Modelling marketing professionals' information behaviour in the workplace: towards a holistic understanding

Abstract

Introduction. The aim of this paper is to examine and model how marketing professionals seek, judge, use, and share information in the workplace. Method. The study consists of two stages: first, a questionnaire was conducted with eleven marketing professionals, and seven of them completed an intensive five-day diary study followed by semi-structured interviews at the second stage. Analysis. The open coding method was applied to the 1,198 diary entries, which encompassed 101 real work tasks demanding active information seeking, and to the interview transcripts. Results. Marketing professionals were found to spend approximately two to three hours a day seeking information. Most information was found from internal documents (47%) and external search engines and websites (21%). More attention was devoted to quality factors than to cost when they chose information sources, and reliability (20%) and accuracy (16%) were perceived important. The obtained information was used for information processing, knowledge construction, information production, and applying information. Five dimensions of information sharing occurrences were uncovered, including people, purpose, mode, content, and level of pro-activeness. Conclusions. A model of information behaviour incorporating information seeking, judgement, use and sharing was developed.