Marketing Research
A Short Introduction
Marketing research is "the process or set of processes that links the producers,
customers, and end users to the marketer through information used to identify and
define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing
actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process.
Marketing research specifies the information required to address these issues, designs
the method for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process,
analyzes the results, and communicates the findings and their implications."
The purpose of marketing research (MR) is to provide management with relevant,
accurate, reliable, valid, and up to date market information. Competitive marketing
environment and the ever-increasing costs attributed to poor decision making require
that marketing research provide sound information. Sound decisions are not based on
gut feeling, intuition, or even pure judgment.
Managers make numerous strategic and tactical decisions in the process of identifying
and satisfying customer needs. They make decisions about potential opportunities, target
market selection, market segmentation, planning and implementing marketing programs,
marketing performance, and control.
These decisions are complicated by interactions between the controllable marketing
variables of product, pricing, promotion, and distribution. Further complications are
added by uncontrollable environmental factors such as general economic conditions,
technology, public policies and laws, political environment, competition, and social
and cultural changes. Another factor in this mix is the complexity of consumers.
Marketing research helps the marketing manager link the marketing variables with the
environment and the consumers. It helps remove some of the uncertainty by providing
relevant information about the marketing variables, environment, and consumers.
In the absence of relevant information, consumers' response to marketing programs
cannot be predicted reliably or accurately.
Ongoing marketing research programs provide information on controllable and non-controllable factors and consumers; this information enhances the effectiveness of decisions made by marketing managers. Traditionally, marketing researchers were responsible for providing the relevant
information and marketing decisions were made by the managers. However, the roles are
changing and marketing researchers are becoming more involved in decision making, whereas
marketing managers are becoming more involved with research.