Interpretation of Marketing Data

• What are the three types of marketing data?

  • Correlation
  • Confidence intervals
  • Extrapolation
• Correlation is a statistical measure of the strength of the relationship between two variables.
• A positive correlation is when the independant variable increases and the dependant variable increases
• A negative correlation is when the dependant variable decreases as the independent variable increases and vice versa
• An independant variable is the variable that is manipulated by the researcher to see what effect it has on the dependent variable
• A dependant variable is impacted by the change in the independant variable
• No estimated data can be 100% reliable
• Confidence intervals help businesses to understand how reliable an estimate is and how confident they can be to act on the data when planning strategy and making decisions
• A confidence interval is a range of values in which we estimate the true mean will lie with a specified probability
• Extrapolation is the process of drawing conclusions about the future based on past data.
• Extrapolation is used to help plan production, staff levels, marketing and to set targets
• Methods of extrapolation include:

  • Asking individuals experts' views
  • Using past sales figures and predicting the existing trend will continue
  • Extrapolating data visually on graphs by carrying on a trend or through calculation