Market research concerns the provision of data, information and knowledge to support marketing management decision making. Good research delivers confident decision making and competitive advantage. In order to achieve its goals, an organisations needs to focus on its resources and its marketplace - its customers, competitors and the trading environment. Strictly speaking, "market research" relates to study of customers and "marketing research" encompasses the wider environment (competitors, legislation, etc).
As market research underpins all aspects of marketing management decision making, the nature of the investigations can be very broad. Sometimes, one-off market intelligence is required to test specific ideas, whilst in other cases on-going tracking is appropriate. The decision areas being served can range from the highly specific (e.g., identifying the optimum merchandising environment) to the strategic direction).
Typical applications of market research include:
Marketing is a management philosophy. It requires that organisations understand their market and match their resources to the needs and wants (often unspoken) of their customers. Oh, and you need to do it better than your competitors!
Typically, research is carried out in a focused way using a variety of quantitative, qualitative or secondary research methods:
Delving deeper in to the market research toolkit, we need to separate two basic research types. Quantitative research is concerned with measuring and profiling the extent of attitudes and behaviour in a statistically meaningful way. Qualitative research is concerned with explaining and understanding attitudes and behaviour. It requires a more in-depth dialogue with a fewer number of people.
The research design determines how all of these elements blend together - and this is very much dependent on the specific business and research objectives being addressed.
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