ABSTRACT
According to one analyst of business behaviour, all companies are in the business of marketing knowledge. 'Knowledge is the business', he writes, l 'fully as much as the customer is the business. Physical goods or services are only the vehicle for the exchange of customer purchasingpower against business knowledge.' The dominant inputs to the process of developing such business knowledge are the gathering, editing, analysing and interpretation of information. And this need for the right information to be in the right place at the right time illustrates very well the advantages which marketing and other executives can gain from the analysis of their tasks and behaviour within a systems framework. The concept of the management information system (MIS) is central to the understanding of the conversion of information into business knowledge by marketing-orientated managers.
