenges across marketing – from formulating strategy, to gaining insight from data and analytics, to optimizing customer interactions, to understanding the customer experience.
http://www.sas.com/software/customer-intelligence/index.html
CAREER OPTIONS AND HOW ATI CAN HELP
There is a growth in all Marketing Research & Marketing Analytics careers and it's not just traditional marketing research we're talking about either. A great example is the web analytics industry. Web analytics, search engine management and search engine optimization (SEM & SEO) are careers that are skyrocketing right now.
Another huge growth industry is Business Intelligence and Database Analytics. As the quality and volume of customer data has continued to increase, so has the need for professionals with the skills to manipulate, analyze, synthesize and use the data. This is particularly true of Database Marketing and other areas of the business that are so closely tied to strategic business decisions and sales.
Marketing Analytics offers a challenging but informal environment where you’ll be part of a highly skilled and motivated team of consultants. Working here will afford the opportunity to expand both your technical and business consulting skill sets as you work directly with our clients to help them quantify what drives sales and use the results to increase market share, revenue, and profit.
Job roles are: Analytics Consultant; SAS Developer; Optimization Specialist, among others.
We at ATI believe that marketing isn’t an exact science even for the big boys! But, costs per thousands, response rates, conversion rates and other data can help you decide what to do next, as well as what works and what doesn’t.
