3. Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc. is a large cooperative of fruit growers and processors. Ocean Spray needed data to determine the effectiveness of its promotions and its advertising and to respond strategically to its competitors’ promotions.The company also wanted to identify trends in consumer preferences for new products and to pinpoint marketing factors that might be causing changes in the selling levels of certain brands and markets.

Ocean Spray buys marketing data from InfoScan

(us.infores.com), a company that collects data using barcode scanners in a sample of 2,500 stores nationwide and from A.C. Nielsen.The data for each product includes sales volume, market share, distribution, price information, and information about promotions (sales, advertisements).

The amount of data provided to Ocean Spray on a daily basis is overwhelming (about 100 to 1,000 times more data items than Ocean Spray used to collect on its own).

All of the data is deposited in the corporate marketing data mart.To analyze this vast amount of data, the company developed a decision support system (DSS).To give end users easy access to the data, the company uses a data mining process called CoverStory, which summarizes information in accordance with user preferences.

CoverStory interprets data processed by the DSS, identifies trends, discovers cause-and-effect relationships, presents hundreds of displays, and provides any information required by the decision makers.This system alerts managers to key problems and opportunities.

a. Find information about Ocean Spray by entering Ocean Spray’s Web site (oceanspray.com).

b. Ocean Spray has said that it cannot run the business without the system.Why?

c. What data from the data mart is used by the DSS?

d. Enter scanmar.nl and click the Marketing Dashboard.

How does the dashboard provide marketing and sales intelligence?