Customer Insights: fresh understandings of customers and the marketplace derived from marketing information that becomes the basis for creating customer value and relationships.
Marketing Information System (MIS): people and procedures for assessing information needs, developing the needed information, and helping decision makers to use the information to generate and validate actionable customer and market insights.
Internal Databases: electronic collections of consumer and market information obtained from data sources within the company network.
Marketing Intelligence: the systematic collection and analysis of publicly available information about consumers, competitors, and developments in the marketing environment.
Marketing Research: the systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data relevant to a specific marketing situation facing an organization.
Explanatory Research: marketing research to gather preliminary information that will help define problem and suggest hypotheses.
Descriptive Research: marketing research to better describe marketing problems, situations, or markets, such as the market potential for a product or the demographics and attitudes of consumers.
Casual Research: marketing research to test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships.
Secondary Data: information that already exists somewhere, having been collected for another purpose.
Primary Data: information collected for the specific purpose at hand.
Commercial Online Databases: computerized collections of information available from online commercial sources or via the internet.
Observational Research: gathering primary data by observing relevant people, actions, and situations.
Ethnographic Research: a form of observational research that involves sending trained observers to watch and interact with consumers in their "natural habitat"
Survey Research: gathering primary data by asking people questions about their knowledge, attitudes, preferences, and buying behavior.
Experimental Research: gathering primary data by selecting matched groups of subjects, giving them different treatments, controlling related factors, and checking for differences in group responses.
Focus Group Interviewing: personal interviewing that involves inviting six to ten people to gather for a few hours with a trained interviewer to talk about a product, service, or organization. The interviewer "focuses" the group discussion on important issues.
Online Focus Groups: gathering a small group of people online with a trained moderator to chat about a product,service, or organization and gain qualitative insights about consumer attitudes and behavior.
Sample: a segment of the population selected for marketing research to represent the population as a whole.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): managing detailed information about individual customers and carefully managing customer "touch points" in order to maximize customer loyalty.