DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS AND MARKETING RESEARCH
NetSmart discovered there are no cohesive subgroups of the female on-line population; women have overlapping, multifaceted responsibilities and interests. They are overwhelmed with multiple demands and their focus is based on the current priority rather than on a single-minded pursuit. As a career woman and investor, she goes on-line for convenience and success.
Almost two-thirds of women on-line work full-time (64 percent) and make computers and the Internet a routine part of the way they work, play, interact, and shop. Instead of picking up a phone, women log on-line, with e-mail their preferred means of communication.
Perceived Benefits
•88 percent feel the Internet saves them time
•86 percent value the convenience
•71 percent say it lets them bank and shop after retail hours
Role of the Internet as an Important Business Tool
These career women use the Internet to
•Send or respond to e-mail
•Do business research on-line
•Communicate with other employees
•Work from home (25 percent)
Along with career and family responsibilities, women have personal needs and interests, from finance to fitness to fashion. They go on-line to stay on top of current events, get stock tips and, of course, find out about the latest fashion trends. There are actually two aspects to this personal on-line usage: “Escape from Stress” and “Self-Indulgence.”1
This type of marketing research can help companies better understand women who use the Web. Managers can better target specific women’s markets. They can also build more effective Web sites. What are the various techniques for conducting marketing research? Should managers always do marketing research before they make a decision? How does marketing research relate to decision support systems?
Global Perspective
Marketing Research Examines Demand for a Prawn-Flavored Potato Chip
Janjaree Thanma flips through a fat folder of market research, thinking about a prawn-flavored potato chip. Janjaree, who directs marketing for Frito-Lay chips in Bangkok, Thailand, has found that prawn is the favorite flavor of Thais—based on marketing research. But that doesn’t necessarily put it in the chips. The Thais said they thought an American snack with a native flavor such as tom yam, or prawn, is inappropriate—much as Frito-Lay people in China, after similar tests, ruled out the most popular flavor, dog.
Thais may “perceive a good snack as a Western snack,” Thanma says. After testing five hundred flavors, her management team eschewed tom yam for now and stayed with American flavors such as barbecue.
Such painstaking research helps Frito-Lay’s blitz of the market in Thailand. In 1995, the PepsiCo, Inc., unit bought out its Thai partner, took over a production plant, hired fifteen hundred farmers to grow potatoes according to its strict criteria, and unleashed a market campaign featuring television ads and a brigade of “promoter girls” who greeted shoppers in stores. Frito-Lay’s sales in Thailand tripled in the first twelve months after the takeover and are forecast at seventy million bags a year.5
Do you think that marketing research can be effectively used in most countries of the world? What might be different about conducting marketing research abroad versus in the United States?
Entrepreneurship Insights
The Internet Is a Great Tool for Entrepreneurs Who Want to Conduct Marketing Research
The Internet is the “great equalizer” for small business owners wishing to conduct marketing research. Secondary research, for example, is at your fingertips simply through the use of a search engine. Do you want to know what people are saying about your industry and products? Go to a chat room.
Survey research was often too expensive for small businesses to hire a marketing research firm. Even without using a research company, hiring and training interviewers was expensive and many entrepreneurs simply didn’t have the knowledge of how to conduct a survey.
On-line surveys offer a whole new approach for small businesses to inexpensively conduct survey research. Current versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator fully support transparent interactivity for on-line surveys. This development allows the entrepreneur to create a much more sophisticated survey than is possible through mail surveys. For example, complicated skip patterns can be built into on-line surveys. A simple skip pattern would be, “Do you own a dog?” If the answer is no, all of the questions pertaining to dog ownership would be skipped.
What are several pitfalls that the entrepreneur should guard against when conducting on-line surveys? When should a small business-person rely on the expertise of the marketing research firm?
Ethics in Marketing
It Seems That I’ve Heard This Before
When Nissan Motor Co. U.S.A.decided to establish a workplace-diversity program, it turned for guidance to one of the nation’s leading human resources specialists: Towers Perrin. The New York consulting firm had recently built a diversity practice to capitalize on companies’ growing concerns about race and gender relations. Towers Perrin’s pitch was that it would study a company in detail and then customize a program to fit the client’s needs.
Towers Perrin launched its painstaking review of the giant Japanese automaker’s U.S. unit. Charging up to $360 an hour, the consultants conducted one-on-one interviews with fifty-five executives, analyzed surveys of hundreds of additional workers, and reviewed company antidiscrimination policies and other internal documents. The project, which took four months to complete at a cost to the client of more than $105,000, appeared to reflect Towers Perrin’s credo: “Prescription without diagnosis is malpractice.” But when the prescription arrived, Nissan U.S.A. officials say they were far from impressed. “The recommendations were so broad, so generic, we didn’t think it reflected what we thought we were going to get,” says spokesman Kurt von Zumwalt. The 121-page report “did not seem to be particularly tailored to Nissan.”
It wasn’t. On the same day that Towers Perrin sent its written findings to Nissan, the consulting firm submitted a strikingly similar report to French-owned Thomson Consumer Electronics, Inc., half a continent away in Indianapolis. Except for the companies’ names, all nine major recommendations made to Thomson matched Nissan’s word for word, as did all fifty-four accompanying “tactics and objectives” and all thirteen elements of a proposed implementation plan.
In offering its services, Towers Perrin had said its recommendations would be based on the company’s specific needs, as gleaned from the data Towers Perrin would collect. “No two organizations are identical,” the firm wrote in its standard thirty-five-page proposal. “They are all as diverse as their workforces and the markets they serve.” Later in the proposal, the firm added that “no textbook solutions exist.”
Although each client’s report contained a long section quoting from the interviews and other research, the recommendations didn’t refer to any findings that were unique to either company. When Towers Perrin discussed employee polls, it described the results identically. In both instances, it said the polling showed that “women and minorities believe there is little or no understanding by supervisors and managers of how to tap their potential or how to mentor them effectively.”
Nissan and Thomson weren’t the only Towers Perrin clients that received nearly identical advice on workplace relations. The Wall Street Journal reviewed reports provided to eleven of the firm’s diversity clients. The vast majority of the advice given to seven clients was identical. Three clients received more individualized suggestions. One client canceled its contract with the consultants before receiving a final report.
Privately held Towers Perrin, with revenue of just over $1 billion, doesn’t dispute that many of its reports use the same language. Indeed, Towers Perrin asserts, it is standard practice for the firm and the industry to give clients with similar problems similar or identical advice. “There are only a finite number of things you can do to make diversity work,” says Margaret Regan, current coleader of Towers Perrin’s global diversity practice. All of Towers Perrin’s diversity clients, a total of about sixty companies in recent years, received one of several “templates,” she says. Clients “do not expect to get something very different from the next client in terms of recommendations.” One reason, she says, is that most clients come to the firm precisely because they are at the same early stage of dealing with diversity issues.
Regan says the firm’s consultants compose recommendations for clients using a shared word-processing file. The consultants go “into WordPerfect,” she says, and select “the pieces that apply” to a particular client. In some situations, standard solutions provided by consultants have become widely accepted as appropriate and even necessary. In the highly technical world of actuarial, benefits, and compensation services, for example, where Towers Perrin built its expertise and reputation, consultants routinely use multicompany survey research to develop pay and pension systems that are then sold repeatedly. Similarly, law firms sometimes provide virtually identical memos to different clients facing similar problems, without disclosing that the work has been recycled.21
Were the actions of Towers Perrin unethical? Why or why not? Is there anything wrong with consultants using a shared word-processing file from other similar studies to prepare a report? Is this any different from a lawyer giving an identical opinion to different clients for the same problem? Why or why not?