Market Information on Ricci Street's Port 80: Docks: Marketing

The people, equipment, procedures, and policies to gather, sort, evaluate, and distribute needed, timely, and accurate information to decision makers.

Assessing information needs

Wicked Problems

You know what they are because you see them all the time at work as well as at home and in the community:

the problem is complex, intertwined, hard to define, visualize, or explain simply; you won't understand it until you have solved it

the problem has no known precedents, no perfect or obviously correct solution; it has better or worse solutions, not right or wrong solutions; for the many possible solutions, there is no logical convergence and no stakeholder consensus

the problem is not independent of the solution; any proposed solution seems to create a new, related problem

a changing cast of multiple stakeholders have conflicting priorities; they have lots of meetings on the project but don't make much progress; there are lots of unresolved political or "organizational" issues

unexpected challenges and obstacles keep arising; the constraints on the solution keep changing; it requires iteration and every trial counts

for moral, political or professional reasons, it's an important problem; for example, your career may be at stake

the problem was already solved, but the solution is not being followed (i.e. it wasn't a real solution)

The term "wicked problems" was coined in the 1970s by Horst Rittel, a design theorist at Berkeley and Stuttgart, who contrasted them to "tame problems". In short, as John C. Camillus notes in the May 1996 issue of Strategy & Leadership (not available online), wicked problems are:

As though all that weren't bad enough, look at the information you have to work with. You don't have enough of the information that you need. You have too much information that you don't need. In truth, you aren't even that sure what info you do need.

Camillus accurately describes the real world, or at least the one where I live and work. For the purposes of learning, we can simulate a world that sets off the wicked parts. That's what you'll be doing when you work on your course projects.

That's also what organizations and "leaders" do when they tame a wicked problem by defining it in a way that obscures the wicked nature of the problem. Then they can apply safe linear methods to solving it in an acceptable time frame. Unfortunately, that doesn't solve the wicked problem and the result too often is frustration and ineffectiveness.

How to solve wicked problems

Because the stakeholders-people care about or have something at stake in how the problem is resolved, the process is fundamentally social, not logical. What's more important, getting it right or making it acceptable?

Discuss. Discuss more. Trust the process. The process ends when you run out of time, money, energy, or the bosses' patience, not when some perfect solution announces itself. To help, Rittel developed IBIS, the Issue-Based Information System:

a hypertext environment for the structured discussion of design issues. This system uses a stringent classification scheme to organize the data. There are three node types (issues, positions, arguments) and nine link types (responds-to, questions, supports, objects-to, specializes, generalizes, refers-to, replaces).

Gathering information

Sources of Information

Internal information

An effective MIS organizes and summarizes balance sheets, orders, schedules, shipments, and inventories into trends that can be linked to management decisions on marketing mix changes.

External information

Marketing intelligence provides everyday info about environmental variables that managers need as they implement and adjust marketing plans

Primary information - information that you develop first-hand, in-house, and expensively

Secondary information - information that you get from others, often for a fee. It may be primary information to them, but it becomes secondary information for you. It's much easier and cheaper to get, but it seldom is exactly what you want.

Marketing Research

links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through an exchange of information. Learn more.

If companies really understood what people needed, market research would be a science instead of an exercise in mysticism.
--Michael Hammer
Darwin Magazine, December 2001

one-stop source for information on marketing research -- everything from case studies of successful research projects and job postings, to the most comprehensive directories of custom research providers found anywhere

In order to not just survive but thrive, every organization needs to make decisions based on market research.

ongoing R/D agenda for products and services

You must improve and innovate, which will take information, statistics, and knowledge. To the extent that you rely on technology, just keeping up with relevant developments is a full-time job.

What do you need to know more about in order to develop new products and services?

How will you acquire this information?

How will you organize it, for example, by market segment, by technology, by source of information?

competitive analysis

name of each competitor; link to web site

basic stats: where, how large

their market share

how direct a competitor?

which of you has competitive advantage: better, faster, cheaper

Don't forget your own company. What will your competitors learn if they research you like you're researching them?

market size and demographic segments

How big is the market?

Is it growing?

Are you going to develop new customers or take a share from a competitor?

How are you dividing it up: age, geography, income?

List and name your demographic segments.

customer profiles

Create at least one profile for each segment, in as much detail as possible. In addition to personal information, think about this customers' psychology. Marketers often analyze them in an appropriate typology (or stereotype, though it has negative connotations). For one example:

Your customer is extroverted, seeks new stimulation when shopping, and is likely to buy impulsively.

Your customer is anxious and cynical and looks skeptically at any brand. A careful shopper, he or she avoid new things because they appear scary.

Your customer is very brand conscious, into the latest styles, chic and gadgets even a bit of a brand slave.

Your customer looks for authenticity, the unique. On the one hand, this customer loves quality, wants the best and the rare. On the other hand, this customer is a pretentious snob who always wants something his or her neighbors don't have.

survey instruments

In this article, Gerry McGovern is writing about website editors and readers, but what he says applies to everyone in marketing and their customers.

The first and by far the most important skill you must develop is to have a gut instinct for what your readers want. To develop a gut instinct -- to have your finger on the pulse of what your audience wants -- you will need constant contact with that audience.

Every week you must observe, meet, phone, and email your readers. Nothing else -- absolutely nothing else -- is more important. There is no greater skill to develop than to know what works with your customer and what doesn't; to know what they will read -- how much they will read -- and what they will not read.

Developing a gut instinct allows you to quickly evaluate the worth of new ideas for content or applications. This is a tremendous skill and will guarantee you a successful career in web management.

You can put these on your web site, you can hire a company to administer them by phone, and you can keep asking them every time you have contact with your customers.

Periodically, in-house or with third-party help, you should bring customers together to talk about and use your products and services under observation. For example, ask them to go to Google and search for your product. Ask them to find something on your web site.

You should archive all the server logs and periodically report visitor and customer data.

Organizing information

The Shape of Things to Come (not online)
by Debra Goldman
Adweek, MQ, September 18, 1995, pp. 5-42

The power now possessed by the media consumer is a heady change from what was once the most passive partner of the Old Media, in which marketer, medium, and audience knew their roles and stuck with them.

It was a cozy threesome, with marketers on one side and compliant audiences on the other, and the medium in between, mediating the relationship between the two. By fulfilling that crucial role, each medium (especially broadcast TV) matured into a powerful, corporate form.

But a funny thing happens to this happy arrangement when the media universe fractures. Media ceases to mediate.

In cyberspace, content is a conversation in which the audience gets first byline. And merely by negotiating a Web site, a computer user becomes an editor, creating a completely personalized �publication� for his individual entertainment.

For Wireheads only

How about my work life? My desk is clear of paper, but my hard drive is jam packed.

I have databases. I have floppies. I have backups. I have hard copies. I have file drawers. I have CDs of music and images. I have DVDs. I have Zip disks. Thousands and thousands of files.

As soon as my hard drive got so big -- and that didn't take long -- it wasn't going to do much good unless I organized it as a knowledge base.

As well-written and as helpful a style guide as Patrick Lynch's Yale Style Manual can't tell you how to connect the knowledge in your head or in its extension -- your hard drive.

Analyzing information

The MIS director must anticipate how information is to be used, e.g., if users from all business functions use the MIS on-line for short deadline decisions, then analytical tools must be available on demand. Then comes the hard part. Thinking.

Is the information credible? Is it valid, reliable, and relevant? Is it sufficient? Have you considered enough contradictory evidence? Have you interpreted well, that is, thought clearly and logically to your conclusions? In college, these are the questions asked in the beginning writing courses. For wicked, real-life problems in politically addled organizations, analyzing information can be quite an adventure.

The October 4, 1999 New Yorker includes "The Science of the Sleeper: How the Information Age could blow away the blockbuster," an article on collaborative filtering by Malcolm Gladwell. Unfortunately, the article isn't online, so here are a couple of excerpts.

The really transformative potential of collaborative filtering ... has to do with the way taste products -- books, plays, movies, and the rest -- can be marketed. Marketers now play an elaborate game of stereotyping. They create fixed sets of groups -- middle-class-suburban, young-urban-professional, inner-city-working-class, rural-religious, and so on -- and then find out enough about us to fit us into one of those groups. The collaborative-filtering process, on the other hand, starts with who we are, then derives our cultural "neighborhood" from those facts. And these groups aren't permanent. They change as we change.

The central claim of the collaborative-filtering movement is that, head to head, the old demographic and "psychographic" data cannot compete with preference data. This is a potentially revolutionary argument. Traditionally, there has been almost no limit to the amount of information marketers have wanted about their customers: academic records, work experience, marital status, age, sex, race, Zip Code, credit records, focus-group sessions -- everything has been relevant, because in trying to answer the question of what we want, marketers have taken the long way around and tried to find out first who we are. Collaborative filtering shows that, in predicting consumer preferences, none of this information is all that important. In order to know what someone wants, what you really need to know is what they've wanted.

Distributing information

The change from atoms to bits is making startling changes in how professionals distribute information. Three comparisons say it all, in my college prof's mind.

For better or worse, I don't think most professionals are going to get a choice of whether or not we're going to do this. The traditional information process:

is missing a step: designing information. At some point, you need to design the styles and the templates and the navigation between the nodes. Interface design, information design, and hypertext design are good search terms to start with. You'll find more ideas throughout the Gizmos, Inc., neighborhood.

What we're talking about here is a matter of scale. The same protocol working for the Internet at large work is also working on a smaller scale for extranets and intranets. The right-hand column makes my point. Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol. Even Lotus Notes, Novell Groupwise, and all the big ERP vendors have joined the TCP/IP bandwagon.


systems and processes on the Web


Customhouse concepts and buzzwords	Charthouse trends and currents	Boardwalk people and communities
Lighthouse information and research	Shoreline issues and policies	Docks systems and processes


search \| sitemap \| help
Ricci Green \| Digital Wares \| Gizmos, Inc. CyberSea Inn \| Port 80

modified: October 30, 2001 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/port80/docks/marketing/information.htm

Nets
intranet	extranet	internet
your organization	selected organizations	everyone and all organizations
TCP/IP	TCP/IP	TCP/IP

Marketing Information