Every firm organizes the flow of marketing information to its marketing manager as a support for his marketing interventions.
Companies are studying their manager’s information needs and designing Marketing Information Systems to meet these needs.
Marketing Information Systems is that part of Business Information Systems which meets the information needs for an organization in sales, distribution, advertising, market analysis, market intelligence, product research, service management, customer profile and other marketing functions.
A Marketing Information Systems consists of people, equipment and procedures to gather, sort, analyze, evaluate and distribute needed, timely and accurate information to marketing decision making.
The Role of Marketing Information Systems is to assess the marketing manager’s information needs, then develop the framework for collecting information and distribute the information gathered to the end-users in time.
The marketing information system is generally carried out marketing need analysis, planning, implementation, and control functions of marketing managers. The needed information is developed through internal company records analysis.
Relevance of Marketing Information Systems
Three crucial developments render the need for Marketing Information Systems.
• Firstly, when companies expand and diversify into new markets, the marketing managers have to necessarily deal with new situations both from the companies and from the customer’s point of view. Therefore, there would be greater need for marketing information.
• Secondly, when there is a perceptible and significant increase in the level of income of the buyers, consumers tend to get more selective and discriminative in their buying process. The marketers should be fully aware of what makes a buyer prefer a brand and what distinguished his brand from that of the close competitors. This awareness is possible only with the help of a well designed effective Marketing Information Systems.
• Thirdly, as the markets develop and the competition moves from price to non price grounds, it becomes increasingly important to find the moves adopted and implemented by the competitors and the response of the consumers towards them.
Analyzing the needs for Marketing Information Systems from a third person’s angle, three more factors come to the front viz., the information explosion, increasing complexity in decision making and the technological developments.
Marketing Information System
