Computer Information Systems Marketing Information

Computer Information Systems

Marketing Information Systems serve as a hub of competitive, market, pricing an product-related information in addition to supporting tactical strategies and campaigns and strategic plans. The use of Marketing Information Systems coordinate new product introductions with other departments, monitor the success of the launched product and keep other departments informed, and also devise plans and strategies for sustaining and increasing sales illustrate the many benefits these systems provide. Underscoring all these functional, process- and strategy-driven areas is the need for ensuring the voice of the customer is heard throughout any organization often and with clarity, to ensure strategies and plans stay on course (Coussement, Van den Poel, 164). The intent of this paper is to discuss the dominant functional areas of a Marketing Information System and also comment on its future trends.

Dominant Functions of a Marketing Information System

The dominant users of Marketing Information Systems are marketing managers, product managers, marketing analysts, market research analysts, industry research professionals, and senior management. In addition, sales management will also often rely on these systems to measure how effective their sales strategies are in achieving sales objectives (Daniel, Wilson, McDonald, p. 825).

The most complex of these Marketing Information Systems include in-depth knowledge management applications, including geo-economic modeling (Hess, Rubin, West Jr., et.al.), in conjunction with an increasingly larger amount of analytics applications that are used for creating dashboards and reports used by senior management, marketing management and sales (Le Bon, Merunka, p. 400). These systems are predominantly designed to align with the planning, executing, evaluating and control of campaigns and strategies to ensure the highest level of performance attainment and measurement is completed. As a result of the heavy focus on marketing effectiveness, often these systems are designed as data warehouses of the information sales professionals contribute about competitors, market conditions, forecasts, and potential new product ideas based on customer discussions. An effective Marketing Information System is actually an enterprise-wide knowledge management system that has been designed to support business process workflows from the strategic to the tactical level.

Future Development Trends