So in this part, we start talking about descriptive data collection. So descriptive data collection, as you recall, basically talks about trying to understand, for instance, who are our customers? What is the share of wallet? And all those kinds of questions where you have to have hard numbers. So how can you do this? This can possibly be done in two ways. One is active data collection and one is unobtrusive data collection. In the active data collection, you can start thinking about again two ways broadly of thinking about data collection. One is surveys, which is a mainstay of market research for many, many companies. The other one are self-reports coming from your costumers, we’ll talk about both of them. So, let's start with surveys. Surveys, pretty much used by every Fortune 500 company. Regularly used for gathering customer attitudes, you can think about sentiments, you can think about purchase habits, many different things actively gathered by surveys. And data of course can be helped to segment customers, start thinking about who our customers are, start thinking about who do they buy from, all of those questions that you need to understand to set your marketing strategy. Now there are many, many companies out there that can hep you do these surveys. I'll give you some examples. Qualtrics is a very famous company that helps you conduct free surveys sometimes. Another example is surveymonkey. Now both of these companies not only help you do sometimes free surveys, but they can also be full service companies. So for instance, if you look at the pricing plan of one of these companies, they allow you and they price you differently based upon whether you would like them to find your customers. You would like them to set up the survey, analyze the data and give you that data. So in that sense, when you start thinking about doing surveys there are already companies out there that can help you reach out to customers, collect that data, and analyze that data. And of course, surveys are not the only way in which you can get information from customers. You can actually ask customers directly to self report some of those surveys. So if you look at, for example, mobile service, that's the next frontier. And these are basically companies that are giving these surveys on mobile devices. Again, some common examples, Qualtrics is one company that does both. It does surveys on your desktop. It also does surveys on mobile devices. Another company, for example, is Mixpanel. Again, what's the idea here? The idea here is, you want to basically send surveys to customers in the moment of purchase sometimes. So what do mobile surveys allow you to do? They allow you to capture customers' reactions in-situ rather than being retrospective. For example, you can actually send a survey to a mobile device of a customer at the time that they're making a purchase decision, rather than one month later. So clearly the kind of sentiment, the feelings the customers might have at the time purchase might be better captured, rather than making them think about their purchase one month later. The questionnaire can be tailored based on location and context. So, again looking at where the mobile device is. In other words, it tells you where the customer is. If the customer is in a mall, you can ask questions about what they're doing in that mall. If the customer is in a restaurant, you can ask questions tailored based on that. So very tailored service can be done, but what's the caveat? You don't want to overdo it. Marketers should be very careful, rather than using this leverage of making a tailored survey, you don't want to keep sending surveys again and again to the same customer. You quite often see a huge amount of survey fatigue setting in. So it's important to again, use this power of mobile surveys, but up to a limit. I also want to talk about one particular type of survey that has gained a lot of recognition. That's the net promoter score. What is that? It actually just boils down to one question. How likely is it that you'd recommend a particular brand, your company, to a friend or colleague? Just one question. It's done on a zero to ten scale. The promoters are people who score a nine or ten on the scale. Passives are people who score a seven or a eight. Detractors are people who score zero to six. And what's the net promoter score of your company? That's the percentage of promoters less the percentage of detractors. So what does this allow you to do? This basically allows you to track the health of your brand. Do your customers overall like you? Or are there growing percentage of people who might become detractors? Net promoter score has found a lot of leverage in terms of linking the score to stock prices, linking the score to future sales and as a leading indicator of how good your brand is. So surveys are one clear way of reaching out to your customers in terms of collecting data from them. But there are other ways customers themselves might be willing to give you some data. So besides surveys where the company is reaching out to customers, many times customers can reach out to companies by giving self reports of what they are buying and when they are buying it. So InfoScout is one example of a company that actually attracts of incentivizes consumers to do the following. Once they have to made their purchases, they take the receipt, they have the mobile device, take a picture of the receipt and send it back. What does InfoScout do with it? They basically collect all this information across many, many customers to get insight into when people are buying certain products. Where are they buying it? Is it in mom and pop stores? Is it in convenience stores? Is it in big box stores? So that's one example in which customers are giving companies that information. Another example would be word-of-mouth dynamics. So as a company, we would like to know what people are purchasing. But we also want to know what people are talking about. How is our brand being mentioned? So there are many companies out there that collect this type of data. As an example, Keller Fay is a company that collects word of mouth dynamics. How do they do that? They have a panel of customers which basically are given the following task. When you talk to somebody, note it down. Who is it? Is it a friend? Is it a colleague? What did you talk about? Collecting this data in a diary format over time across months, they're able to observe what people are talking about, who are they talking to, how is a brand being mentioned and so on. So word-of-mouth dynamics is a powerful way of understanding how the brand sentiment might be changing over time, and or so on. Now again, there are many, many different ways in these people can collect this data. Keller Fay is a company that does through panel data, through a diary form. And there are other unobtrusive ways of collecting these data as well which you'll talk about next. So at this point, we talked about active ways of data collection. Next we'll talk about unobtrusive, passive ways of data collection.
