Week 5 Information systems  consumer information systems If you call on the phone and you order a pizza somewhere or if you email your order-in, it is certainly, likely, your order is likely to be put into some sort of database and saved. three major components of a total information system for an organization: highly interdependent, if there’s weakness in one of them it’ll hurt the other two.  information is being gathered or collected and it's flowing into the organization.- info about consumers and consumer purchases or other dimensions of consumerbehavior, or something going on in the marketing environment-- Such as laws or changes in the laws, regulations or regulatory actions Marketing Research- info collected as needed by decision makers to help them 2 type of marketing research- Exploratory research- conducted to gather more info about a problem or make a tentative hypothesis more specific Conclusive research- designed to verify insights through objective procedures and to help marketers in making decisions.  5 steps/phases of the marketing research process: Locating and defining- defining the problem Designing- research questions derived from the problem itself  Collecting-- two major types of data: Secondary data data that someone else has already collected.  census data- when government orgs collect data that’s available to anyone, collected every ten years, but updated periodically. Open publications- open to everyone, sometimes require subscription Trade publications- publications by trade associations or trade organizations Since already collected by people theres going to be some bias built into it Primary data data that you have to collect.  4 methods of collecting primary data: Observation method  Experiments Focus groups Surveys - variety of different types of surveys  telephone  mail online or personal interviews- need to develop a questionnaire Step 1- think about and consider the types of info you want to collect. Step 2- think about the kinds of questions you need to ask to get the info you wanta. 2 types of questions: a. Close-ended question (also called objective questions or restricted answer)b. Open-ended question Sequence questions so you start out with easy questions- pilot test to administer the questionnaire to a few people who have the characteristics of people in the population that you're going to be aiming at important to do to questionnaire- Sampling plan- has three components to it.  First component describe the population, who are they? What are their characteristics? EX) women in 18 to 24 years of age that live in Texas  Second componentyou have to indicate, how many people are going to be in the sample? Third component indicate how you're going to select the sample from the population EX)  random sample- convenient sample- not random, based upon the ease of selection.  Interpreting- assign meanings to findings, and perform accuracy checks on our calculations Reporting- reporting the findings- Executive summary- summarizes the research