Marketing Information Sources

Abstract

People concerned with marketing and product management, sales merchandising, advertising and market research make use of a variety of demographic and socioeconomic information available on a national, regional, state, and local level. The quantitative market indicators include population, households, income and industrial and retail sales, while qualitative data is provided by specific categories such as percentage of households by gross income classes or the various components of the population like age, race, sex and marital status. There are other indicators like the index of sales to disposable income which measures the selling power in a given area by comparing the volume of retail sales transacted by the retail stores in the area with the income or the buying power of the area residents. The buying power index measures a given market's ability to buy, expressed as a percentage of the national potential. The effective buying income is a bulk measurement of the market potential. It indicates the general ability to buy and facilitates comparison, selection and grouping of markets on that basis. Another useful marketing technique, called input‐output analysis or inter‐industry analysis, studies changes in the demand for or supply of a given industry's products as it affects all other industries. By analyzing the demand for the factors of production‐input one can arrive at the interrelationships between on industry's output and the goods needed to achieve a given volume of production. All these characteristics of markets and measurable marketing components are set forth cogently in a federal document entitled Measuring Markets. Briefly listed below are some of major uses of various types of marketing information: defining market potential, evaluation of sales performance, determination of distribution trends, development of product demand indices, selection of markets, mapping of sales territories, setting of quotas, routing sales force, allocation of advertising dollars, selection of new product test markets, location of high income concentrations, tracing population shifts and forecasting regional and national sales.

Citation

Balachandran, M. (1976), "Marketing Information Sources", Reference Services Review, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 87-91. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb048588