Marketing is an art of business and every organization must maintain the rich flow of information to their marketing managers. Today each and every organization has been facing global competition and tough challenge at every moment. Therefore companies are implementing the concept of marketing information system in their marketing management area to meet all their requirements of information and necessities along with the sustain decision making. Now days, marketing information system is at work with most of the organizations. Marketing information system is a three pillar body that consists of people, equipment and procedure .They collectively work to collect, store, evaluate, analyze and distribute the timely and accurate information to the managers who are responsible for decision making in favor of their organization.
Organization designs the marketing information system to distribute the needful information in the timeliest fashion. Management information system developed through the input data sources such as external data, sales data, marketing intelligence, marketing competitor’s profile and consumer research market profile and decision support analysis through management information system workstation. Marketing managers rely on various reports like sales, price, payables, cost, invariably receivables etc. With the help of this marketing information, managers can solve various problems relating sales & distribution. In general you can say that the marketing information system is actually the one who is doing the marketing research and forecasting information stuff for their higher level officials working for an organization.
Apart from this, marketing department also develops the marketing management related information system applications. Marketing information system works to collect information and do research work for their organization in the various fields such as external environment research, marketing research, consumer research, advertisement research and in various other fields.
Two Crucial Applications That Are Developed By Marketing Information System Are
- Sales force automation.
- Interactive marketing.
- Sales Force Automation
As a very important activity of business management, sales activity should be automated through the available technology. There are various companies who are using the technique of e-commerce to increase their sales through the process of automation. But with the availability of technology such as computer hardware, software and other network facilities like internet, intranet, extranet made the automation too easy for any organization.
The automation not only improves the sales of the company but also improves the sales performance along with the productivity. Despite the fact that the marketing managers get and use that data for analysis as well as interpretation to generate the information.
- Interactive Marketing
Now this is the very strong area of information system. In this area there are three kinds of people interacting in the marketing activities. These persons are manager, employee and customer. In order to make marketing interactive through the process of information system more effective, then they have to widely use network technology like internet, intranet, extranet etc. In an interactive marketing customer also participate in product development, pricing, strategies and service issues. This methodology can be implemented by collaborative management technique and customer relation management technique.
