STUDENTS' CORNER - 207

 Database 

Data mining, Datawarehouse and Database are three things that the experts often focus attention in marketing.

The company must be very cautious in interpreting the Database. After all, data mining, datawarehouse and database—all these three will present nothing but numbers collected from various sources by various official personnel. It is very difficult to make an exact interpretation of the database which is meant to help the company take right marketing decisions.  We must not lose sight of the fact that human intervention in any process does not completely eliminate human errors. For the sake of information, despite tremendous advances in technology, it is found out by a study that human error appears to be a major cause for the accidents and collisions that take place on the seas. And, particularly, the villain of the human errors seems to be the unfortunate fatigue the seafarers are subject to.  If you go into the investigation for the cause of fatigue, it will take us deep into the shipping industry which we need not do here since it is out of context.  The point driven home is human processes do not exclude the possibility of human errors which might even be committed unconsciously or even with good intentions.

Let us take one example just to illustrate the possibilities of human errors in the collection of information transfigured in the form of numbers, that is, statistics.

Say one customer goes to a shop to buy a product which comes in three colours and his choice is always green; on that day, it so happens that the green product is not available and the shopkeeper manages to sell a yellow product; perhaps it continues for about a week or till the time he gets the green products delivered.  Supply chain disruptions are too common nowadays and things reach the destination late. All understand it with no grudge against any one. The shopkeeper will send the details of product sold last few week and there will be less number of green products sold and more of yellow ones. The number for the yellow ones will be a big number and as a contrast, the number for the green might be a small one. We can extend such episodes demographically also. That is, in another outlet, yellow not available but only red more and green less. The report to the company will carry these different details.

Based on the reports received from the various shopkeepers, it is not exactly possible to assess the demand for these products.  Market sense and long standing analysis familiarity will be more reliable than numbers alone sent to the company by various persons.

Of course, there are analysts professional by practice; but, they are also human beings.

The point to remember is informed decisions can be taken not just based on the databases which are the result of collection of information by human beings.  All the same, at present, databases play a vital role in marketing.

We will see some more of databases and their significant usefulness in marketing.