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Mississippi River recreation ramps up thanks to task force
South Washington County Bulletin-Jul 13, 2018
COTTAGE GROVE — From Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi Riverstretches 2,350 miles long, and Cottage Grove claims 72 ...
Channel Cat water taxi helps rescue woman and her dog from ...
WQAD.com-Jul 12, 2018
MOLINE, Illinois -- The Channel Cat came to the rescue after a woman jumped into the Mississippi River to save her dog. The incident ...
Mississippi River Mayors Sound Tariff Alarm
The Waterways Journal-Jul 13, 2018
Mayors of Mississippi River cities are warning that China's tariffs on U.S. farm products, especially soybeans, made in response to the Trump ...
The Need for Research in Marketing and Advertising
by
Charles Lamson
Every year, companies spend millions of dollars creating ads and promotions that they hope their customers and prospects will notice and relate to. Then they spend millions more placing their communications in print and electronic media, hoping their customers will see and hear them and eventually respond.
Advertising is expensive. In the United States the cost of a single 30-second commercial on prime-time network TV averages around $130,000. Likewise, a single full-page color ad in a national business magazine averages $100 to reach every thousand prospects. That is too much money to risk unless advertisers have very good information about who their customers are, what they want and like, and where they spend their media time. And that is why advertisers need research. Research provides the information that drives marketing and advertising decision making. Without that information, advertisers are forced to use intuition or guesswork. In today's fast-changing, highly competitive, global economy, that invites failure.
What is Marketing Research? To help managers make marketing decisions, companies develop systematic procedures for gathering, recording and analyzing new information. This is called marketing research (it should not be confused with market research, which is information gathered about a particular market or market segment). Marketing research does a number of things: It helps identify consumer needs and market segments; it provides the information necessary for developing new products and devising marketing strategies; and it enables managers to assess the effectiveness of marketing programs and promotional activities. Marketing research is also useful in financial planning, economic forecasting,and quality control.
Companies use marketing research to gather a lot of different types of information. It may be easiest to think of all these in terms of what one researcher calls the three Rs of marketing: recruiting new customers, retaining current customers, and regaining lost customers.
For example, to recruit new customers, researchers may study different market segments and create product attribute models to match buyers with the right products and services. Marketers need answers to many questions: What new products do consumers want? Which ideas should we work on? What product features are most important to our customers? What changes in the product's appearance and performance will increase sales? What price will maintain the brand's image, create profits, and still be attractive and affordable to consumers? Answers may lead to product and marketing decisions that directly affect the product's nature, content, packaging, pricing---and advertising. On the other hand, to retain existing customers, a marketer may use customer satisfaction studies. Likewise, database of customer transactions may identify reasons for customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Today, companies realize that the best sales go to those who develop good relationships with individual customers. As a result, customer satisfaction is now the fastest-growing field in marketing research. Information gained for the first two Rs helps the third, regaining lost customers. For example, if an office equipment manufacturer discovers through research that an increase in service calls typically precedes cancellation of a service contract, it can watch for that pattern with current customers and then take preventive action. Moreover, it can review service records of former customers and (if the pattern holds true)devise some marketing action or advertising appeal to win them back.
*SOURCE: CONTEMPORARY ADVERTISING 11TH ED., 2008, WILLIAM F. ARENS, MICHAEL F. WEIGOLD, CHRISTIAN ARENS, PGS. 209-210*
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